feeling dumb tonight...

[wardshorsehead]

Ok...so you rip an audio file to .wav. Data loss? Man, for some reason my brain isn't firing on all cylinders tonight.

Proposed situation...a recording that was mixed to CD-R. My buddy wants to bring it into SoundForge to trim the ends of the tracks, sequence the order of tracks, and normalize. He has a decent soundcard, etc. Could he just load the CD in on the computer and work with the audio as .wav files? There wouldn't be an advantage to bringing it in through the sound card via sp-dif, would there?

I'm not a computer guy, especially when it comes to audio.

Apoligies for posting this in the general forum, as it is sort of a computer question, but touches on other variables too...or not. Damn flu....

Frank

[I'm Painting Again]

i feel like the more you copy audio files the less detailed and more muddy they become.

i guess it depends on what yr doing with the music, if it is for retail i would not want to copy those files over and over. if it is and you have the original material, mix it to 1/4" tape or to a quality cd burning deck. if its a demo just import the wav files and do your thing.

[pandafresh]

feel like the more you copy audio files the less detailed and more muddy they become.

wait! were talking about computer files here right? [.wav files]?
how is that even technicaly possible?i mean, it doesnt matter how much i copy my text files, or, images files [as long as i dont mess with the compression] they dont get more blurry.. ??

but on the orignal question. it would seem best to me to copy the wav files off the CDr, and work with them. there is atleast error correction when just copying. it would seem to run it through some spdif, well digital,, would have less error correction?
i dont know the uber technical side of that though.

-trevor

[A.L.]

wait! were talking about computer files here right? [.wav files]?
how is that even technicaly possible?i mean, it doesnt matter how much i copy my text files, or, images files [as long as i dont mess with the compression] they dont get more blurry.. ??

In theory. But in reality (of course depends on the software, etc.) by ripping / burning you may end up subtly re-compressing the file each time you pass it back and forth. The process is more akin to taking an image, saving it as a slightly compressed .jpg, taking a screen capture of the image then resaving it as a .jpg again, etc. than actually just duplicating or copy/pasting the image.

[buzzaudioguy]

I use a Plextor SCSI reader(the UltraPlex 40 Max) to rip in all my tracks. When you buy the drive it comes with sofeware to do this(Plextor Manager) and unless I have a bad disc(scratched or wasn't burned properly in the first place) I never have a problem extracting audio from a CD. It always sounds as good as it did on the disc. I'd definately do it this way and not playing it in real time. It's all just 1's & 0's...

[@?,*???&?]

As it's been explained to me at a few mastering facilities, the only difference between WAV, AIFF and SDII files is a little strip of code at the top of the file. The audio portion is identical on all 3 formats.

[blm15]

Hmm. If you do some poking around, there's some golden ear guys that claim just by the simple act of copying a file changes things.
If you talk to a good mastering engineer, if a digital project is submitted for mastering, one of the prefered formats is a CD-ROM with unaltered 24 bit audio file copy {s}. Don't ask me why but some like AIFF over wav. Some like 48k, some prefer other sample frequencies. Either way, they want to be able to work on the files in 24 bit until the dither stage. Of course, they could rip the track from an audio CD. But then, they're forced to work with what was a 16 bit file. I may be nuts but after doing some munging with several different programs @16 bit, every change seems to make the file murkier... compression, normalizing.... you name it.
Regardless, if there's a choice, it may be a good habit to store away the unmunged 24bit files on CD-ROM or perhaps other removables..... or at least that's what I do. That way I can go back, load as close to what was the original file in...
Obviously, if a client brings in a "music CD" and that's all he/she has, then that's what you have to work with.
blm15

[tiger vomitt]

copying a aiff, sd2 or wav file wont change the quality at all. if youre ripping a cd you can run into little weird things due to things like jitter, etc.

but just copying a file from one hard drive to another wont change anything (unless the copy is bad, but if that's the case you'll usually know, it's pretty obvious)


voodoo - BOO!

[A.L.]

Ripping music from discs is still a conversion process, as music CDs don't use AIFF or WAV as their native file format, instead those formats are converted to some other format that is unique to CDR.

That was basically my point. Bless you for being more articulate than I...

[cassembler]

Resident is on the right track...

Ripping audio from an audio CD can, and likely will, result in small errors and here's why:

On a data CD(R), where you're storing bank acounts and spreadheets and text... There's no room for error. Thus, the error correction is ether 100% acurate or the file is corrupt. (Ever notice a CDR can hold 650 MB of data, but 74 min of audio (740 MB-ish)?)

On an audio CD(R), the designers figured, "Hey, we have 44 thousand samples a second here. Each one doesn't need to be 100% acurate." As well, they knew stupid people like me were going to treat their CD's like crap and scratch them up, so there were definitely going to be bad samples. Thus, the error correction isn't 100% reliable. When a CD player comes across a bad group of samples, it ether, in order of preference:

a) 100% correctly determines the missing data
b) Interpolates the missing data, with varying degrees of intellegence, or
c) "blanks out" the bad data, causing crappy skipping and stuff.

This is a waaaaay oversimplified explanation, but ultimately, ripping audio from an audio CD will likely have a few interpolated samples.

Some things you can do to reduce the problems:
1) Rip in "ultra-safe" mode, where the data is read at least twice and the results have to be the same each time.

ummm... That's all I'm aware of.

But back to the beginning, that's why audio files are better for this opperation: the data you save will be 100% correctly transfered to you reader (unless the file is corrupt), and anyone who tells you they can hear a file that's been copied from and to a lossless data format is a damn liar, and I got $20 to anyone who can prove me wrong.

EDIT: Everyone here needs to go to the library and find the book, "The Principals of Digital Audio" by Ken C Pohlman. MUST READ, not optional. Don't be afraid to skip some of the calculus stuff...

[distorTED]

dont skip the calculus, thats the good stuff!!!!!!

[I'm Painting Again]

when i say copy audio files i mean bouncing to disk, any dsp, etc. There is a huge difference in deatail, at least to my ears, when you compare a mix bounced to disk + burned and one burned straight to a nice deck from the original tracks. as for copying a wav to wav i'm not sure i never listened for a change had no need to so far, i will try it. but is not bouncing a bunch of wavs in a multitrack down to stereo similar to copying a wav??? i dunno im not super technical i just use my ears. im sorry if i misunderstood the question but its a neat debate now at least .

[cassembler]

Yeah, completely different... There was a great article back when TapeOp still had the "This %$#^ Computer section" about this very topic.

A program's mixing code, without any doubt, has an effect on the "sound" of the application.