[paranoia-dev] possible bug in version III release alpha 9.8

[Brent A. Musat]

Background and Goal

I've been wanting to make an linux jukebox for a long time (5 plus years).  It would serve two purposes.  1) to have all my music
(600 CD's worth) at my fingertips anywhere within my home network.  and 2) to archive the CD's and have a back-up copy of the CDDA
bitstream so I could reburn a CD (exact bitwise burn) in the case one of my CD's was damaged or lost or degraded over time (a lot of
CD-R's in my collection).   So, the MP3 format would fit requirement 1, but not 2, since it is a lossy format.  I learned about FLAC
a couple of days ago and instantly fell in love with the open lossless format.  And with HD space as cheap as it is today I felt I
could finally realize my linux lossless jukebox idea.  The only major hurdle was ripping the CDDA bitstream off the CD's in an exact
manner to wav format!  which is how I came to be using cdparanoia.

Hardware

I'm running Debian Linux (2.2.20 kernel), with cdparanoia, flac, and rip installed on an old Pentium 90.  I just recently bought a
56x CD-Rom drive for $25 that I installed and it seems to work fine, and read data CD's at a fast rate, and it's capable of digital
audio extraction, altho I'm not sure if it's working 100%.  I'm not even sure of the brand of CD-Rom but it says the following in
the output of rip: "CDROM sensed: ATAPI compatible OEM CD-ROM F564E"

What I'm Seeing

I first started trying to use cdparanoia with the "-Z" flag since it was so darn fast.  I could rip a CD to FLACs in about 20-25
mins, but I realized I was bypassing the main features of cdparanoia. (note: the progress bar never showed any +'s or -'s or
anything else other than happy smilies).  So then I tried running it without any options and the progress bar would show +'s and -'s
which, from reading the documentation, should be correctable and not cause any audible noise, skips, or clicks.  I would get an
occasional "V" which was unacceptable..  I started using the "-X" option so it would abort on "V"s.  I also tried the "-z"
(lowercase) option so that it would try indefinitely to correct mistakes

But I found out that even if it ripped with only +'s and -'s I was still hearing some mistakes in the wav file!  this disappointed
me since I thought that cdparanoia would correct those problems!  So I've had to experiment around with the other options and it
seems that if I use the "-S 1" flag to reduce the speed I will get a perfectly clean rip with no +'s or -'s and no audible mistakes
in the wav file....

So my question and point is that even if I rip and only get +'s and -'s it still does NOT guarantee a clean rip!  I have to force
the "-S 1" flag to ensure a clean rip.   (note: I haven't tried other values of the -S flag to push the limits, since I'm mainly
concerned with a clean rip and -S 1 is the most conservative level.)

Am I doing something wrong or have you seen this kind of behavior before?  Just thought I'd notate it and give you the complete info
and problem I've been experiencing so you can improve your software.  Although the problem might lie with my slow 90Mhz processor.

Hope this is helpful info,
Thanks,

Brent A. Musat

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