CDRLabs.com

Hi, I'm one of those nuts who is absolutely obsessed with sound quality, has spent a ton of money on a fancy stereo, and can't bear the thought of listening to cds with errors on them.

I want to copy all my cds so that I can listen to the copies instead of the originals in order to make sure that the originals don't get scratched in the way that they always otherwise do (especially when moving them around between work, car, home, etc.).

However, ripping each one to hd and then burning will add up to a major pain in the ass. Therefore I'd like to direct burn.

I understand that some ripping software have error correction features such as reading same track twice and then comparing. Is it possible to reliably get exact, bit for bit, duplicates at all? If so, does this require not doing direct burn?

What's the best way of copying a large music collection reasonably quickly with the best possible quality?

The fanatics about bit-for-bit audio accuracy often use Exact Audio Copy with all the requisite read multiple times, calculate CRC sums, offset tuning and other arcane minutiae. Personally, a direct copy seems to work fine for my leaden ears. But you might want to go explore:

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

If you have Plextor drive, Plextools is reported to be faster and more accurate than EAC for ripping audio. Unfortunately, Plextor America drives don't come with a copy of Plextools, and you first need to have a copy installed before you can upgrade from the Plextor Europe site:

http://www.plextools.com/english/techni ... _util.html

Given your concerns about 100% accurate audio copies, don't expect that you will be able to burn copies directly from disc to disc. At the very least you will be copying to hard disc first, and you may be lucky to exceed 5x average extraction speed with all the bells and whistles activated.

cfitz