Audio

The sound quality of your converted music is the most important aspect of any ripping service.  A ripping service needs to be able to accurately extract and convert your music.

Audio Extraction

Audio extraction is done by using high quality drives that have a history of providing consistent results and using tools that monitor the drives and their output.  In reality, the CD holds the key to accurate audio extraction.  Any high quality drive ripping a brand new CD will yield accurate results.  The problem is that most CDs are far from being brand new and scratch free.  Audio CDs are remarkably robust in that they contain a great deal of information to ensure that the integrity of the music is maintained even after a CD may have encountered a few scratches.  If that were not the case, then as soon as a CD got a scratch, it would be unreadable. 

Most services have a set-it and forget-it attitude.  They will rip your CDs whether they are dirty, scratched, etc and use other techniques to validate the accuracy.  Some services use accurate ripping databases to compare the extraction against other good rips.  This has problems too.  First, we already indicated that a good quality CD on good hardware will rip fine.  The issue is when you have a CD that is not in the database or if the CD has some scratches that cause the data to be incorrect.  Then the ripping database doesn't really help.  We do use a similar process to validate rips, but it is used as a secondary validation only. 

We believe that the first step in any ripping process is to ensure a quality CD is ripped.  This is achieved by hand cleaning each and every CD and repairing any that are excessively scratched.  This is done before we start the extraction process.  Very few ripping services own a commercial repair machine and most that do will only use it after errors are reported.  The problem is that not all errors are reportable by drives.  We have a great deal of time and money invested in CD repair because of its importance.  We use Advantage repair machines from Azuradisc for all of our CD repair.  We spend more time in preparation because starting from a good foundation is so important.

Audio Conversion

After the audio has been extracted, it must then be converted to the specified digital format.  In most cases this format is MP3 320kbps.  This process is as important as the audio extraction since the resulting converted music quality must be maintained.  When audio is converted to lossy formats like MP3, there are a number of settings that can directly influence the resulting audio file.  These settings number in the thousands and can make the difference between a good sounding audio track and one that sounds great.  We have taken many steps to ensure that the settings are both compatible with all players and provide the best sound. 

One of the ways we do this is through double blind listening studies.  The process is simple and yields invaluable information.  We will have a person listen to both the original and the converted file using a program that allows them to switch between them seamlessly.  Their job is to try to identify the CD original.  Our 320 kbps MP3 files are so close to the original that it is nearly impossible to determine the difference between the CD and the converted music.  We have found that once the bitrate drops below 224 kbps, notable differences can be easily heard between the original CD and the converted music.