I have been in the process of ripping my entire collection (ripping in FLAC) using dBpoweramp and I noticed on many occasions certain songs, will have to be re-rip "frames." I pretty sure I understand what is going on, however, can someone explain frames better? Are frames individual bits of song data that are somehow "messed up" from the original song.

What I don't understand is I can take a CD that seems to be in pristine condition (i.e., no scratches or damaging marks) and it will take forever to rip even one song. It took over an hour to rip two songs (they both had about 550 frames each to re-ripped). It just seems a little weird that there could be that many errors.

If I notice a song has a lot of frames, I will cancel the rip and then use iTunes to rip the songs using Apple Lossless with error correction set to "on." iTunes rips the same song in a couple of minutes. So why can iTunes do it a lot less time than dBpoweramp? And what does "Secure" ripping mean.

Honestly, I can't tell a difference between a song that had many frames ripped with dBpoweramp and that same song being ripped in Apple Lossless with error correction on.

Here are my settings on dBpoweramp:

FLAC
Compression Level - 8
Ripping Method - Secure

Lastly, is there any sound quality differences between the different compression levels (e.g., 8 vs. 5 vs. 0, etc). It seems for most of my CDs, the difference in total file size might be anywhere from 25MB - 50MB range between Level 8 (Best) and Level 0 (Fast). After thinking about this, It seems I should be ripping everything at Level 0. Level 0 is still half the size of ripping a CD in .WAV.

Anyhow, sorry for the long post. I just want to make sure I understand ripping as best as I can. And while dBpoweramp's Support site provides some good information, it still seems like there is a lot to learn.

Thanks!

Nick



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