Like most folks, I've taken on faith the accuracy with which Exact Audio
Copy rips CDs and have ripped a large number of CDs using it over the
past few years. Recently, I picked up a Plextor Plexwriter Premium CD-RW
drive primarily to get a much faster ripping speed without (hopefully)
loss of accuracy. To my surprise however, I found that the vast majority
of rips using the Plextor were bit-wise different from those CDs I had
previously ripped with EAC (I used the Foobar 'Bit Compare Tracks'
feature to determine this). I was understandably concerned since I was
led to believe that Plextools with the Plextor drive was capable of
producing extremely accurate results.
In reading some forum posts, I ran across references to AccurateRip
(www.accuraterip.com) that provides a software plug in for EAC that will
compare the rips (CRCs?) to an online database of collected results and
report the correlation. I installed this and re-ripped several CDs with
EAC, and AccurateRip indicated that the rips were not accurate
(confidence value of 1). On the forth of fifth CD it asked if I wanted
to use that CD to set the read offsets for the drive (why it didn't do
this with the first few CDs is a mystery to me). I did this and found
that it had changed the read offset settings in EAC for the drive from 0
to +30. I ripped the CD and lo and behold I received an indication that
the rip was accurate (confidence = 9). I re-ripped the previous few CDs
and the results from them were also listed as accurate. I compared these
files with those from the Plextor drive and sure enough, the decoded
audio data in all of them were identical.
I took a peek at the Drive Options -> Offset/Speed page in EAC and there
is a button on the page that will presumably detect the read sample
offset for the drive, but unfortunately it states that the drive is not
in its database and it does nothing. This result was the same with the
other 3 drives I have, and their offsets remained at 0 as well.
So it appears that EAC is NOT entirely accurate unless the read offsets
are correctly set, and this is not being done by default. Without
AccurateRip, I would not have known this, and I would definitely not
know what the proper offsets should be.
Sigh...
- Ken
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