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.

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who took their time to comment and make suggestions. I have been unable to make any headway into solving this. My uneducated guess is that this is some weird edge interaction between the optical drive, motherboard, and libcdio/cdparanoia. Purely speculating, this may be an issue with buffering/caching. It seems to me that applications that rely on libvlc do not have this issue. I tried using a portable USB DVD drive and it worked fine, as at least there was no crackle. I really don’t know how to proceed from here, so I’ll probably just use a USB drive for now. A commenter suggested getting a separate SATA card to bypass the SATA ports on the motherboard, and that sounds plausible, but I haven’t tried it. Any explanations are welcome!

  • @ElderWendigo
    3•9 months ago

    What CD ripping software are you using? When were the CDs you’re struggling to rip pressed? In particular, were those CDs distributed at the height of the CD ripping panic of the turn of the millennium when rootkits and other nasty tricks were used widely. Depending on the software’s approach to ripping, defects,like scratches or non-standard audio tracks, that a simple player might simply skip over without much more than a blip could confuse the ripping software. I vaguely recall some early copy protection scheme using this exploit to deter CD rips by making CDs that appeared normal in dumb CD audio players, but confused PCs attempting to rip audio tracks that were expected to follow the Redbook standard, but didn’t.

    I’ve had some success getting accurate rips using morituri whipper (Morituri is no longer actively maintained, Whipper is an active fork). It’s command line output and logs might offer some insight about the exact problem you’re having with these CDs. I’m pretty sure that given the way Morituri/whipper works it can bypass all but the most “damaged” audio tracks.

    • @[email protected]OP
      1•9 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]OP
        1•9 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]OP
          1•9 months ago

          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.