Last month I upgraded my computer with new parts. I kept my old DVD drive that I mainly use to rip CDs. I have now however run into an issue that has stumped me. When I tried to rip some used CDs I bought the resulting FLACs had a terrible crackle, making them unlistenable. So I started looking into the issue and tried different ripping programs and CD players. Trying to play a CD also produces a crackle with most players. Some players can’t even see my CD drive. I have installed rippers and players from distro repos and flatpaks and it makes no difference. I have even tried booting into live environments of different distros and the problem persists.
Now, the real kicker for me is that VLC (from flathub or distro repos) plays and rips the CDs with no issues. VLC is not a great tool for my purposes however. EDIT: Kaffeine flatpak also plays CDs without issue.
There are no error messages (aside from some players which can’t even see the drive) to go off of. Google has failed me. CD error correction makes no difference, just makes ripping terribly slow. Some attempts to fiddle with pipewire also produced no result. Encoders work fine when encoding from different sources, so they are probably not the problem, and the same issue happens when playing the CDs.
On my old setup this worked fine. I can also watch DVDs without trouble.
Does anyone have any idea where to go from here? If it wasn’t for VLC I’d think this is a hardware issue, but now I’ve no real idea. I’m currently on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
So far I think I’ve tried fre:ac (my usual go to), Asunder, abcde, SoundJuicer, and possibly some other. I’m currently testing with a CD I previously ripped successfully with the same DVD drive before the upgrade. This issue is present with all CDs I’ve tried. I first noticed this with a CD pressed in 1992 I think. Copy protection has never been an issue for me when ripping CDs before.
I’ll check out whipper, thanks.
First test with whipper is not promising. Same crackling is present and rip quality for the first track is 9.57%. Q sub-channel CRC errors are in the tens of thousands for all tracks, though I’m not sure what to think of that. Audio cache of the drive couldn’t be defeated. I stopped the ripper after one track, but I also didn’t encounter any real errors.
Well, I ripped Buddy Holly’s Buddy Holly with whipper and the log says no errors, but the rips are a crackling mess. I’m none the wiser, I’m afraid.