then discovered to my disgust that there were clicks and pops in the RIPped tracks... This meant I had to go back and learn how to use the RIPper properly (Audio Catalyst)...

Interesting you should bring this up. I just yesterday bought AudioCatalyst. I found, to my dismay, that its default ripping mode is the least reliable. Even more to my dismay, I found that its reliable modes (the ones with sector synchronization) did not work on one of my computers and were dog-slow on another one.

The truth is that I knew its Audiograbber engine had these problems, but that was over a year ago when I first tried Audiograbber. I was hoping the ripper had improved, but it hasn't. In any case, what I bought AC for was the encoder engine, and I am VERY happy with that. At the two highest quality settings, the variable bit rate encoder sounds fantastic, and is still VERY fast at doing its job.

Fortunately, AC allows you to encode .WAV files already sitting on your hard disk, so I can use my existing dead-reliable ripper (WinDAC32) and use AC to encode.

Something that I should mention, though, is that on one of my computers, AC works fantastic at its default settings because it likes my CD-ROM drive. When you have the right hardware, it is a really good product and does the job well.

One thing I've noticed about bad rips... more often than clicks and pops, what I get is a much more minor glitch that manifests itself as sudden stereo-image shifting. For instance, a panned instrument will suddenly hop from the left channel to the right channel, or vice versa. Therefore, when checking the quality of the rip, it is necessary for me to use headphones and listen closely for it. Have you noticed this?

Anyway, the moral of the story, to anyone else reading, is...

Don't trust your ripper to make good rips at its default settings. Listen to your rips carefully and make sure there are no clicks, pops, or stereo image problems. If there are, alter your software to use its "sector synchronization" method of ripping. It will be slower, but it will give you more reliable rips.

and that some tracks had obvious commpression artefacts through being RIPped at a fixed bitrate that was too low for the quality of reproduction I wanted on high-frequency content tracks.

That's the one thing that impressed me about AudioCatalyst. When you use its VBR engine and turn on the "High Frequency" checkbox, it does a much better job of capturing cymbals and similar sounds. When setting it at the top two quality settings, the resulting files are very good, and not much bigger than a 128kbps fixed bitrate file.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144