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Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

Xiph.Org has a command line program called cdparanoia, which is built with the same philosophy as Exact Audio Copy (EAC). The FAQ page explains a lot about why the program is necessary.

https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/

https://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html

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Thanks for the name drop. I went Linux-only on my primary laptop, but I still have a Windows 7 laptop with EAC installed that I dig out every time I buy a new CD and need to do a rip. Maybe I'll finally be able to put it to rest, soon.

I've found that EAC works really well in Wine, and it's still my favorite ripper, even on Linux. Similarly, Foobar2000 in Wine is the best Replaygain scanner/tagger.

cdparanoia was the cornerstone of my favorite CD ripper back in the day. The package was a Perl script that would 1) watch the CD drive for a CD. 2) When one appeared, launch cdparanoia to rip the tracks 3) Grab some ID key from the CD and look up the 'album.' 4) Encode the tracks to MP3s, renaming to the information fetched about the album. 5) Copy the album directory to the desired target destination. 6) Eject the CD. 7) Repeat from 1. (I may not have the exact order - I just needed to watch for it spitting out one CD and swap in the next.

I used it to rip a CD collection consisting of dozens and dozens of disks. It was a true zero click interface. It took no command line arguments - customization was via code editing - so it was not particularly user friendly in that regard. Nowadays look for the downloads of purchased CDs on Amazon or use some GUI app - at least it retains settings from one execution to the next.

Do you by any chance mean abcde? I just used that a couple of weeks ago when I noticed that I still had a few CDs that I had not ripped.

A custom CD ripper script was the first program I ever wrote that actually served a useful purpose. Back then, somebody told me not to bother and just use abcde. 16 years later, I have finally come around to follow that advice. :-)

cdparanoia, I find, works better than EAC. The latter seems to be 'the standard' though.

A certain now dead site parsed EAC logs for verification purposes. (At least why it's the standard)

I miss what so badly :'(

Any more insight on the dead site or how it became a standard? Is its DB still available?

Yes, the database has been published.

https://twitter.com/whatcd/status/923942203080273921

EAC was the standard because it was the only free tool that could bypass firmware error correction (with 'secure' mode) and log the whole process securely, in a way that could not be tampered with easily.

A certain now dead site's successor also parses EAC logs (and relies on its checksumming).

A certain now dead site's successor also parses XLD logs, in case you are doing a rip on a Mac.

I hear that they instruct you to run EAC under Wine if you have a *nix box.

XLD logs were also processed by the predecessor. It would be rather frustrating to have to use an inferior solution via Wine.

What is your certain dead site? I cannot understand this subthread because of that uncertainty.

Oink, what.cd, redacted

first rule about private trackers is not to talk about private trackers.

I believe in freedom of information ;)

cdparanoia also has a detailed log file. So why can't they parse that for Linux users?

The most modern CD ripper frontend for Linux I've found is whipper, which is a fork of morituri. It also has detailed log files, no ideas if "certain sites" accept them or not.

Due to dependency shenanigans I couldn't run it on Debian so I created an LXC container on my server running Ubuntu 18.04, passed the /dev/sr0 block device and it worked.

https://gist.github.com/jtl999/2991f1100b4f42895aa1842c5bef8...

I'd be curious how well cdparanoia handles his CD if at all. Furthermore I read a post on a forum where someone tested a bunch of drives with scratched CDs and the Samsung SH-2xxxx drives performed the best. No idea of the exact methodology he used.

https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?34529-Best-DVD-d...

(Before you ask. I didn't buy this drive based on his post, bought it 7 years ago for my desktop on a whim) Still gotten 100% track quality out of whipper with some minor scratched discs.

Whipper is ripper frontend that's 'planned' to eventually be accepted at 'certain sites', but it's not yet to my knowledge.

Does the default log file list the locations of sectors that failed to read? There's also a question of interpolation for obliterated sectors. Many would prefer there to be no data than interpolated data because that's a much more obvious failure mode.

They can parse it, but seem to want some proprietary plugin to create signed checksums to prevent (though in reality only for the most unknowledgeable) log spoofing.

Though to be fair that site was simply carrying on the tradition of long-dead Oink’s Palace!

And to script cdparanoia, flac and cddb, I quite like crip: http://bach.dynet.com/crip/index.html

I used it a lot. Sadly, it destroyed my Macbook Pro's drive when I tried to rip a particular CD-R (it had ripped others fine before).

Well, that isn't the program's fault. There should be no series of commands it can send that would destroy the CD drive--I bet it wasn't even running as root.

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