All of Ripfactory’s CD ripping products use Ripsure™ in order to correct any errors or error conditions that may be present on a typical CD rip.

Errors can be due to many reasons – from scratched and damaged discs through drive issues and encoding problems – all of which are detected and corrected where possible by Ripsure.

Ripsure is a non proprietary system of error detection, correction and reporting, applied as standard to any Ripstation rip and is detailed here. Ripsure is simply an overview term to describe the various levels of error handling that Ripstation uses to ensure an error free rip each and every time.

The system is focussed in three key areas:

C2 correction

C2 is a system of error detection that is used by a number of CD/DVD ROM drives to detect errors at the read stage. It should be noted that all drives do not have this capability and a list of those that do are maintained here. C2 counts the number of errors per byte read and then uses the drive to fix or interpolate these errors at drive level. In the main, these errors are therefore considered warnings to the degree that we know the errors have existed, and these are corrected at drive level, not requiring intervention by Ripstation to address. Rather, these are reported and held in the ripping logs to correlate against any further errors that may be correctable in software by test and copy.

As noted, some drives will make an attempt at interpolation to correct the errors and these are flagged to Ripstation in order that the errors are handled more effectively at re rip level.

In addition, all Ripfactory ripping products feature accurate stream detection, which when used with compatible drives adds an additional layer of surety to the rip. Note that not all drives are accurate stream compliant, and Ripstation products use this information only when available.

Ripcompare

Ripcompare is again, a non proprietary way to, at its very basic level, compare a CD that you have just ripped to a number of other copies that have been ripped elsewhere with different drives and equipment. By comparing these copies on line, Ripstation leverages the fact that over half a million CD’s are ripped monthly on its platform and utilises this vast database to apply a confidence factor to the rip. Since the number of matches required is small to ensure a fully error free rip, and the database is huge, accuracy can be assured.

Ripcompare should not be confused with AccurateRip as used by EAC and DBpoweramp. AccurateRip, whilst an excellent system, differs from Ripcompare in the size and scope of its database.Ripcompare is driven by both professional bulk ripping services and home users has a vast number of CD’s based on almost 2 million titles being ripped worldwide per month and should therefore provide a return with a higher correct compare/confidence count based on its database size.

Ripcompare access is available to all developers with a simple SDK for ease of integration. Simply contact us if you wish to join the program.

Test and Copy

In ‘fast’ or ‘burst’ mode, Ripstation does not use Test and Copy, but does when an error is encountered.

This is handled in two ways:

a) Test and Copy a sector level involves a re read of N sectors of the track and then compares this to the next re-read. At minimum this will take place 3 times or until the sector rip matches exactly, since this assumes that a matching rip has a higher confidence of correctness or error free nature. Ripstation will re read a total of 6 times, at a slow drive speed before it reports the error as not correctable and provides the user a choice of rejection or re-ripping for a second time. Obviously, this does have an impact on speed and Ripstation’s position is to correct all errors where possible and if not report these clearly to the user for some physical course of action

b) In order to retain speed , Test and Copy is also present on album by album level which in effect re rips the entire album comparing check sums (CRC) of the entire album track by track. Non matching CRCs will flag an error and require user intervention, thereby reducing the automated nature of item a) above.

reporting

Finally, three forms of reporting are used by Ripstation to assist with quality rips:

1) Reporting of Jitter errors – time (mmss) is passed to the user so these errors may be previewed and alternate action decided on. Note that only those errors classed as uncorrected are shown. This is common in Ripstation as you should be assured of a constant, error free rip every time unless we inform that an error has not been corrected. The threshold for jitter errors may be selected by the user.

2) Drive monitoring – we attach a log of drive activity to create advance notice of a failing drive and notify the user if said drive has a higher number of error conditions.

3) Full detailed output log of all errors with an option to simply reject those that have a high error count,

Ripsure is always enabled by default which will ensure error free rips, but you should be aware that for heavily damaged discs this can slow the rip process down as low as 0.5 x real time while errors are corrected.This time can be reduced by checking ‘Skip Heavily damaged discs’ in the UI which will only allow a finite time for error correction before rejecting the disc as one with unrecoverable error. This is recommended for batch and bulk ripping processes.

Ripsure is available to use by all and detailed SDK and technical documentation is available by simply contacting us.