Boggie, no ...
Maybe I'm a bit short of time to respond to everything, but let's start with the comparing thing anyway ...
The reason I said it's not easy, was from my perspective of having a "raw" file comparer tool, that's not intelligent.
With the latter I mean that it should leave out the leading (and trailing) bytes, which already would be off because of the CDRom drive not being able to find the exact beginning of the track. Or better, you may have not calibrated it for that (which by itself is a feature of EAC, but which might fail because it needs reference CDs you might not have). So, if the first 100 bytes are off, and the comparer is not inteligent, all will be off.
If you compare the things yourself like with WaveLab, you'd have to find the common denominator of the start, and chop off the bytes from the track that has the additional bytes. For more complicated looking waves it can turn out to be undoable.
So that's what I meant. And I don't know about the bit comparer from Foobar. It might be "intelligent".
Btw Chris, thanks for pointing out the ToolTips. I was already wondering how I came to my choices myself (a few years ago), today not understanding the plain labels on the form. The means of arranging for it all looks still strange to me, but ok ...
Anyway, yes, it is ridiculous that we can't seem to read audio from a CD error free, but that's life for now. Btw, there was a thread on bd-design once where all this was worked out to some extend, and although this thread has been deleted by the owner, I still have it myself, and there sure are means to improve the reliability. I have to make something for it though, and somehow I can't do everything at the same time.
My conclusion for today in that thread was : If you have the opportunity to have two drives and both calibrate them properly, and they both always produce the same data, you're okay with either drive. BUT, you'd have to be very careful in watching the performance of the drive you use; Once the performance degrades (gerenally : it takes longer to rip), do the comparison with the other drive again. You *will* be behind things though, because you'll always decide to check when you ripped several CDs wrongly. But it's a means ...
Oh, and please note that with more poor CDs there's hardly a chance that both drives will read the same data. So on that matter ... have three drives.
Quite awkward ...
The least you will have relatively soon is a means from within XX to check the tracks on "realistic audio data" ... I could say, that if you just can hear the difference from two different rips, 100% sure my checking for realistic audio data will come up with something.
Generally spoken "that you can immediatly hear the difference" would be rare. Or maybe not, but don't make too much fuzz about it until yuo just have proven it (somehow) to yourself.
Oh, and to be clear on things : once the track is on the HDD, it can't be readout wrongly (better : differently) from there.
Even if the CD/DVD Drive supports C2 Error detection, i used to uncheck the option because i *want* EAC
to re-read the data and look for these errors.
Looking the way EAC is setup (or presented) this might not be a bad approach. I mean, look how the procedure goes (or how it comes to me) :
You can check the box for "drive supports CRC", and in some later stage you can upload the "findings" from your drive to whereever it is for the next person. So you judge or do wrong, and the next one is in trouble.
As a sidenote, I mention that the best means of ripping (which is not necessarily "insane" mode), often is undoable. I mean, the rip of one CD could take hours and hours, just because EAC wants to make something of something that will fail anyway. Never noticed it ? as soon as it takes 10 minutes to read 5 seconds, you will have a glitch, no matter what. Solution ? rip less secure, so you'd at least have ripped 30 CDs for the night ...
Actually it all IMHO s*cks. No matter how good intentions are.
Might it help somewhat for now : Plextors always have been the best.
Peter
