I also thought this was a longevity test.
I do love optical media and have a considerable CD, DVD, minidisc, and blu-ray collection. Like a Luddite, I still enjoy burning my own.
I especially like my Superscope disc copier. It completely disregards copy protection and I frequently make a backup of my favorite CDs which I store. Although much of my stock are older blanks (like those listed in this article)I’ll be sad if CD-R disappears from the market.
Could you recommend a usb CD drive for ripping audio CDs? A local library that I frequent has an extensive jazz collection and I'd like to rip it before they remove it, as I think it's just a matter of time before they do so.
If you just want to rip audio CDs, pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine. If you want a drive that can do everything up to and including UHD BD, try a Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD if you like slot loading or a Pioneer BDR-XD07B if you need a top-loader with snap-spindle for mini CDs or oddly-shaped CDs. These will cost way more than an old USB2-era drive but will be brand new.
You might be able to trawl your local thrift store and walk out with a $5 external drive from the 2000s, but a drive like that should be opened, dusted out, lens cleaned, and rails lubricated with some PTFE grease: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0081JE0OO
Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software, and here's how to configure it: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/eac-ripping/
Or XLD if you're on Mac: https://zexwoo.blog/en/posts/tutorials/xld-ripping/
> pretty much any USB drive ever made will be fine.
This is not the case. Most of the cheap drives on Amazon sold by random capital letters people are complete shit. As an example, the "CB31005" drive doesn't fucking work. It often gets hung up on reading the TOC and won't even admit there is a CD in the drive. If it doesn't hang there, it reads fine for a while, then at some random point (possibly the first point of error) just gives up and fails to read sectors, forevermore, until you unplug and replug the drive.
Even with EAC (which is indeed very good), it just spends hours re-reading sectors up to its maximum number of retries, giving up, and inserting silence. Do not buy a CB31005.
Drat, I didn't realize the six-letter people had gotten to optical drives. The cheapest (materially and monetarily) I'd previously encountered was like a very very cost-reduced LG SATA drive which was $20 but still worked perfectly.
> Exact Audio Copy is still the gold standard for ripping software
What makes it the best? I assumed that, since you're just reading digital data, any ripping software would do the same job in terms of quality, and the only differences would mostly be about having some convenient features or a better UI.
CD audio data is indeed lossless data, and has some form of spreading the data physically (CIRC), but has limited error correction. Data CDs have more error correction data than audio CDs, so are more resilient to media degradation, scratches, etc.
When CD audio has errors, more often than not, the CD drive conceals the error -- it interpolates for this unreadable data and doesn't tell the host. Some drives do report C2 errors, but many lie about their capabilities, or have poor implementations.
Secondly, when you ask for CD audio, you can't say "give me the samples from 00:01:23.567 to 00:49:20.211". You can say "seek to 00:01:23.567; start playing; give me the audio samples over ATA as you read them". You can also say "tell me where you think you are on the disc right now". CD drives do not do this reliably, or give reliable answers. Exact Audio Copy is looking to detect this and account for it.
EAC is best used with drives which reliably report wrong locations, i.e. are always wrong by a fixed amount, and EAC can learn by how much by comparing how your drive reports known discs to what's in the AccurateRip database.... but EAC can also work with drives that are unreliably wrong as well, it just has to read the same audio data multiple times over to get a good fix on where that audio really is on the CD.
See https://www.accuraterip.com/ for more details of how CD drives lie to you and let you down
Any drive will be capable of ripping just fine. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty finding a drive with well known read offsets and the ability to defeat the drive cache is a good bet so you can compare against the accuraterip database.
Not all CD-ROM drives, even those that can play audio, can be used to rip digital audio. Some only have an analogue audio output for playing CDs. I know at least some IDE CD-ROM drives can't read digital audio.
It might be true that all SATA drives can read digital audio.
Note of caution about others comments that suggests using cheap CD drive, audio CDs tracks have no redundancy checks, and production of ripping artifacts is directly related to the drive raw accuracy.
That said CD seek is so slow that drives cannot really afford to rely much on redundancy checks, so maybe this is not of concern.
Safest would probably be any drive from the "top drives" AccurateRip list here: https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/forum/dbpoweramp/cd-ripper/3247...
If you have an old mac, you can take out the SuperDrive and use that!
Worked flawlessly in contrast to a no-name USB DVD drive I bought on AliExpress
Fun fact: in the G4/G5 era, the SuperDrive was a Pioneer DVR-1xx rebadged. That's how I got into them in the first place :)
This is also why the Pioneer-branded models work just perfectly in Mac OS 9 and every version of Mac OS X with no PatchBurn necessary: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/patchburn
My experience with Aliexpress USB CD drives is they contain recycled laptop optical drives, sometimes over a decade old!
I do have this[1] one (product code: 43888 not 43889). Ripped a bunch of CDs perfectly.
AFAIK, 43888 is preferred by makemkv forums as it's internal drive can be flashed to support ripping blu-rays as well.
[1] https://www.verbatim.com/prod/accessories/disc-drives--burne...
As others said, the only thing you should be looking for is a drive that works with Accuraterip. Ripping discs from my local library is a hobby of mine and I've discovered so much music from there. I still buy CDs from thrift shops and the occasional garage sale, but having my music collection neatly organized and ripped/verified in FLAC is something I enjoy a lot.
To piggyback, is there a good USB Blu ray drive?
(And is there a known good CLI tool for backing up copies of them?)
I have some Blu Rays I worry will be lost to disc rot 20 years from now...
I've used the Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD[0] and that's worked well with MakeMKV[1]! I've only tried it on normal DVDs, but Blu-Rays should work well too.
[0]: https://usa.pioneer/collections/optical-drives/products/bdr-...
[1]: https://makemkv.com/
In this case you need a drive with firmware older than February 2023's v1.03 which disabled MakeMKV's LibreDrive. Mine is v1.01. See here: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30383
Mine was purchased after that date, does that only apply to Blu-Ray?
Yes, and even then only for Ultra HD Blu-ray. Regular BDs should still usually work unless they're uncommon enough to not have a title key known to MakeMKV.
“A LibreDrive is a mode of operation of an optical disc drive (DVD, Blu-ray or UHD) when the data on the disc are accessed directly, without any restrictions or transformations enforced by drive firmware. A LibreDrive would never refuse to read the data from the disc or declare itself ‘revoked’. LibreDrive compatible drive is required to read UHD discs.”
Thanks, good to know!
Check your drive anyway. Purchased after that date does not necessarily mean manufactured after that date :)
It sucks that firmware updates used to be a thing to look forward to but now are something to be avoided at all cost. I'd rather buy a second drive if I needed some new feature.
MakeMKV will show you all the relevant drive info when you start it up, including LibreDrive status. Here's my BDR-XS07 for example: https://i.imgur.com/10CGsbm.png
With a combination of MakeMKV, DVDfab Passkey, and a LibreDrive-supporting drive I can rip pretty much anything. Passkey is a driver-level thing like AnyDVD HD. Both of them are available perpetually-licensed but AnyDVD is currently being legaled and is unavailable: https://www.dvdfab.cn/passkey.htm
You can try MakeMKV for free using the beta key posted monthly on their subreddit, but I just went ahead and bought it because it's not that expensive and then I don't have to think about it: https://old.reddit.com/r/makemkv/comments/1jolbsq/the_may_ke...
I'm currently going through and backing up my library with Passkey's “Rip to Image”. Due to the way LibreDrive works, it's common for MakeMKV to be able to make MKVs (lol) directly from a BD/UHD disc in the drive but fail to open a protected ISO of the same title. For this reason I uncheck “Keep Protection” in Passkey for anything AACS (BD, UHD, HD-DVD (yes I have an HD-DVD drive)) so I can run the image through MakeMKV later. I do check “Keep Protection” for DVDs however, because CSS is fully broken and I want to do the most untouched rip possible.
any CD-R drive can do that, and they are dirt cheap (you should only say CD for audio which refers to audio output rather than the audio CDs themselves) CD-R drives can read audio CDs.
so can DVD-R drives with computer interfaces.
Do you have any advice for burning CD-Rs that will play on old players? My Sony CD changer, and the CD players in both cars won’t play CD-Rs I make. They play CDs fine. I assume it is because the lasers have gotten weaker with time and can’t read the CD-Rs which don’t have as much difference between a 1 and 0 pit compared to stamped CDs? I even ordered Verbatim ones with blue azo dye that was supposed to help but still no dice.
Are you burning it as slow as possible? That can help a bit, but I’m almost sure you know about it.
I have this problem as well with my 2005 Prius CD player, and my 2005 Odyssey's changer before I replaced that car. I think only the highest quality CD-Rs written at the lowest possible speed is your best bet, but I think there are more variables than that.
Have you tried a different writer?
I've only tried my HHB BurnIT CDR-830, which I love.
https://rapmag.com/a/01/feb01/hhb-burnit-cdr-830-review
I guess it's time to find an old computer CD burner and see if those work.
