Digital Output from MacBook

quote:

Originally posted by Exiled Highlander:
PC

Apple seems to disagree with you on the need to defragment an HFS hard drive and actually advise that it may degrade performance.

Cheers

Jim

That wouldn't surprise me.

In the days of 286, 386 and 486 weedy PC's, de-fragmentation was almost an essential part of PC maintenance in order to keep it running. It didn’t-arf take a long time to complete! In fact, it was quite a develop process. You could either screw it up with Windows 95 and even have a slower machine (as mentioned), or use an advanced program that recognised the fragments that were related and essentially put them back together. Funny, by the time that process was finish, war would have broken out.

Modern machines are far too powerful for fragmentation to bring benefits.

PMR

It's more to do with ow MAC OSX and the HFS handle file allocation space rather than power as such - PC's still need defragmentation to oragnize the the file/table space more efficiently.

If I try to dive any deeper than that I'll get myself in trouble as a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Cheers

Jim

quote:

Originally posted by Exiled Highlander:
PMR

It's more to do with ow MAC OSX and the HFS handle file allocation space rather than power as such - PC's still need defragmentation to oragnize the the file/table space more efficiently.

If I try to dive any deeper than that I'll get myself in trouble as a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Cheers

Jim

Don't worry, trouble is fun!

When you first install a program the files are lined-up (for want of a better word), but get fragmented over time even with re-booting the machine. Windows 95 was only capable of re-allocating the FAT32 table space, which meant you could have part of Microsoft Office in one table segment and another part in another segment. All in all, it meant that when you run Office it would be busy scanning the entire drive to find the required segments and therefore much slower to load.

Some programs would give you an option for optimising the process by application, rather than by the entire drive. Essentially, files would be tight and close together to improve performance following data fragmentation.

Peter

I must admit I am some way off 60,000 tunes in the, and fail to see how PCS could have either if he does not use itunes.

I have never. And I will state this again NEVER had a glitch or pop in itunes that was not simply down to a wireless network issue. For the last week I have been fitting a new kitchen and set itunes to random for 10 hours a day for 7 days with no issues what so ever.

What is dismantle dashboard?

All I can really garner from PCs post is for users using G4 or older macs, anyone with an intel even my lowest of the range 2 year old mini will experience no issues, and thats not just in my experience.

I have never defragged a mac harddrive, not in the 8 years of using OSX and the years before on OS9 and before.

PMR

I do actually know my way around this stuff pretty well but I didn't want to turn this thread into yet another geek IT discussion.

I'm with garyi on this as I have never had an iTunes glitch during replay - network dropouts yes but nothing resembling an iTunes click or pop. Less than 10,000 songs in my library though - so I'm obviously just a rookie!

Cheers

Jim

quote:

I have never. And I will state this again NEVER had a glitch or pop in itunes that was not simply down to a wireless network issue. For the last week I have been fitting a new kitchen and set itunes to random for 10 hours a day for 7 days with no issues what so ever.

Garyi,

I have never had a problem with iTunes. My rips are aiff with full tagging and no error correction and they take all of 2 minutes per cd. Never had a click, a pop or skip. Peeps get totally hung up on error correction and perfect rips. They either work or they don't. Most who lose sleep worrying about error correction are pc users. Maybe the mish mash of components in a typical pc are less harmonious than offerings from Apple.

Keith

Keith

quote:

Peeps get totally hung up on error correction and perfect rips. They either work or they don't.

Yep....

Cheers

Jim

Sweet!

It look like everyone is doing very well...

I dont personally use Itunes or a Mac for audio, although I am typing on one right now.

The "suggestions" above were simply relayed to me from my best friend who is a Mac zealot. He exclusively uses Macs for his "audio" production work. It is his life and career (owns a production company in NYC)so i figured if he does these things it cannot be a bad idea.

Although he does use a PC/Foobar for playback at home.

in any event. I didn't mean to ruffle feathers. I was just trying to help as others have helped me.

Enjoy!

quote:

Originally posted by Keith L:
Peeps get totally hung up on error correction and perfect rips. They either work or they don't. Most who lose sleep worrying about error correction are pc users. Maybe the mish mash of components in a typical pc are less harmonious than offerings from Apple.

Keith

This couldn't be further from the truth. But i will leave it to you to figure it out on your own.

That is like saying all CDPs sound identical.

For example, if you DO NOT correct your Mac's drive offset for reading, you will NEVER get a perfect rip. EVER.

If Itunes supports that along with secure mode ripping, and test and copy, I would recommend using them.

Or not.... But I wouldn't in any fashion simply trust that your Mac does what you want it to without setting it up properly.

All you need to do is read the "white paper" on the HDX and you will see that it isn't as simple as you think.

My ripping method, as well as yours, shouldn't be much different than what they have developed for the HDX.

quote:

Originally posted by Keith L:
2 minutes per cd.
Keith

Have fun with your "burst mode" rips.

PCS

quote:

For example, if you DO NOT correct your Mac's drive offset for reading, you will NEVER get a perfect rip. EVER

So, if the same track from the same CD was ripped to the same hard disc at the same sample rate and bit depth (say WAV to be fair?) and replayed through the same system you could tell the difference between those files in a blind test and get it consistently right (say at least 80% of the time) when compared back to back? You would be willing to lay a years salary you could do that?

Just trying to figure out if your passion for ripping detail actually manifests itself in audible differences.

TBH, if I had to go through what you seem to have to go through to be happy with your rips I would give up on audio and take up something fun like piercing the most sensitive parts of my body with blunt, burning hot needles!

Cheers

Jim

quote:

Originally posted by Exiled Highlander:
could tell the difference between those files in a blind test and get it consistently right (say at least 80% of the time) when compared back to back? You would be willing to lay a years salary you could do that?

Jim

No i wouldn't. And I have NEVER said it makes an "audible" difference.

That is a different issue.

But if you can make the rip more "perfect" why would you resist the opportunity?

If you could correct errors, as EVERY CD player does, why wouldn't you?

The same reason that the 555 is a "superior" player, is why you should rip as "properly" as possible.

I am NOT saying you cannot do it with an Itunes that is set up to do so... I am not sure on that point.


As Ive said, it takes very little effort to setup a program properly. And you only have to do it once. So why not?

I have noticed VERY serious playback improvement in seemingly irrelevant PC settings. And I know Mac users can benefit from similar "tweaks".

If you choose not to take part, so be it. But i wouldn't shy away from potential knowledge if i was you.

"Audible differences" I cannot answer that. But I do know that the rips are as good as they can possibly be given the circumstances.

PCS

quote:

No i wouldn't. And I have NEVER said it makes an "audible" difference.

That is a different issue.

But if you can make the rip more "perfect" why would you resist the opportunity?

Eh.....because I have better things to do in life than ensure that I have to flip 15 software switches to make sure that I have a "bit perfect rip" that apparently makes no difference to sound quality.

quote:

I have noticed VERY serious playback improvement in seemingly irrelevant PC settings. And I know Mac users can benefit from similar "tweaks"

But hold on....didn't you just say you couldn't hear a difference and wouldn't bet a years salary that you could? Now there are "VERY serious" playback problems. I don't follow that argument I'm afraid - you can't have it both ways.

I'm not shying away from potential knowledge but until I can hear a difference between something that takes a few minutes (a "simple burst" rip) vs a convoluted and seemingly endless task that has taken thousands of hours and involves paying local kids to come rip stuff for you as it takes so long for no sound quality difference as you say (or maybe there is as you state it both ways..), then I will stick with the simple approach thanks.

I'm not interested on theoretical/esoteric discussions on ripping technology but I am interested in having music that moves me and I don't need a degree in computer audio boffinry to know what does it for me.

You enjoy what you do and you love to show off how much knowledge you have and all power to you as there is nothing wrong with having an interest in the equipment (as I have stated in another thread) but in this case I will continue to make a good living from the IT world but it's not my focus for audio replay.

Now, if you had said "yes there is a sound quality difference and I'm prepared to prove it" then I would have been interested.

Cheers

Jim

Sweet! Good luck to you.

Yes, quitting ALL applications made a difference with my puters performance and made 24/96 playback better sounding.

I was saying I dont know if a perfect rip sounds better than a "close to perfect" rip.


If you were asking me if I can hear the difference between a "perfect" rip and one riddled with errors, then YES i would bet the farm I could hear a difference there. EVERYTIME.

The problem is, with Itunes, you have NO WAY of knowing if it has errors or not!

In any case.... You like whta you are doing so you can ignore ALL comments I make. Others might be interested though.

I assume you are using you PC/Mac for other things than audio. Otherwise setting it up ONCE wouldn't matter to you.

I have BOTH a Mac and a PC available for FULL dedication to music replay. So setting it up to do so was easy and logical.

... none of the suggestions I gave above had ANYTHING to do with an error free rip.

It was all about optimizing playback regardless of the rip.

they are seperate, but equally important, facets of the issue.

For me??? I only have one source for now. So to make it as good as possible is the way to go for ME.

Obsession / compulsion aside, none of this matters once you have direct data transfer from artist to listener (i.e., no spinning silver disc). Everything else is a heuristic, integral, and painstaking process–how much of this you are willing to engage with is up to you–but it does make a difference in performance, more so than one is often led to believe.

Bit-transparent encoding, transmission and decoding is a Holy Grail of communications theory–we'd be all better off if our digital signal paths were audited first. Lossy encoding/transmission/decoding (a la MP3) is the lazy way around the process, and is painless–just like a vinyl record on FM radio!

quote:

Originally posted by Exiled Highlander:
So, if the same track from the same CD was ripped to the same hard disc at the same sample rate and bit depth (say WAV to be fair?) and replayed through the same system you could tell the difference between those files in a blind test and get it consistently right (say at least 80% of the time) when compared back to back? You would be willing to lay a years salary you could do that?

Just trying to figure out if your passion for ripping detail actually manifests itself in audible differences.

TBH, if I had to go through what you seem to have to go through to be happy with your rips I would give up on audio and take up something fun like piercing the most sensitive parts of my body with blunt, burning hot needles!

Cheers

Jim

I have done a few comparisons WAV-FLAC-Apple Lossless and couldn't tell any difference, I had assumed that I don't have bat's ears.

I certainly soon became happy that Lossless means just that, when compared to the CD it came from, using the same DAC/output/amp/speakers. I assume that some legal beagle would have been sniffing around a law suit by now, if it could be proved that "Lossless" wasn't. So it may be lucrative to be able to establish that.

It won't be a popular view here, but I remain sceptical that even just talk of 'a potential' for different rip qualities might produce enough mystique to perhaps justify charging much more for a device. Which is why I would be keen to see and, more importantly, hear some evidence. I believe that any differences in sound will be down to other factors downstream. You can't rip better than is on the disc and as I can't hear any difference between disc and copy I've stopped worrying about it (could be that my hearing is not good enough - but I seem to pick up on other small changes) I'm always open to demonstration of different rip quality with all else equal in a system. So if anyone fancies a bake off...

I agree with Jim and would have given up ages ago, if I had felt a need to be so obsessive about ripping. Although I'm not sure about his alternative suggestion.

There is of course, much scope for differences in digital-audio conversion and output stages downstream. I look forward to any developments there, for sure.

Steve

Am I correct in thinking that there is no means to set drive offset in iTunes? Am I also correct in saying that iTunes relies heavily on the built in error correction of the drive because, as stated, its software error correction is limited?

Most of my ripping is performed with a Pioneer dvd drive in my ancient G4 emac. It must have very good error correction because I am blissfully unaware of any errors, even with CDs that show signs of abuse.

Keith

All very interesting.

My take on this is that ripping CD’s is a pretty comprehensive process that you are looking to simplify, without sacrificing the quality of the rip.

EAC is certainly the best program (that I have found) for examining the CDROM drives unique facilities in order to ensure best performance, and for showing error correction. I.e. 99% perfect. It seems that even though EAC is a very strong contender for best ripping program, you can equally get the settings wrong and end-up with haunting problems which you wouldn’t experience with an HDX.

Each to their own, but PC/MAC’s are not straight forward.

There is also the issue of playing the CD’s that you are not interested in ripping. For example, a CD that doesn’t show the track information, local musician etc. The MAC Mini is particularly noisy when playing CD’s, which you can normally tame through the software on the PC. I think the MAC Mini drive is defaulted this way and cannot be changed by software, unless burning a CD. Any help?

All in all, whether I have used iTunes, MusicMatch or Winamp they all rip at full speed depending on the CD (5x to 20x on average) and in all cases EAC has confirmed that the Wav rip is perfect compared to its own 100% quality.

There probably isn’t very much to worry about apart from user friendliness, but is it worth ££££'s for a dedicated player?

Peter

quote:

Originally posted by Keith L:
Am I correct in thinking that there is no means to set drive offset in iTunes?
Keith

Yes you are correct. As far as I know.

As of last fall, the last time I fooled around with Itunes, it was not available.

Unfortunately, Macs, while ideal for industry pros, are not up to par for ripping and burning activities. Although Itunes is a fine player, it falls short on the other side of things.

If only Mac would support third party developments....

Trust me, if I could use EAC or dbpoweramp on a Mac, as well as FLAC, I would most likely use my Mac for everything.

PCS

Help me understand what "bit perfect" means in this context - this is a serious question.

Does it mean that the 1 and 0's get mixed up and that they are in different places after the rip and if this is the case why does error correction not catch it (which is what I thought error correction did).

If you are using a format like FLAC you are by default changing the file structure anyway through compression so why does having a "bit perfect" rip matter in the real world. I have never heard a pop or click other artifact in any ripped music, whether it was ripped on a PC or a Mac.

I'm trying to understand your obsession with this and as I say I am especially puzzled since you rip to a format that is different from the original anyway.

Jim

You can be honest with au PCS, you have bit of compulsive disorder yes?

Do you wash your hands a lot, close doors three times, check the iron is off ten times before leaving the house etc?

Bit perfect... Playback or Ripping?

Most players are capable of bit transparent playback (Itunes, Winamp, Foobar, WMP etc...)

Bit perfect ripping is another issue. You are asking a very complicated question. Let me attempt to break it down for you.

Firstly, secure mode ripping is needed. In secure mode the program either reads every audio sector at least twice or rely on extended error information that some drives are able to return with the audio data. That is one reason why the program is slower than other rippers. But by using this technique non-identical sectors are detected. If an error occurs (read or sync error), the program keeps on reading this sector, until eight of 16 retries are identical, but at maximum one, three or five times (according to the selected error recovery quality) these 16 retries are read. So, in the worst case, bad sectors are read up to 82 times! But this effort will help the program to obtain the best result by comparing all of the retries.

If it is not sure that the audio stream is correct (at least that it can not be said at approx. 99.5%) the program will tell the user where the (possible) read error occurred. The program also tries to correct the jitter artefacts that occur on the first block of a track, so that each extraction should be exactly the same. On drives which have the “accurate stream” feature, this is guaranteed. Of course, this technology is a little bit more complex, especially with some CD drives which implements caching. When drives cache audio data, every sector read will be read from the drives cache and is that way always identical. Basically there are several ways to clear the cache. In newer versions it will overread sectors, so that the cache contains sectors from a position elsewhere on the CD.

NOT using secure mode WITHOUT caching, the program will no longer be able to find read errors. Only if a read error occurs in a sector synchronization area, a sync error will be displayed. Fast mode is sector synchronized with 2 synchronization blocks of 23 total blocks. Burst copy is even worse, no synchronization is performed at all, enabling extraction at maximum speed of the drive. No error checking of any kind is done. For burst mode there is at least a small indicator of the extracted track quality. If the stream ever breaks, it will tell the user in the status report by showing up suspicous positions. Of course this is only an heuristic; there needn’t be any errors on these positions; moreover there could be errors that are not found at all.

Correcting offsets will help to always get the same WAVs compared to a different reader drive and to prevent generation losses that way. Nearly all drives are not able to position their head correctly. That means if the program tells the drive to read block 10000 it will perhaps read data somewhere in block 9998 instead. But this is not obvious to the reading program, it will not know if it does really received the data it wanted. Usually the head will be set always to a fixed offset before or after the correct read position. So it is possible to detect this offset once and use it for all CDs coming afterwards.

So now that you are using offset correction, if by perfect you mean to copy precisely the entire disc, start to finish, then yes, the drive needs to over-read at least one direction, depending on the direction of the offset. For example, most drives have a negative offset (thus requiring a positive offset correction). Such drives would need to over-read into the lead-out to get every bit of data. That being said, worrying about this isn't really worth the time in my opinion. Even if your drive can't over-read into the lead-out has a large offset, say -1000 samples, that means you'd lose 1000 samples at the end of the disc. 1000 samples is .023 seconds. Losing a tiny fraction of a second of what is almost always silence isn't really a big deal.

But hey... i want it to be as perfect as possible? Audible difference? That is up to you and your ears.

Can i hear errors? Oh yes. and you can as well.

Can I hear the the non-audible errors of false positives? Um, no. But that does not entail that I dont care if they are there.

At the expense of $10,000 you can have Naim and HDX perform all of this for you, and it has a DAC to boot.

You seem so concerned, and somewhat angry, about how and why I rip the way I do. With the VERY SMALL exception of using C2 pointers, I do basically the same thing as Naim did with the HDX. I dont hear you giving them grief.

If you have any further questions, the "white page" on the HDX ripping process is a good place to start.

Then I would recommend tooling around on hydrogenaudio.

Your best bet though, if you wish to continue to rip yourself, is to get in contact with someone who has knowledge of these issues. I learned everything I know from others.


Lastly, regarding converting to FLAC. You can convert between FLAC and WAV, back and forth, as many times as you want, and NEVER lose one 0 or 1. If ripped properly, you can even burn a disc somewhere in the process, and start converting again. In the end you still have a bit perfect copy. So converting to FLAC does not undermine any efforts to obtain a "perfect" or as close as possible, rip.

quote:

Originally posted by garyi:
You can be honest with au PCS, you have bit of compulsive disorder yes?

Do you wash your hands a lot, close doors three times, check the iron is off ten times before leaving the house etc?

Look. I asked an "expert" how he did rips. He told me. I setup EAC to do so. It took 5 minutes TOTAL.

Compulsive? Whatever. I am simply answering the questions posed to me.

I do wash my hands alot. In turn I dont get sick very often. You should try it.

If disparaging me for wanting good rips helps you feel better about how you do it, that is your prerogative. But when I read the "white paper" on the HDX i was very pleased we both came to the same conclusion as to how to do it best.

I see NO DIFFERENCE IN ANY FASHION about what I am doing, than those with Superlines and a pocket full of loading plugs.

Although it does not involve a computer, vinyl replay is equally techie, and maybe even more so, than PC audio.

The pursuit of great music replay is important to most here. If you dont want it from your PC audio, CHEERS TO YOU!

I personally don't care about my vinyl replay in the same fashion. But i am surely not getting upset at those who are.

Take Care,
Patrick

Well I for one take great interest in what PCS says and appreciates the effort he puts into his posts. So come on guys quit the bitching why dontcha ?!!

You know the amazing thing about all this is that given all the problems that have to be overcome to extract error free music off a cd, it's incredible that Naim have managed to build cd players that rip off the digits perfectly in real time

But maybe the powerline scares them into an orderly queue.