[NBLUG/talk] High-quality CD ripping

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 04:40:39PM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> I got a WAV file that runs for 4 minutes, 26 seconds, but it has no
> sound whatsoever.  I even opened it in Kwave to verify that there is no
> sound (the sound graph is a horizontal line).

Do you possibly have an alternate CD-ROM drive somewhere to try?  cdparanoia
already uses the IDE cable, but the method required to get at the data is a
bit weird (it basically pulls all the audio data off, but skips the error
correction stuff that would normally occur when playing a CD as audio). 
cdparanoia corrects for this weirdness by reading the same data repeatedly
via various overlapping blocks of reads.

Some drives just won't cooperate.  Some discs are specifically designed to
make this hard...  Combining the drives that aren't very good at this with a
disc that's either designed to prevent copying (via bad bits that most audio
players ignore) or is damaged can result in the inability to get clean
data...  If you're seeing "jitter", that's probably an issue with the drive
doing weird things when reading data.  - is vaguely bad in your status bar. 
+ is even worse.

Try a different drive, if you can.  You don't have to worry about hooking up
a cable to the audio card; it's not used.
Try a different audio disc, if you can.
Try the "-v" option to see exactly what cdparanoia has to say...
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & Director-At-Large
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244