Both very probably. But the lesser hardware as very cheap Chinese cd drives in pc won’t be able to replicate the same quality rips, even with same software. Just what I believe…
You can easily check whether your belief is correct or not by looking at whether the resulting rips are identical or different.
I am not sure it will be enough. As said Gazza, the tools are probably not enough accurate to detect some differences which were not identified before and incorporated by the common software are dbpoweramp or accurate rips. But I know that you believe at 100% in their accuracy. There are probably other things than bits…
In the context we are talking about, whether or not one rip is the same as another, this suggests you don’t understand digital data.
Maybe not. Other people I am sure will be. It is nice to help others get the best from their systems…
If Peter 180 give later the results of the comparison of metadatas of melco rips and pc rips, and if the results are identical, will you still say that I don’t understand metadata.
However I confess that I don’t really understand it, but I feel there are other factors that will not appear in the metadata.
Let’s perhaps wait his results.
I don’t think that same quality rips can be realised by all hardwares. It’s why the Melco d100 costs 1k and their entry level ripper cost 100 dollars.
So I feel it’s very unprobabily that you will be able to help here.
What makes you think that I believe in the accuracy of ripping software? That’s exactly the opposite case: if two rips that have been obtained with different ripping programs or devices turned out to be different, I would be quite suspicious about those programs or devices. Even more so if the two files had been obtained with the same software or device, of course!
Yes but, as I mentioned, the metadata have to be stripped off the rips first. It is also possible to compare the files in a text editor or to compare them with a file checksum function. In any case you should design a proof of concept before you test: start with a .wav file, make a copy of it, add some metadata to the copy and then apply the procedure and verify that it asserts the identity of the copy with the original. Once you have verified the method, you can apply it to the rips generated by the different ripping software (or devices) under examination.
That goes without saying. But given two specific devices or softwares, you can very easily check if they produce identical rips or not.
There is actually nothing to understand, metadata are just blocks of data which are appended to the actual music data. They are clearly delimited and can be easily erased. I think in the old forum we even had listings of metadata. This was when the Core came out and it was found to produce slightly different rips than the UnitiServe.
So , if finally the rips appear to be identical, but sound differently, what will you say ?
i certainly can’t do anything to help your apparent belief that money guarantees better, or your lack of desire to help find the best solution for everyone, including people who may have the misfortune to already have a collection of thousands of CDs not optimally ripped, if that is the case.
As I alluded in an earlier post here, it has previously been suggested in another thread that it may be to do with other aspects of the file as stored, which includes metadata. I am no digital expert, and have no idea in what way that could have an effect, but at the same time I have no idea if it can be ruled out.
In what file format does Melco save rips? E.g. is it .flac? Flac can have different compressions, which conceivably might put different loads on the processor when unpacking in the process of play, which would likely vary from player to player. Again I have no idea if this is a factor in this case, but it is the sort of thing that could have an effect.
And provided that the two ways of ripping, Melco and A.N.Other are bit-perfect, so that the music data are the same, it should be possible to transcode one to the other, so rips from whichever sound inferior could be converted to the better format, so upgrading that mammoth ripped collection…
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If the stripped off rips are identical and the original rips sound differently, then the replay + listening system is obviously affected by the metadata. The worst possibility would be that the replay system purposely treats rips from different devices differently, based on the metadata. This would be very easy to do and it would imply that the replay system is favouring certain ripping devices or software over others. This would be cheating but … the car industry has been cheating for decades so why shouldn’t the HiFi industry do the same? There is also plenty of other possibilities not involving cheating and even more that do not involve the replay system. All these could explain the observed differences between files with the same music data but different metadata.
But there is also the possibility that the stripped off rips are not identical and therefore that one (or more) of them are not bit-perfect.
A very interesting test is also ripping the same track on devices that are not connected to the Internet. In this case the the ripping software cannot access Internet data for bit perfectness tests. In this case, good ripping software should become much slower and make three or more identical rips of the same track before accepting the results.
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We need a D100 that is loaned out, so we can all take advantage of its ripping with out having to buy it.
As for me with about 300 CD’s, i feel its not worth me spending £999 just to rip them once as i am not going to be buying anymore CD’s anytime soon.
So £50 a week to hire, now thats a deal i would be up for and i guess others as well, so who is going to lend it then?
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Perhaps you? The D100 looks quite nice from the pictures and if its build quality is good and if it turns out to make faithful copies of the original CD, I would buy it rather than rent it. The plan of ripping 300 CDs in a sweep is anyway quite unrealistic. Take your time, use a device and a software that you trust and that give you reproducible results and cleanup the (most likely incorrect and/or incomplete) metadata of your rips before you add them to your music collection.
Sounds like a hire function for Melco dealers to offer given that many people will want for a one-off task of ripping a collection, and if they switch to download buying they may never need again. Latter point suggests they’ll appear on secondhand market a few months to a year or so old.
Meanwhile I second ndpf’s observations re metadata. When I ripped my CD collection I was unaware of the significance if metadata for playing software I may later be interested in, then to find a lot of inconsistencies and errors in the meta data from ripped CDs: and once you have a whole collection to sort through and correct it becomes a soul-destroying task, whereas doing it one at a time as you would at the time of ripping would not be such an issue.
Well I ripped all mine in 4 days, boring yes but just ploughed through it.
Would be great if that service was available, as since ripping mine over a year ago, I haven’t needed to use.the buffalo drive I got for the job since, hence why I wouldn’t want to buy one at £1K
I said that because the same software is used in the entry level buffalo/ melco ripper and their D100 ripper. Some have reported better rips from the d100 vs the first melco ripper.
So the causes of better rips are mostly in the hardware.