basic rip or cd paranoia?

[rydenfan]

Guys I really need some help! If a cd is in excellent condition is there any difference between the basic rip and cd paranoia? It takes like 25 minutes per disc with paranoia and it seems like it will take forever to rip my collection at this rate. I would prefer to use the basic rip, but not if it sacrifices quality. I really hope somebody can help me soon. Thanks!!

[Mike1]

Here's Stephen Booth himself on a similar question in another thread:

http://www.sbooth.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 1715#p5582

[rydenfan]

I wish it will a little clear. Saying the basic ripper is probably good enough is not as convincing of an answer as I would like. 25 minutes seems excessive for a pristine disc. Would an external burner makes things faster? Or the is the basic ripper all I need and I am making myself crazy for no reason?

[Mike1]

I wish it will a little clear. Saying the basic ripper is probably good enough is not as convincing of an answer as I would like. 25 minutes seems excessive for a pristine disc. Would an external burner makes things faster? Or the is the basic ripper all I need and I am making myself crazy for no reason?

I doubt it's possible to give an absolutely definitive answer. And where Stephen, who's written the software, hasn't given one it would be foolhardy of me to venture one. I guess it's possible that a CD might look fine but still be a little damaged so that it would benefit from error correction (which CDParanoia can do). So I think "probably good enough" is as far as anyone could go.

FWIW, most people here like to use CDParanoia (and I'm no exception). But that's a preference rather than anything that has been be proved to be necessary by experience -- like enough the Basic Ripper would do just as well for most of our CDs while saving us time.

If you were to rip some sample tracks with all three rippers -- and with the ripper in Itunes, while you were about it -- and encode to the same codec, then have the results played back to you blind, I strongly suspect that you couldn't tell any of the four samples apart. But there might well be the occasional disc where the ripper did matter -- including on some occasions the odd disc that just didn't "play nice" with CDParanoia. There seem to be some of which that's true -- see this post:

http://sbooth.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=382

[rydenfan]

Ok. So using cdparanoia does 25 minutes per disc, even when they are pristine make sense? Or is there something I can do to speed that up? Does an external burner help?

[Fuga]

Compared to EAC 25 minutes with paranoia is excellent.