[CLUE-Tech] cdparanoia and ripping CDs with Linux

[Jed S. Baer]

On Tue, 19 Mar 2002 21:52:06 -0500 (EST)
Adam Bultman <adamb at glaven.org> wrote:

> Well, it's easily put this way.  IN it's native format, the songs on the
> CD are like wavs (are they wavs?).

IIRC, M$ wav format is simply a CDA "track" with a header stuck on it to
identify bitrate, and maybe a few other things. The CDA track doesn't need
any header info for identifying the audio encoding, because that's fix in
the CD audio standard. As a result of the header being there, you can
encode at different bitrates than CD audio. Probably some later additions
to that though, because I recall finding some wav files I couldn't play
without getting a newer codec.

> Super-ultra-high-quality

It's extremely debatable whether CD audio could be called "Super-Ultra"
high quality. In fact, "adequate" would be better. Sampling always omits
data. There are comb filtering effects which must be dealt with via
filtering. There are also limits to how much data can be stored in 16bits
sampled at 44.1Khz. There is definitely more data on an LP record than
that. Theoretically, your sample rate would have to be "infinite" to
capture all the audio information. Yeah, that sounds silly, but think
about it. To make a very simple analogy, recall the mathematics
(arithmetic?) of a number line. You can always find a number halfway
between two points, even if those two points are represented by numbers of
several thousand digits. Audiophiles have been playing with 20-bit digital
audio for a while now.

>  I use grip and have oggenc encode the files at 192kbits.  The file
>  sizes are larger than your standard 128kbit MP3, but then, you've got
>  higher quality.  I certainly recommend encoding in one form or another.
>   At work, I've got 3000 some odd MP3s from the collective CDs of
>   employees.  There's NO way I could have housed that many if they were
>   in wav format.

Been thinking about trying out Ogg. However, for the sort of casual
listening I do with the 'puter, mpg3 at 128 (each channel) is just fine
for me.

jed
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