[Paranoia] CD Ripping Uncertainty Principle?

[Nils Chr. Framstad]

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004, Monty wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 09:01:06PM +0200, Nils Chr. Framstad wrote:
>
> > An (obviously) uneducated question from me, then: where does the
> > _randomness_ occur? Is it
> >  - the bits? E.g. the CD has bits with values so close to 1/2 that
> > Heisenberg, God and Kolmogorov (please delete as appropriate)
> > sometimes outputs 0, sometimes 1, for any reasonable CD-player?
>
> yes.

Thanks. Do you (or anyone) have a reference (online or research paper)
to the frequency of such errors? Curiosity is about to get the better
of me here...


>  Once upon a time it was pointless to try to intuit more from
> 'unstable' bits; every drive behaved differently and what worked on
> one didn't work on another. Most drives do not tell you if there are
> corrected/uncorrected errors in a returned data vector. Once upon a
> time, Plextor was the only brand that would do so, and it was
> vaguely pointless to support the feature. More drives will report
> that information today (although many report it incorrectly).

So -- at least for Plextor, but for an increasing number of players as
well -- there is room for improvement by incorporating better
communication with the drive? (And at the risk of committing heresy:
given that one has a particular drive, is there then better ripping
software than cdparanoia around?)

Regards,
- Nils

-- 
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