Flac Files Question

N

netsider

Limp Gawd
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Oct 12, 2004
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466
I'm trying to reassure someone that FLAC files are lossless. However, even though I understand that they're lossless, I was wondering about other contributing factors that might affect it's quality, before it even becomes ripped or encoded. My main concern is the CD-ROM/DVD drive. This particular person is an audiophile, and won't settle for less than the best. Do CD-ROM drives employ any type of error correction? Like, is there anything from preventing the loss of data from, for example, a cheap CD ROM drive, or scratched media? Scratched media would be a good example here. It's the equivalent of a scratched CD when copying files to a computer.. or at least thats the analogy I'll use. We've all had scratched discs that STILL copied, and after the file copying process, those files were intact and useable, even though the drive had to read over the CD a dozen times. Is this the case with audio being ripped from a CD to a lossless format, such as FLAC? I really don't know much about computer audio, or audio altogether, but I do have a pretty good knowledge of hardware/software. The simple question in the end is, if I copy audio from a CD and encode it to a FLAC file, is that *exactly what was, and everything* that was on the audio CD? Thanks guys.
 
I guess you could rip the CD as an ISO twice (or from two different drives), and then get the MD5 hash of both of the ISO files. If any of the data was different, you would get a different checksum.
 
bholstege said:
I guess you could rip the CD as an ISO twice (or from two different drives), and then get the MD5 hash of both of the ISO files. If any of the data was different, you would get a different checksum.
Click to expand...

That's what http://www.accuraterip.com/ is for.

It's a database of CD rips that compare checksums against your rips. EAC supports comparing your rip to that database.

EAC also does built in checksum and error correction when ripping your CD as well.

You want to use "secure mode" and rip with "test and copy".
 
The end result of a proper rip will certainly be more accurate than what makes it out of almost any standalone CD player during playback, as the PC can take as many retries as it needs to get it right without being constrained by the need to maintain a steady output stream.

As mentioned above there are several tools available to confirm the accuracy of the resulting output.

As to the abilities of FLAC, as advertised it is a lossless codec, the PCM audio that comes out during decode is 100% identical to what was input during encode, otherwise it would not be lossless.
 
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