dBPoweramp ripping software

CCNJ

Just purchased dBPoweramp. This is fantastic software. Can rip to two codecs at the same time and it is lightning fast. I am ripping to FLAC and AIFF. I have had a couple of tracks that came back with an "innacurate" message. What causes a rip to be innacurate - scratches on the CD?

Gadabout

I could be wrong here, but dbPoweramp runs a comparison of bits to what is stored in his database of what other folks have ripped of that same song. So the inaccurate, first of all means you don't compare well with his database.

Secondly, there are bad track possibilities. A place where it had a hard time reading a particular section. In your settings, you can choose how it tries to resolve these errors. I should also mention that if you have a lot of listed errors, the software will try and resolve them by re reading the track at very slow speeds. This can be pretty hard on a drive especially if you have a lot of errors.

One of the tracks I ripped came back with 500 errors. I decided to see how the software handled it. It took 45 minutes of spinning up and slowing down as it tried to resolve all the errors. It finally came back with 3 errors that it couldn't resolve. It kind of depends on how precise you want the rip to be. What's your personal acceptable level for inaccuracy. These are all adjustable in the settings.

What I found that works best for me is that I use multiple drives for ripping. If I find a CD is coming back with a lot of errors, I'll cancel the rip and re start it in and another CD drive. Most of the time one of the other drives will read it better and have fewer errors so it can resolve the issues faster.

On a side note, when I started ripping all my CD's I bought an external CDRW drive because I didn't want to burn up the drive that was in the computer. Last year, I bought another external CDRW drive because the first one was about 6 years old. So when I'm ripping I have the choice of 3 drives to rip from 1 internal and 2 external. Out of the 800+ CD's I have ripped I only have about 6 tracks that the software couldn't get to rip accurately.

Scott

CCNJ

Scott - Thanks for the info. I think you are correct about doing a compare to what's in their dB to determine how accurate the rip is. I ripped about 50 CDs yesterday. It found all in their dB except one Fiona Apple cd.