Hi,

I am having some serious problems ripping CDs with Apple's lossless
encoding, and am hoping someone else has a clue as to what the problem
might be. In all my web searches I can find no reference to problems
with this.

The story: I had set up an old Linux laptop as a Samba server and was
using it as a shared disk for my wife and I to play iTunes from. It
worked without discernable problems for months; I put my iTunes music
library on the shared disk and would rip from my Windows laptop using
high quality AAC encoding. My wife played and ripped from her ibook; no
problem.

Then we ran out of disk so I decided to get serious and set up an old
blue and white G3 as the official house iTunes server. About that time
Apple came out with lossless encoding and we decided we'd better switch
if we were serious about sound quality. We soon filled up the G3's disk
and I ordered a nice big external firewire hard drive to store the music
on. We started ripping music directly on the G3's hard drive.

Shortly thereafter I got ahold of a CD of a rare live performance and
ripped it. Listening intently to the server's playback, I noticed some
reproducible 1/2-second (or so) glitches that sounded like full-volume
white noise at particular times in the recording (i.e. they weren't just
being introduced by the playback process). Checking the original CD I
found they weren't there. I tried re-ripping with "use error
correction" checked but there were still glitches (in new places).

I figured it might have had something to do with the CD, but then I
found a similar glitch in another ("officially" published studio)
recording and confirmed that it wasn't present on the original CD. Next
I figured it might have something to do with the G3's CD drive so I
tried ripping from my laptop upstairs with the G3's disk remotely
mounted via Samba. More glitches (in different but repeatable places).
Then I tried ripping from my laptop directly to its internal drive.
After copying them to the server, more glitches in repeatable places.

I hear the same thing no matter where I play the file.

It is of course possible that this has nothing to do with lossless
encoding, but before I started using it, I never had this problem. I'm
not sure what else to try or where to look for problems. If anyone has
an idea of what to try next, I'm all ears.

Thanks in advance,

--
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 00:08:37 +0100, David Abrahams wrote
(in article ):

Listening intently to the server's playback, I noticed some
reproducible 1/2-second (or so) glitches that sounded like full-volume
white noise at particular times in the recording (i.e. they weren't just
being introduced by the playback process).
---------------------------snip---------------------------

I also had problems using Apple Lossless Coding (ALC), at least with an iPod.
I had three distinct problems:

1) the iPod would cut off the first 1/4-second or so of almost every song. My
guess is that the puny 4200RPM drive in the iPod just couldn't get enough
information in the buffer fast enough.

2) I would (rarely) hear random glitches, just like what you describe. I
never heard them from iTunes, though -- only from the iPod. They never
happened in the same place at the same time, so I'm guessing this is just a
random fault in the program.

3) the iPod would crash -- hard -- to the point where I had to let the
battery die down before it would reboot. (I also had similar problems where
the iPod would occasionally refuse to turn OFF, but I'm fairly certain this
is an operating system/clickwheel issue.)

I eventually threw in the towel, decided that the ALC process might be part
of the problem, and decided to compress my files with the "least-compressed"
format available: 320K AAC (MP4), which is about a 4:1 ratio. Those files
sounded fine to my ears, certainly good enough for portable listening and
background music.

My advice would be try that, and see if it helps.

--MFW