[Paranoia] CD Ripping Uncertainty Principle?

[Monty]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 10:05:11PM +0200, Nils Chr. Framstad wrote:
> 
> 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?

Yes.

> (And at the risk of committing heresy:
> given that one has a particular drive, is there then better ripping
> software than cdparanoia around?)

Perhaps not better, but certainly 'different'.  EAC can get C2 error
reports from Plextor and a couple other drives.  EAC is geenrally more
trusting of drives than Paranoia, but it also takes more advantage of
drive features.

Older versions of Paranoia (version 2) would attempt to track
'unstable' bits in individual samples and implemented 'loose' matching
to accomidate this.  Paranoia 3 didn;t do it this way primarily
because it caused bad reads on some drives.  The dangers of heuristics
:-)

Monty