On 2023-03-24 Adam Thompson wrote:

I, and I know a few of you, have long been looking for an equivalent tool under Linux to Windows’ Exact Audio Copy. I just stumbled upon a new (to me) possible contender: Whipper. Source at: GitHub - whipper-team/whipper: Python CD-DA ripper preferring accuracy over speed<https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper> Binaries appear to mostly be in your distro’s repos? Or so the github page reports, at least. It does use the new-ish libcdparanoia to do the ripping, under the hood – it seems that product has matured and more or less reached parity with EAC.

I checked libcdparanoia-based rippers out again maybe 2-3 years back and it was still massively inferior to EAC. I really wanted to switch, but it just wasn't there yet: still. So unless it's made massive strides in 3 years, I'm dubious. I've been doing this EAC stuff since 1997 (when I got my first burner! coaster city!) and have it down to a science. Last paranoia attempt I would do my best to get the same output as EAC, but doing cmp -l on the results I'd find weird bit flips and other strangeness. Someone was reading it wrong. Since my ears trust EAC after this bazillion years (and since if I wanted to I could verify with AccurateRip), I'll need wav files that exactly duplicate EAC bit-for-bit (minus variable headers). Not saying you haven't found it! Just saying every time I get my hopes up, I get disappointed. I found paranoia especially bad at handling scratches. EAC will only ever really barf on horrifically bad CDs. It might take all night to rip, but it will get there if it's possible. When I get a mo, I'll give it a try again! Cutting the reboot-to-XP step out of my ripping would save time and let me kick Bill out of my basement. On 2023-03-24 J. King wrote:

I've been using cdparanoia for several years as the basis of a script which will rip multiple discs as a set (I mainly buy operas on CD nowadays), convert the result to FLAC, add track and disc number metadata, calculate Replaygain, and finally open the files in foobar2000 for further tagging.

Ha, ya, guys who are still doing this probably have refined their method by now, just like us. :-) My set of scripts and purpose-made mini-ripper-computer are quite insane at this point. But it all works great and lets me get through my regular piles of a 100 CDs pretty quickly. Opera, eh? I'm a huge fan. I accidentally bought a 2 copies of Mehta's Turandot fat-box set and I'd love to trade if you have an extra (legit!) copy of any (complete) rendition of the same, or Butterfly or Aida or Rigoletto. Hope you're going to Cosi Fan Tutte: see you there. (PM me with muug in the subject!)