On Thursday 03 July 2003 22:43, Ryan Underwood wrote: > Just my two cents, you can rip a CD in either analog or digital form. > Analog will incur some lossiness since the path is > CD-DA -> DAC -> ADC -> WAV > The ADC (analog to digital conversion) is a lossy operation. > > Ripping directly from the CD is preferable since there is no ADC > involved. But it is not necessary to get acceptable sound quality. > > Programs like cdparanoia and EAC operate as digital rippers, using the > cdrom's built in mechanisms to extract the audio data directly. There > are other programs however (such as cdsound-recorder) that will play the > disc through your CD drive's built in DAC, and record the sound through > your soundcards ADC input. Or, you can use a standalone CD player for > the same effect. Wow, I guess that either I have always been mistaken about this, or the meaing of the word has changed over the years. I always thought that "ripping" meant getting a byte for byte digital copy, converting the CD audio format to a soun file format. What you're describing, I always thought of as "taping". So when some in the Linux Audio world talks about, say, ripping samples from an audio sample CD into wavs, in order to load them into csound (just picking a likely application), do they mean they made an exact digital copy, or do they mean they made an analog copy? I always thought it would mean the former, but am I wrong? This is a quite important distinction, don't you think? Larry Troxler
