CDs and high quality tracks

Went a bit into this rabbit hole of CD-ripping with linux programs, lossless quality, metadata matching, showing love to music you enjoy and want to experience in all of its high-quality glory. This is my story.

CD Ripping

Getting this out of the way, I bought the CD that I used to test this, and if I had a gun to my head telling me that I needed to say out loud which artist it was…. It was an OST, for チェンソーマンレゼ篇. If you can read that, good you already know what’s up.

In short, because the Linux community is GOATed, they built tools that help automate and make ripping tracks out of CDs pretty streamlined. You just need to know what to install and how to use it.

But as always, let’s look at some concepts and theory first

Ripping as a concept

CD-Ripping: A specific process that extracts digital content from a container, in this case a CD onto a new digital form and location. Data is not damaged, and the key is at the fact that ripping is used to shift formats, and to edit or duplicate/back-up media. It’s copying but with extra steps, they are not the same regardless.

I remember somehow that DVDs and Blu-Rays are region-locked and initially thought this was the same case for CD’s however, it’s NOT. If you buy a CD in Japan, that very same CD can be reproduced by anything that has a CD Reader. So that’s one less extra hurdle to go over.

Audio Quality

I’m not an audio engineer, nor claim to be an expert either, but I know based on bits and pieces that I read/heard that audio quality varies based on:

• Bit depth: 16-bit
• Sample rate: 44.1 kHz
• Channels: 2 (stereo)
• Encoding: PCM (uncompressed)

(This example set of metadata values is for CD-quality audio)

If we were to explain briefly what each field is:

• Bit depth: Basically affects how loud the track is, 16-bit is roughly 96 dB.
• Sample rate: This determines the highest frequency that can be put in the track, 44.1 kHz is roughly 22 kHz audio, which is actually above human hearing, meaning that the track should be able to reproduce an immense amount of sounds, so we can hear all the details the musician/engineer put in there.
• Channels: Music is basically always mixed in stereo, that way when we hear it we get all sorts of sounds coming from everywhere, and small playful imagery (if you close your eyes and let your imagination run wild). Said in a fancy way: enables spatial imaging and soundstage
• Encoding: PCM stands for Pulse-Code Modulation, this is raw, uncompressed representation of audio samples. Native format for CDs, any lossless format decodes to PCM quality before playback, a format such as WAV is a container that holds PCM

How-to

So there are two possibilities here:

• Your CD is Audio CD, which means if you try to analyze the contents there is no concept of “tracks” inside a file manager that is trying to visualize said contents.
• Your CD is Data CD, so you see files, should be .wav files (this is easier to work with)

In order to cover both cases we will install this set of tools:

yay -S cdparanoia flac abcde sox picard

Audio CD

You can literally run one command and you will get .flac files already tagged. Of course with bit-perfect output and lossless quality.

Definitions:

• Bit-perfect: We copied _every single bit that held audio data over, we didn’t cut corners, so we should have the track in its purest form
• Lossless quality: Again, the format in which we have a track should not cut any corners and should provide on playback all of the track’s full on remastered glory
• Tagging: It just means adding metadata to a track (might be just me, but I like my tracks looking pretty with a cover and all sorts of information adding a story, and more background on it)

abcde -o flac

EXTRA NOTE: Why .flac? This is a good format that’s Linux Friendly, has built-in integrations with the Linux ecosystem, it can keep metadata info without issues (.wav is really bad at keeping metadata). On top of that its size is smaller than .wav. It’s a good combination of:

• Quality
• Size
• Metadata
• Longevity

Data CD

This is a bit more manual however, this is what I did, since my copy was .wav files.

Since my CD had already audio extracted, ripping was not necessary, all you have to do is copy the files over to another device (in my case my PC). However, be sure to double check if the copied over files are copied correctly, you can use this tool to check the metadata of copied over files: soxi *.wav. We should be seeing the audio quality metadata spat out by the command for all files.

And now the sequence of steps should be as follows:

• Convert to flac with flac *.wav
• Verify the integrity of files with flac -t *.wav

A note on tagging: With abcde because we are ripping and we can detect other metadata that only lives in that specific format we can tag automatically and have everything done for us in a heart-beat, however since we are doing things a bit more manual here we have to do some extra steps such as using a program called Picard.

• Open the program by launching it through the terminal with picard
• This is a full-on GUI, you can play around with it, but in short you should do this with the GUI:
  • Select all the .flac tracks we just converted
  • Load them into Picard
  • Select all tracks
  • Press the Scan button, this is magically, it works even if the filenames are useless, (which was my case).
  • There are sometimes differences in releases (varied by countries), so you can also dive into that part if neccesary, since there will be differences and you want to tag the tracks with the correct release, luckily I have the only (at the time of writing) release in the world. So it was easier.
  • Configure naming rules with Options > File Naming
  • Check the “Rename files when saving” option
  • Select Preset 2 for the naming convention
  • In the main screen press on Save
  • After a couple of seconds you should be able to see all the files in green and with names and everything already tagged (album cover, artist info, country, title, and many other things)

Playing lossless formats

Linux has many good players:

• mpv (this is the one I use)
• DeadBeef
• Strawberry
• Rhytmbox

That’s on the software side however, there’s a bit of hardware involved also, so pairing any of these players with a decent DAC or audio interface, will sound identical to a high-end CD player.

DAC / amp

DAC = This stands for Digital-to-Analog Converter. Takes digital audio (USB, optical, CD data, etc), and converts it all to analog waveform

Music files (FLAC, WAV, etc) are digital data (numbers). Speakers and headphones need an analog electric signal

Now, this is really important, EVERY DEVICE HAS A BUILT-IN DAC, (phone, laptop, CD player, Bluetooth headphones). But the difference is quality

Amplifier = The analog signal coming out of a DAC is very weak. The amplifier amplifies the signal so it can properly drive Headphones (headphones amp), Speakers (speaker amp). Without enough amplification: Sound is quiet, bass is weak, dynamics are flat.

Nowadays, many devices combine both devices in one, it’s convenient and common.

However there are external DAC/amps, and you can totally buy one if you want to go that extra mile:

• Built-in audio (laptops, cheap phones) often:
  • Have electrical noise
  • Use low-quality DAC chips
  • Have weak amps

An external DAC/amp can give:

• Cleaner sound
• Better stereo separation
• Enough power for good headphones

Just better electronics

A small memo

I have this vivid memory of back-in-the-day where a friend from my English institute bringing in these headphones that apparently were amazing, and yeah, when hearing through them I heard all sorts of sounds, that spatial imagery was ever-present with them. I don’t know if it’s just an illusion of the past, but in recent years I never heard something like it again. Is production of hardware growing cheaper and with less quality for the masses?, Is this just a mandela effect?, Has audio engineering and re-mastering grown weaker in the industry?.

I only have questions as to this clear contradiction/dissonance with a memory I had and the reality of things in the present. I will probably buy this external DAC/amp to just test it out and see if I ever get to feel what I once felt. But yeah, just something I wanted to leave somewhere.

Audio formats

For lossless formats we have the big three: .wav, .flac, .alac. They all have the same quality so don’t go listening to myths. However a brief description of them can fall into:

• WAV: Raw, uncompressed PCM audio, it’s “audio numbers in a box”. However, very large files, poor/inconsistent metadata support, no built-in error checking. Not ideal for music libraries.
• FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec): Lossless compression of PCM audio, it’s like ZIP but specialized for audio. It has a lot of PROS going for it, but we can focus on two: 30-60% smaller than .wav, great metadata support.
• ALAC: Apple’s version of FLAC, wouldn’t touch it…