Hard Drive Speeds and Audio Ripping

[exholt]

Hello Everyone,

Does the rotational speed of the hard drive make any difference in the quality of the extracted wav files from ripping an audio CD? Would ripping onto a slow (i.e. below 5400 RPM) hard drive cause glitches in the extracted wavs?

[dhc014]

Well, the RPM isn't the only factore, but I don't foresee a problem just because it is 5400 RPM.

[blakerwry]

The hard drive would not effect the quality of the music. Additionally, a new 5400 rpm hard drive is probably 4 times faster than the fastest CD-ROM drive made.

Considering that most optical drives are slower than amx speed when doing digital audio extraction almost any 5400rpm drive far exceeds the speed you're ripping at.

if you're getting bad quality audio, try using a different program I suggest EAC used with LAME. www.exactaudiocopy.de EAC in secure mode never fails, even on damaged disks.

[freemanzhu]

The speed of the hard drive should not play a role at all in terms of DAE quality. The DAE capability of the CD reader is the primary factor. EAC is great; I also recommend it.

[exholt]

Hello again,

The hard drive I was using is an IBM 4.2 gig 4000 RPM 3.5" drive on a p233mmx with 64 megs SDRAM. I am using EAC to rip off a 52x ASUS CD-ROM drive. The 52 ASuS has a good rep for ripping good audio.

However, I still noticed minor glitches when ripping some audio even though EAC detected the drive's settings correctly and the ripping said 100% with matching checksums.

What could be causing this?

[blakerwry]

1) Are you ripping in secure mode?
2) What LAME settings did you use (i recommend the defualt ~192Kbps VBR)
3) What are you using to play the mp3?
4) Does this problem occur at specific points in the mp3 file or do the glitches seem to occur at random, changing points?
5) Have you tried defragging your drive and then ripping?

If you're using a pMMX, you must use LAME as an external compressor and not a codec. I don't know if you can use any codec other than the defauly windows PCM simply because your CPU is probably not fast enough to keep up.


btw, this disk is ancient... For sure a new 40GB hard drive will knock your socks off in terms of performance. If you have the money and the knowlege to install/ghost, I recommend you buy a 40-60GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV hard drive for ~$90 (www.allstarshop.com is a good place to order HDDs)

[exholt]

I am ripping in secure mode. My purpose for ripping my audio CDs was to make archival backups of them by burning the ripped wavs into anoher audio CD. For this reason, I am not using LAME as I never intended to make mp3s out of them.

Glitches seem to pop at random. This is especailly on classical music CDs, less so on rock and pop ones.

All CDs are either brand new or close to it. I basically make a backup copy and play off of that copy while keeping the original CD in a safe place...

[cfitz]

But the glitches are in the .wav files, and always occur at the same point? Have you looked at the .wav files with a sound editor to see the offending region? Do you hear the glitch when listening to the .wav file on your computer, when listening to a CD-R burned from the .wav file, or both?

cfitz