HD audio ripping from a Mac

"HD Audio" might be the wrong phrase.  I think you just mean "with good quality?"  People mostly use HD or "hi res" to refer to audio files offering greater bit depth (>16) and greater sampling rate (>44100) than traditional ("redbook") cd's.  These files are not found on traditional cd's; they are most commonly downloaded from an online source such as HDTracks, the Naim music store, etc.

SACD's do offer higher resolution than 16/44100, but are not rippable without significant fuss and hardware beyond the pc or mac.  I don't think you mean SACD's however.

For traditional cd's use XLD on your Mac and rip to the .flac format

Are you going to use a media server built into or running on the nas?

Hi, thanks for your reply, the NAS drive has upnp built in, which I understand acts as a server for music files. Please can I confirm that standard cd's do not offer hi-res audio ? My cd's are currently ripped in AAC 44.1kHz, 879 KB\s , can I improve on this ?

Standard cd's don't offer anything over 16/44100. 

I'm not exactly sure what that AAC value means, as on iTunes on my computer AAC tops out at 320kB/s.  Maybe it's a 'lossless AAC?'

In any event, if you've ripped with iTunes . . . most people think that other rippers can do better than iTunes as other rippers have (better) error detection. 

I have never seen this better ripper business.

There are two kinds of rips. Those that not bit-perfect [i.e. identical clones of the ripped file] or those that are not. Several ripping engines can make bit-perfect files and that includes iTunes.

ATB from George 

I've found XLD copes better with less than pristine CD's. I've had iTunes rip them (with error correction etc on) and had ticks and pops on playback whereas XLD has ripped them, taken about 20 minutes in the process though but with perfect results. You only want to rip once so do it properly - use XLD on the Mac. 

The software and hardware has to know whether there are errors, or not.  Some ripping software is better at that than others.  The problem is that some software, with no or poor error detection and correction, doesn't know that there are errors.

We know that bit-perfect rips are not 'automatic' -- its relatively easy for errors to arise.

How does the ripping engine know if there are errors or not? I've read that it compares to external databases of rips. But I can rip a CD on the UnitiServe offline and have it show no errors. Internal database, or encoding in the CD data ?

dbPoweramp's website has some useful discussion.

Some cd drives detect errors; exactly how they do this (w/o reference to an external database) exceeds my technical competency!  But if an error is detected, the drive will re-read the data.

There are methods to compare to external databases too (AccurateRip).  XLD will compare a rip this way, but not iTunes. 

Thanks for that Bart. I'll have a look at the dBPoweramp site.

I understand (maybe incorrectly)  that Bit-Perfect confirms the accuracy of that rip against the file/CD its copying.  

dBpoweramp on the other hand I know well & it uses its own prog called AccurateRip & that compares the rip accuracy against a www file of up to 200 other rips.  

It seems reasonable to assume that comparing a copy against 1 example vs 200,  then 200 will have a better chance to get it right.  

The problem is I don't think dBpoweramp has a MAC version ready yet, it was trying for release in 3rd Qtr 2014,  but I believe its still in beta only at the moment

I would 100% recommend dBpoweramp whatever,  it might be worth the wait or plan to move up to it in future.  

XLD compares against the AccurateRip database too Mike. 

With iTunes I have had perhaps three CDs rip badly out of about seven hundred. I could detect the errors with my ears.

I simply replaced the CDs with new ones and ripped those in place.

It is quite simple.

I also tried XLD for ripping before selecting iTunes. It produced more problems than iTunes in my experience.

Indeed iTunes ripped one unplayable CD that had no visible damage or fault though my CDS 2 would never play it. Cheap CD players had no problem with the disc! XLD refused and rejected the disc without an attempt at a rip, and iTunes made an audibly pristine rip. Why did I not replace that CD as the other few and stick with XLD?

Simply that it was a release from Finlandia that ran to one batch and was deleted. They sell for hundreds of pounds second hand. Unique EMI transfers of Sibelius conducted by Robert Kajanus. Legendary performances that still have not received better transfers than the original EMI ones since. The recordings themselves were made by HMV and Columbia in London in 1930 and 1932. 

No system is perfect in every case, but on balance I found iTunes the best.

ATB from George

Agreed, there is a noticeable difference on poor discs with different ripper algorithms. WMP and dbpoweramp in my case, same playback problems without true error correction.

Unfortunately that says to me itunes will get a rip regardless of quality. To know if your rip is audibly pristine you need to compare it to something!

But it was a clean rip!

It trust my ears!

Now you can call me deaf, if you like, but it would be irrational as you do not know me.

Consider this? iTunes is a ripping engine and media player from a very powerful computer company long associated with music replay, and at the professional level Apple computers are the choice of companies like EMI when actually transferring, restoring and remastering music for commercial release.

It has to work for Apple, and be so good that it is a platform that competes successfully with anything else going. It is crucial to a whole industry of downloads and is a sure revenue turner for Apple, so they have an interest in making sure that it is as fine as it can be over time.I can live with the results. 

Every now and again iTunes gets updated - gratis - as an easy download and update. It is better as a player than it was five years ago. As a ripping engine, I would happily describe it as the best I have tried out, and I did many experiments before selecting it.

ATB from George

Thanks on that one James, I was aware XDL compared to a database, but was not sure what the setup was. I've seen lots of chat about it & a friend says its good (moving from a UnitiServe)

AccurateRip is an Illustrate company & Illustrate are the parent co of dBpoweramp - Music Converter & CD Ripper - & Asset UPnP plus a few other associated systems in the music file business.    The owner & founder Steven Elkins seems to be one of those super talented people able to make things work simply & all done without the marketing gong bashing we get from the big corps.   

George - i suspect the convenience factor comes in with the iTunes ripper. A typical user won't want to wait a long time for their CD to rip and i know from experience that an iTunes rip of a poor disc (i buy a lot of used CD's) is not as good as the XLD equivalent. I've ripped my collection twice. Once when i fresh into computer audio with iTunes and then using XLD for the final time. Max, dBpoweramp (on a spare PC we had in the house) and XLD were compared and XLD won out for me for rip quality and convenience. I run my mini headless so XLD can be configured to rip, add tracks to iTunes and eject the disc without screen share intervention.

Anyway iTunes works for you, XLD works for me. I suggest to anyone who is about to rip a big collection to compare rippers and decide for themselves on what they wish to use. Plenty of choice.

James

The beta Mac version of DbPoweramp works perfectly and is a pleasure to use. It should be exiting beta in January.  Download and try it out - it's free for now so nothing to lose

If you say the rip was clean who am I to argue  my problem is with the idea that a pristine rip can be vouchsafed from a single sample. I agree no system is infallible, but a system that goes beyond comparing itself to itself before declaring 'i am perfect' is a bare minimum. Data integrity used to be my business and paid my bills so it's one of the few subjects that gets me to open my coffin lid at night!

Just out of interest, approx 1 in 70 of my collection was in some way defective or at variance with the majority of other (same matrix) CDs owned by other users.

Dear James,

I can only speak from my experience.

I have only a handful of second hand CDs. The rest were all bought as new, and who ever gets them when I die will have a pristine set set of collectibles to make some money from!

Same in the days of LPs, so I could sell them to the dealer as being approaching mint if used, when I quite the delights of vinyl replay.

I used to replace heavily used LPs every couple of years, so as to have clean replay of favourite performances. That, in spite of changing my stylus every three months ...

ATB from George

On some level, if you like it, who can object?

(iTunes does not make errors every time.  And I'm sure that some errors are perhaps inaudible to most; like trees falling in the woods when no one is there to hear them.)

But when the question is, "Which ripper rips with the highest quality?" the answer isn't iTunes.  It's being less good at error correction overall is well documented.

Wow

you change your stylus every 3 Months ?  That's pretty...........I dunno.  Serious

Not to mention that talk of 'vinyl' and 'a stylus' in the Streaming Audio room is highly unconventional .

I think George might be talking about the steel needles that came in a little metal box for playing 78s...

Anyway, I happily use iTunes for ripping & of the thousands of CDs I've ripped I can't detect any problems. Of course I went down the road of using XLD (which still resides on my 'puter, handy for conversion of FLAC & DSD files) but having tried ripping with both methods I could detect no audible difference. A couple of CDs that my 555 wouldn't play ripped perfectly in both XLD & iTunes. And sounded identical. Good enough for me, I like a simple life.