Why You Should Back Up
Your CD Collection
You should use cue files to make bit-for-bit perfect backup copies of your compact discs in case they are lost, damaged or chewed on by your dog.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
I spent a lot of time and money building my compact disc collection. Many of my albums were hard to find, and some were very expensive. But I'm a clumsy frog, and sometimes I'm not very careful. Some of my CDs have gotten scratched, so they stutter when I try to play them. Some of them won't play at all anymore.
You might think you could just burn CDs from your Oggs, and the CDs will play, but both Ogg Vorbis and MP3 use "lossy compression" to make the files smaller. They sound pretty good if you don't compress them as much, but if you make a CD from an Ogg or MP3 file then play it on a quality stereo with good speakers, it won't sound as good as the original CD.
At first I tried ripping to the uncompressed WAV format with iTunes. CDs burned from WAVs that come straight from CD do sound as good as the original, but they aren't faithful backups! iTunes downloads the names of the artist, album and songs when I insert an original CD, but not when I insert a copy I made with it. The reason is that WAV-file backups are not bit-for-bit perfect copies of all the data on the original CD.
For one thing, the track location and length info that's used as the key to look up the tracks in the CDDB database is contained in the TOC, or Table of Contents. The TOC isn't saved when you rip audio to a WAV or FLAC file. For that, you need a cue file.
If you rip an entire CD to a single WAV or FLAC file, then save the TOC and other info as a cue file, you can burn the two files together to a new CD to restore your backup. DVD recorders have become very affordable and blank DVD-R discs can be had for less than a dollar. A DVD-R will hold about ten WAV-format cue file backups and even more if they are losslessly compressed with FLAC.
If you want a CD to play in a regular CD player, put your originals in a safe place, then play copies instead.
You can bet that the Ogg Frog free music ripping, encoding and backup program I'm writing will not only create and burn cue files, but play them as well. Big hard drives cost a lot less than they used to, so I figure I'll just store all my backups on a single hard disk so I can listen to all my tunes at full compact disc quality without risk of scratching the originals. Rippit cares about Purity of Signal, after all.
(My pond is networked, so I'll put my music drive on my file server so I can listen to my music from all my lily pads.)
My Dog Ate My Homework
Twiggy says, "It was good. Real good."
If you don't think backing up your compact disc collection is worth all that trouble, sit back and listen to Rippit tell you what happened when he lent his brand-new U2 CD to Twiggy the Ogg Dog.
I'm a big fan of U2, and it had been a long time since they released any new albums. So when How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb hit the stores, Rippit was right there. But frogs don't make much money. I couldn't afford to buy it. But I didn't want to just download it. It's not just that it would be copyright infringment, but MP3's lossy compression reduces the quality of the music to save on file size. Rippit's a musician - I play the piano - so I can hear the difference, even if you can't.
So I waited, and saved my money.
It was a great day for Rippit when he walked into CD Plus on Barrington Street in Downtown Halifax (I'm Canadian), put my new U2 CD on the counter and handed over my cash. I couldn't wait to get home and listen for the first time. What a thrill it was! I still remember that day.
My dog Twiggy liked it too, and asked if she could borrow it. I was glad to oblige - share the goodness, I always say. In Canada, while one cannot copy a CD for a friend, it's perfectly legal to lend them the original so they can make their own copy. I'm not just making this up, this is how the courts interpreted Canada's copyright lasw. To be fair to the copyright holders, Canadians pay a special tax on blank recordable media, that's handed over to the record industry. They say they dole it out proportionately. Yeah, so they say.
U2 - How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
[
Buy at Amazon in Unchewed Condition]
Twiggy's Canadian too. Rippit adopted her after reading her heartbreaking story on the SPCA's website. Somebody abandoned her there late one night. They left her tied on to the shelter's gate. She didn't remember her name, so Rippit named her after the famously thin model. It was kind of a cruel joke - she was starved nearly to death.
How Not to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
Anyway, Rippit was happy to lend Twiggy his prized U2 CD. I didn't think much more of it until I came home one day to find the disc out of its case, all chewed up on the living room couch. When I demanded an explanation, Twiggy said simply, "It's instinct. Every dog must chew."
And friends, Twiggy's right, a dog just has to chew. Every dog lover can expect to lose a few albums to their pets over the years. But that doesn't mean you have to lose your music. You just have to make backups.
The first step in backing up music CDs is to rip them. As I said, Rippit was frustrated with all the CD rippers he tried. iTunes can rip to MP3, and it can rip to WAV, but it can't rip to WAV and then encode the WAV files to MP3. iTunes makes you rip again, and it won't make cue files.
abcde - A Better CD Encoder - can rip to multiple formats simultaneously, but Rippit had a hard time using it on Linux, and couldn't get it to work on Mac OS X.
CDDA Paranoia is the world's best ripper - it can even repair scratches - but it's hard to use and only makes WAV files on its own: it needs a front end. Rippit's going to use CDDA Paranoia's ripping engine known as libparanoia as the ripping engine for Ogg Frog. That's because Rippit believes in Purity of Signal. It's perfectly OK: CDDA Paranoia is Free Software, Free as in Freedom. Rippit believes in giving back too: I'll contribute patches back to the original developers of any of the libraries I use.
But I'm afraid t's going to take Rippit a while to make a better ripper that you can actually use. So you don't have to wait, Rippit is learning how to use all the Free (as in Freedom, not beer) CD rippers he can find, not just for Linux, but for Windows, Mac OS X and even Mac OS 9, and will make sense of it all in his upcoming article HOWTO Make Cue File CD Backups with Free Software. It will have the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Why? Because Rippit's not just a music fan, Rippit's not just a writer, Rippit's not just a geek. No, Rippit is proud to be a Dirty GNU Hippy.
Rippit's got to say goodbye for now. He's hungry, and the pond is buzzing with blackflies. Yum! Just like Mom used to make!
-- Rippit the Ogg Frog rippit@oggfrog.com
Tune in Next Time When Rippit the Ogg Frog Explains HOWTO Make Cue File CD Backups with Free Software.
What the Bold Print Giveth, the Fine Print Taketh Away
Copyright © 2005 Michael D. Crawford.
Ogg Frog, Rippit, Rippit the Ogg Frog, the Frog logo and the Circle Flowers logo are trademarks of Michael D. Crawford. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
So there.