BBritten.com - articles:oldblog

cao

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-21T12:13:29+00:00

Compositions-at-Once!

It's quite common to see in, say, YouTube comments these days that people still prefer to use physical media for their classical music listening pleasure rather than any of the streaming, YouTube or similar 'consume-but-don't-own' musical options available these days.

I agree with that sentiment in one sense: I hate streaming music. If I don't own it, it doesn't really 'count' in my mind. If I own it, I curate it and maintain it and make sure it's metadata is accurate and so on; if I merely 'consume' it, I have no idea whether all that's being done correctly or not (but can be pretty confident that as it's classical music we're talking about, it won't have been!)

So, though this site and my personal preferences are all about ripping music off a CD, I get and agree with the 'ownership' angle of the original proposition.

The trouble I have with CDs is that they split music into multiple tracks -and we then tend to rip them per track, and thus we end up with digital music players that can play the Adagio from that symphony, and the Presto from that concerto…. and we think nothing of it, because that's just the way it's always been with recorded music, right?

Wrong!

That's a photo of my highly-prized and beloved 78rpm first edition of Benjamin Britten's 1943 masterpiece, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings: the recording was made in 1944.

The Serenade has several 'movements': lovely settings of poems by various authors, concerning moonlight, evening, fears about night and so on. The six poems are prefaced by a haunting prologue for natural horn and suffixed by an equally haunting epilogue.

Looking at the picture of the shellac disc containing this work, however, can you see any evidence of this piece being comprised of six separate poems? No: the grooves obviously reflect light differently at different places, reflecting where the music gets louder and softer… but there's no actual, physical compartmentalisation of the music at all.

Meaning that in 1944, if you wanted to hear the Serenade, you had to hear it as a continuous stream of music, not as separate poems or movements.

Naturally, there are pauses between the poems: the players need to get themselves into gear for what's coming and both the conductor and tenor could probably do with a bit of a breather… but, a few seconds of pause doesn't really count as a 'break' in my view.

Of course, being a 78rpm disk, you could only fit about 4 minutes of music on each side of the record in any case -so, in fact, the 'big breaks' really kick in, not by physical separation of tracks on a side of disk, but by you having to get up and turn over the disk to allow play to continue. There are six sides of shellac record for this work, which represents one side per poem. So in that sense, I guess you could say that the recorded music listening experience was broken up into separate 'bits', each bit representing one poem setting. But even though I acknowledge that, you'll note that the prologue and epilogue do not get separate sides or separate 'tracks'.

What about the LPs that came after the 78s? Surely, they split things up into tracks? In my mind, I felt sure they did… but I was again wrong!

Here, you see my pristine (but rather dusty!) LP of the same Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings piece, though a copyright notice on the sleeve tells me that it dates from at least 1986.

Do you notice six separate tracks on this disk?

No. Because there simply aren't any. It perhaps looks like that there are separated tracks because again the light is reflected at different points differently, depending on the changing loudness, orchestral density and so on. But I can promise you… there are no separated tracks… despite, you'll notice, the central label clearly that there are six 'movements', starting with '1. Pastoral' and ending at '6. Sonnet' (or, at least, it would be clear if I was better at taking photographs!)

So as late as 1986, if you wanted to listen to Britten's masterpiece, you really did now have to start at the beginning and keep going until the end -for now, everything fits on one side of an LP and you don't even get the breaks that came about by having to turn the disk over any more!

So now we move into the really digital, CD era -roughly around the mid-1980s or early 1990s. What happened when I re-bought the recording then?

Well, this:

You'll notice the date over on the blurry right: no earlier than 1993. And the Serenade has suddenly morphed into a piece of eight separate tracks! Not even six, one per poem! No, on this release, even the horn prologue and epilogue are treated to their own index mark.

Why on Earth did someone in the early 1990s ever think that what was written as a single work, and was sold as a single work for nigh-on 45 years, should suddenly be shipped in 8 separate 'pieces'?! My mind boggles at the abruptness of it all, really.

Now, naturally, it being a CD, the playback from one track to another will be seamless and therefore the overall effect is of the work still being supplied as a single, organic whole. But the mere existence of track points (or index marks… call them what you will) means that it's now possible to play just the Sonnet, or to keep repeat-playing the Hymn (for example), for the first time ever. By merely providing the technology to break the work into pieces, the CD manufacturers have encouraged us to think of music as coming in little pieces, rather than large, whole compositions -because you could now do something that even as recently as 1986, you couldn't do. (Dropping a stylus at random points onto the playing surface in the hope you hit the right spot doesn't count as an equivalent experience, by the way!)

Fundamentally, then, I ask the question: when did it become acceptable to supply a 3-Symphony CD with 12 tracks rather than 3 (i.e., one per symphonic movement, rather than 1 per symphony)?

There's no real answer, of course -and, as has been pointed out to me, index marks can be quite useful …for skipping boring bits, repeating the good bits… and a whole host of other reasons which (to my mind) simply fly in the face of how we used to listen to music and how we're really supposed to listen to music (classical music, at least).

The problems in my view are magnified when you rip CDs to digital audio files. For starters, you've potentially got dozens of files (for a large oratorio, say), when “ideally” you'd really only have 3 or 4 (one per 'part' or 'Act'). Multiply by lots of CDs, and you end up managing a collection of (in my case) 65,000 “tracks” rather than around 10,000 “compositions”. Every media player generally available, too, will present your music to you like this:

..as fragments of something, each with as much right to be heard as the other… and with play and pause buttons so you can stop-and-start your way through a piece that (presumably) the composer intended you to hear from beginning to end without major interruption (and which is precisely how you'd hear it if you attended a concert, for example).

Incidentally, I also deplore an equivalent tendency for otherwise-respectable radio stations to play merely 'bits' of something, rather than the whole. Take this random grab of Classic.fm's current playlist:

One track from one of the longest film scores ever written; the second movement only of a Dvorak symphony (the one with the good tune!); one aria from Madama Butterfly; a march from Aida; one dance from a ballet; the third movement of a piano concerto; an overture to Beethoven's only opera; the third movement of a trumpet concerto and one track from a 13-track 'medley' compilation CD. There's not a single, serious piece of music played in its entirety there. And 'posh' and 'proper' Radio 3 is often no better, at least in their morning programming:

You now get bits and pieces, never whole, complex works. It's as if everyone has decided that whole works are too taxing, too boring, too much like hard work… and yet we expect listeners to somehow switch into 'complex mode' at the drop of a hat any time they venture into the concert hall?! I blame the CD tracks for encouraging this trend!

It was to take a stand against this sort of thing that I made the deliberate design decision to make my own music player play entire folders of music, not tracks. As per my Axioms of Classical Tagging article, specifically Axiom 8, a folder of music is equivalent to and corresponds to a composition, so by only playing complete folders, Giocoso plays complete compositions. You therefore don't get to pick and choose only the good stuff: you have to learn to listen to classical music properly! Do it right in the privacy of your own home, after all, and you'll find it no great shakes to have to do it at the public concert hall.

Of course, we can't all eat everything on our plates all the time :) Sometimes the Brussels sprouts are unappetising and we just fancy tucking in to the chocolate pudding instead. So, whilst Giocoso is a bit of a purist about how you should listen, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from having access to your music via more conventional audio players, too. It's not like I really have to go without, therefore: I have options. But, my default mode of listening now is what Giocoso makes it: complete compositions, no picking and choosing.

The fundamental point to make, I guess, is that whilst I'm definitely a fan of CDs, in the sense that I want to own my music, not rent it, I am not such a fan of the particular way CDs implemented digital classical music. I wish there were fewer tracks. I wish things would be composition-based primarily, with the option to go to specific tracks if really needed. It's for that reason that I also wrote my FLAC tagging manager, Semplice. It has the ability to 'merge' or concatenate per-track FLACs into single, whole-composition FLACs that I've called “SuperFLACs”. These appear on your file system as a single, large FLAC that plays completely as a single 'thing', thereby abolishing the concept of tracks in digital music altogether (though, if you've got the right music player software, the SuperFLAC can still be made to appear as a bunch of virtual, separate tracks, if that's what you prefer).

So, let me sum up what's been a long post.

I like owning music, and I like the click-free, scratchless perfection that digital music provides. So thumbs up for CDs! But when they were introduced, they encouraged a frivolous approach to listening to classical music, because they provided index points within compositions. I think that's a bad thing, so I've written a music player (Giocoso) that ignores tracks and just plays entire folders (i.e., entire compositions), from beginning to end.

I've also written a tagging FLAC manager (Semplice) that, by creating SuperFLACs, abolishes individual tracks as physical entities entirely. Your music is turned into a single, giant file that contains all the data and metadata that was present in the original files, and has an embedded cue sheet so that, if you really insist, and you use an appropriate media player, you can still access individual tracks whilst physically having only one file to manage and look after.

This is a lightly edited version of a blog piece that appeared on AbsolutelyBaching.com in January 2021. It has been updated to make mention of current software developments (Giocoso and Semplice) rather than the now-unsupported code I was writing back in 2021.

hyperaccrip

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-01-22T15:45:09+00:00

Is AccurateRip Accurate?

When ripping an audio CD to digital files, it's important to know that this optical drive reads the first audio sample from (say) sample 103, whereas that optical drive reads the same first audio sample from sample 6. The inability to precisely and accurately read the first audio sample from, er… the first audio sample is, unfortunately, inherent in the design of the audio CD standard in the first place (which has no absolute positioning information encoded in the data stream) and in the vagaries of hardware manufacturing, where tolerances vary between manufacturers, designs and even batches of the same design by the same manufacturer!

On the whole, however, a given optical device product will be consistent about its failings. If one specific ASUS DRW-20B1 device reads its first sample from actual sample -6, then you can be fairly sure that almost all ASUS DRW-20B1's will do the same thing. You can therefore build up a database of known optical device models with a record of what their read positioning errors are -and this is exactly what the AccurateRip database of CD drive offsets is. Knowing these 'offset corrections', you can then tell your device to read (say) sample 103 knowing that this will actually make it read sample 0 (computers usually start counting at zero!), which means you now know you're actually reading the correct 'start of audio'. Thus, once you know the read offset that applies to each make of optical drive, then the same audio CD can be read from the same absolute starting position in the audio signal no matter which make of drive is doing the reading. AccurateRip therefore lets you produce consistent rips with different optical drives, because applying the read offsets always ensures each drive can read the start of the audio data on the CD correctly.

But does it produce actually accurate rips? Meaning, if I apply the correct offset for my particular make of drive, am I then guaranteed to start ripping at precisely the start of the audio data contained on a CD?

It sounds a daft a question, given the name of the project… but actually the answer to it is a definite 'no'. AccurateRip is not “accurate”!

The problem is that read offsets are relative numbers. Relative to what? To the first CD drive that was used to invent the read offset mechanism in the first place. That first drive produced a digital fingerprint of X for input a; the second optical drive produced a digital fingerprint of Y for input a… so the question was, what read offset can we apply to the second drive so that it would adjust its read position and start producing digital fingerprint X for input a<, too? Whatever offset that is, add it to the database for that model. Every other optical device listed in the AccurateRip database is similarly listed with an offset that also makes that new device output a digital fingerprint of X for input a, too. Once all devices are consistently producing X for input a, they'll all produce fingerprint Z for input b, too, and so on. Everything is calibrated, in other words, so that given the same audio CD input, they will all output the same digital fingerprint.

The trouble is, that first device was out by 30 samples, so it's 'X' was actually an incorrect digital fingerprint to start with (possibly!). Using AccurateRip therefore ensures that all optical drives are consistently able to output the wrong digital fingerprint for any given source audio CD!

It is as if the inventors of the metre were 2 millimetres short of an actual metre: we'd say a building was 45 metres tall, and it would actually be 90mm short of that, if there were somehow an objective test of what a metre really was that we could appeal to. Since we would have defined our meaning of the word 'metre' on the basis of some physical 'standard' that was only 998mm long, however, we would all still say the building was 45 metres tall; and if we said to the architect 'now I want a 90m tall building', it would genuinely end up being double the height of the first one. Everything would be relatively correct in height, therefore: it's just that an alien species visiting us using this 'objective metre standard' would beg to disagree on the specific numbers we'd assigned as the measurements in each case.

When this was pointed out to the inventor of AccurateRip (whose own Pioneer CD-ROM was the 'ground zero' device whose own internal read position error he hadn't accounted for), in the early 2000s, his response was three-fold: first, it's too late to do anything about it now, because millions of CDs have already been ripped with the (wrong) ground zero device offset as their point of comparison; second, it's physically impossible to get a 'perfect' rip of the audio signal on a CD anyway (because of the lack of true, absolute location data within the physical medium), so any read offset will only ever be an approximate number; and third, even if all 'AccurateRips' are off by 30 samples, it doesn't really matter.

Let's deal with that last part of his response first. The “error” in AccurateRip's database of read offsets is 30 samples: tell a device to read sample 1 and it will actually read sample 31, missing the data contained in the first 30 samples entirely (and adding 30 samples of blank data to the end of the last track on the CD). Remember that the audio on a standard CD is sampled 44,100 times a second. So 30 samples amounts to 30÷44100 = 0.000680272108843 seconds of audio data missed when ripping. That's to say, if your CD starts with a moment of silence, you're missing around 680 microseconds of nothing at all. If it starts with a bang, however, then yes: you're missing 680 microseconds of the bang! Can your ears actually hear that, though? “Unlikely” is a bit of an understatement, I think, unless you possess mystic superpowers: the fact is that no human ear based on messy, wet biology will ever really be able to spot that amount of missing samples, no matter how 'bang-y' your choice of music might be -and classical music in particular tends not, on the whole, to start with abrupt bangs anyway (Grieg's Piano Concerto excepted, I suppose)! This is the underpinning of the 'it doesn't really matter' argument -and I can't really argue with it.

The database administrator in me, however, objects to losing 30 tiny samples of even completely zero-based data!

The inventor of AccurateRip also made the perfectly reasonable point that it's far better than 100 rips of a given audio CD should be identical with each other, even if objectively they're all 'out' by a miniscule amount, than that 100 different versions should exist -for we would never be able to know which one of the 100, if any, was 'true'. If you were to rip the same CD, would you like to know you agree with the work of 100 other people, even if you are all 'wrong' by a trivial amount; or would you prefer to be yet another unique rip? Which situation would give you more assurance that your rip was a good one and didn't include random pops and clicks caused by scratches or spots of jam on the disc surface? I again agree with Andre Wiethoff that I'd probably prefer to know I was 'in consistent company' than that my audio hardware was doing things entirely unique to me, for that uniqueness might be 'uniquely good' or 'uniquely, randomly weird and wrong'. No matter the tiny 'error' built in to AccurateRip, therefore, it still serves a very useful purpose: ensuring consistent results, even if they are consistently very, very slightly wrong results.

The database administrator in me, however, still objects to losing 30 tiny samples of even completely zero-based data!

So is AccurateRip accurate in the sense of 'guaranteed to be objectively correct'? No. It's guaranteed to mean that your optical device can output precisely the same audio signal as someone else's completely different device, given the same audio CD input. Is that good enough? Yes, absolutely.

Except for obsessive-compulsive former database administrators.

For such people, the cure is to subtract 30 from whatever the official list of read offsets declares is needed for your optical drive. If the list says your offset is 6, it should actually be -24; if it says it's 103, it should actually be 73. Rips made with these adjusted offsets will never match those produced by millions of other owners of that same CD who are not doing this obsessive-compulsive mathematics (this is the “it's too late to fix it now” argument), so you will not know whether your rip is digitally, bit-wise perfect; nor whether it agrees with all those other rips or not -but at least you will have the satisfaction of knowing your rips aren't losing 680 microseconds of anything at all at their start!

It's for this reason that I'm considering writing a new CD ripper which will have the option of setting HYPER_ACCURATERIP=1 or HYPER_ACCURATERIP=0 in my Semplice CD Ripper software. If set to 1, the program will subtract 30 from the 'official' offset for your optical drive. If you set it to 0 (which will be the default), your rips will use the same 'wrong' offsets that everyone else uses. Hyper-accurate rips won't be comparable to anyone else's rips of the same audio CD: the audio stream will have been ripped from a starting position that millions of other rips won't have used. So you will be special and unique; and though your ears won't thank you (because they won't be able to tell), you may still gain an inner sense of satisfaction from 'doing it right'!

Am I going to use this new feature to go back and re-rip my 6000+ CDs? Not a chance! My inner database administrator may be obsessive-compulsive, but he's not stupid! I may use the new capability for any future rips I make, but I'm not sure I'd bother even so. I just think it fair the option is there to use or not as you see fit, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

Funnily enough, the largest 'family' of comments I saw when researching this topic in the dark undergrowth of the Internet that is audiophile discussion groups was on the theme of 'who on Earth rips physical CDs these days?'! Clearly, everyone's doing Tidal, Qobuz, Spotify and/or other music streaming these days and using physical media marks you out as some sort of dinosaur 'boomer' that is well on the way to a care home. Which is possibly true enough, I suppose, from the perspective of the music industry as a whole. Specifically classical music listeners, however, still have a fondness for physical media (including, gasp, LPs!) which means this sort of esoteric discussion is still worth having from time to time, as far as I'm concerned. Take a look at the background to any of Dave Hurwitz's videos as proof of this contention! Even I, purchaser of downloads from the likes of Prestoclassical though I am, sometimes use physical CDs: they are incredibly cheap sources of music from second-hand and charity shops, after all.

I do wonder what is going on when I buy a digital download from Presto, though: are they taking account of read-offsets when producing their FLAC files? Or does the digital data come to them in completely novel forms where this sort of concern doesn't apply? I can't answer that… but it's certainly food for thought… or lying awake at nights…!

This is a lightly edited version of a blog piece that appeared on AbsolutelyBaching.com in February 2024.