Distortion in ripped flac files.
 

Slowly ripping my vast CD collection to Flac and sticking the CD's in the attic.
Downloaded and tried 5.55 last night problem still exists.
Have noticed Cd's ripped on one machine exhibit occassional distortion. It's a quite new machine with an AMD X2 4850e (low power consumption) on an AMD780G board with 4x500gb in RAID 10 config, 4GB ECC memory and a Samsung CD writer/DVD player combo unit. Rip speed was 8x. Windows 2003 server X64 edition is the OS.
Virus checker Vipre has been disabled.
Nothing else going on whilst ripping.

Rips done with same settings on 2 dell laptops seem ok.
The discs ripped are as new pristine, no scratches or marks.

Symptoms are upon playback of some flac files a split second of distorted , compressed crunchy noise is present. This is normally between 10 and 20 seconds into the song.

I copied the output files to another machine to see if it was a playbck issue on 1 machine only , but the distortion was still present.

I have compression set to maximum on the encoder option.
And calculate track gain.

So far has occurred on Erasure Pop album, Eurythmics and Robins S show me love. You could say all are similar music styles and frequency ranges.


Listening to the 10,000 tracks ripped so far is difficult,
Last night I tried the Eurythmics album twice, 2nd rip has same problem in a different track. 2nd rip of Robin S was ok
Reduced rip spped for 2nd try of Erasure Pop album to 4x and quick listen seemed ok.

Trouble is now having to find which tracks have the exhibit the problem and re rip.

Any suggestions on the cause? I am going to try swapping the drive used for ripping.
Do you think it is the encoder or a playback issue in winamp. I have not tried playing the files in any other media player.

Searched for distorted rips found nothing so surprised I am the only 1 with this issue.

I uncovered another handful of examples last night, listened to the intro of about 100 songs and found 4 more examples. 4% seems a high number,

My winamp is installed on a vanilla 2003 x64 r2 server.
No plugins, no remote agent.

One thing I noticed , I reduced my rip speed from 8x to 4x, but when ripping the screen often shows ripping at 8.6X or other numbers way above 4x. ?????

I am sure it is only files ripped on a 64 bit 2003 server machine described above that exhibit this problem. I have copied a lot of files converted on my company laptop with same winamp settings to my phone and have not had uncovered any corruption or distortion as yet.

Would orb or remote agent indexing have a locking issue when ripping if the file is being ripped and added to an index simultaneously?

That's the reason I disable virus checkers when ripping.

Music type seems a red herring as uncovered a Vanessa williams song and another by Leo Sayer.

On another note is there a plugin that will play the first 30 seconds (or user set number) of a file. Something like a "Name that tune" or "Bits and pieces" mode.

Hmmm....

I have a funny feeling the problem might be with the Samsung CD/DVD drive on your machine that has issues. You might be getting some undetected C2 errors on the drive, leading to bad rips.

Hate to suggest this, since it's a WinAmp forum, but you might want to try a secure ripper like EAC or dBPowerAmp...just to see if you have any better luck with secure ripping as opposed to the burst method that WinAmp uses.

Might be interesting to try to rip to wav and encode to flac in a separate step to see if that makes a difference.