RIPPERS REVISITED |
by Gnomie Matt Gruett
Back in Article 6, I mentioned that ripping at slower speeds would help reduce the number of errors that you get from extracting audio from a CD. This is a very confusing aspect; after all, digital is digital, right? Believe me, this really was confusing when I started trying to figure out MP3s. And plenty of you had questions regarding it as well so I decided I'd explain in a little more detail how ripping at high speeds can introduce errors into your MP3s.
The CDs that we use day to day all get exposed to dust, dirt, spilled root beer and all sorts opportunities to get scratched. OK, maybe the spilled root beer only happens to me, but the point is that there are numerous ways that your CDs can get damaged. When manufacturers were developing the CD-ROM standard, they knew that all of these factors could lead to the corrupting of the data on the CD. So they added a level of error checking into the standard that would help try and prevent these errors. If the error checking doesn't match, the CD-ROM drive will re-read that section to try and ensure that it read the data correctly off of the CD.
Several years earlier than this, audio manufactures were putting together the standard for Red Book Audio. This is the standard that all audio CD players adhere to and is different from CD-ROM (i.e. data) formats. Unfortunately, the Red Book Audio format has very poor error checking capabilities. This was not seen as an issue back then because audio CDs are read at 1x speed, which allows for such errors to be minimized. The problem comes in when you rip something at 32x speed on your brand new CD-ROM drive. The faster speeds lead to more errors because there is no quick check that can be performed to test for errors. This is why I mentioned before that purists would rip everything at 1x speed to ensure the best possible quality since that is the fastest speed that the original spec was designed for.
You can certainly rip your audio CDs at any speed you want. But I hope that now you understand a bit more about why you might encounter random pops and other noises in your ripped audio files at faster speeds. Remember, many of the ripping programs available today allow you to adjust the ripping speeds to help you get the perfect balance of speed/quality that you desire. And for the MP3 enthusiasts out there, there are rippers available that read every segment of a CD twice and compare them to help insure that your ripped audio sounds as good as the CD original. True, it makes the process incredibly slow, but if you are archiving your entire CD collection as MP3, you might as well do it right the first time.
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