Tír Na HiFi

When the cMP project started cics made provision for ripping to be done within cMP.

Until we deleted this ability away that is how I made all of my rips.

I can see now that one of the things that made the cMP setup sound as good as it did for its time was that the ripping was part of the system.

After this was lost and I had to use another machine for ripping I must admit I did not hear a difference but I was not looking for it, either. Which is one of the foibles of these projects.

At this point I am getting close to the minimal OS for ripping with dBpoweramp. My WINDOWS folder is less than 60 mB. I know there are some .exe files to be deleted and a few .sys files in drivers but it is down to trying one at a time. There is lots of work left in the registry though the registry is a shadow of its former self.

This is a single purpose OS. When you turn the machine on you are at dBpoweramp. EXPLORER has been deleted in the c: folder and most of the registry. I am sure there are some more references in there, still. I am using two SSDs with one motherboard so when you want to transfer the files to the SD card you must turn off the machine and reboot into another OS. I am using the basic starting point of the rip OS to do this work. AS minimized as it was with nLite it still does this (and many other things) just fine.

The dBpoweramp folder is full of stuff that I will never use so I will start getting rid of that.

At this point there is something very interesting going on. I can only assume there is a large amount of noise missing from the rips. There is an ease to the presentation versus my old rips done on a regular WINDOWS 8.1 machine and my home UBUNTU machine. These new rips sound very different; not in tonal balance so much, increased dynamics are apparent but the main thing is what is not there. There is a clarity that allows details to be heard but not in a plastic capacitor kind of way. The old window analogy is the best I can come up with. The glass is much cleaner.

Randy, give me an idea of what music you listen to and I will send you a card with some files. I figure that is an easy way to get another opinion.

There is so much more information on these disks than I realized.

Why this aspect of digital audio has been glossed over by all of us is a mystery. We go to Herculean efforts on the playback side and have believed that anything goes with ripping once uses a good program.

All I can say is these rips on the SDTrans are beyond anything I could have imagined.

I am hoping the thing is portable. This one was made with HASWELL and H81 MB. I think one can copy it to a drive and it should boot. I do worry if it can recognize a different CD-ROM. I am using the $20.00 ASUS drive that is ubiquitous. I am using a SATADOM for the OS and another SDD for the "other" OS. The files are loaded onto this SDD during ripping. I will probably use a dedicated SDD (or laptop HDD, can''t decide which would be best) eventually.

As I mentioned, when WINDOWS gets small you no longer need an image program to make a usable copy. When I get done I will see if I can copy it. If it works I can send it to those who would like to try it. Otherwise I will have to write instructions which could take as long as doing it! Even if it doesn't work one can use this copy and mimic it with your own system. If you are familiar with the guts of WINDOWS this is no big deal. Otherwise it can be an interesting learning experience.

That's great stuff, many thanks for sharing your progress with barebone XP.

What if we just go for a unified hardware config that's fanless and accepting a wide range of voltage?

http://pcengines.ch/alix3d3.htm
http://pcengines.ch/pdf/alix3d3.pdf
http://pub.agrarix.net/HW/ALIX-3d3/

We could power that with a few A123 LiFePO4 26650 cells since it's able to take anywhere from 7V to 20V, 500MHz with 256MB of RAM should be good enough for a totally stripped down version of XP.

Right now it could be ordered for 100 bucks plus shipping, simply add a piece of 1GB CF card (or any cards that are sitting around) and we're good to go:

http://pcengines.ch/order1.php?c=4

Pioneer's BD Drive Utility does work under XP SP3 so we've got PureRead2+ covered as well:

http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/ ... s/BDR-XD05
http://www.google.com/shopping/product/ ... 9675233948
http://www.amazon.com/Pioneer-Electroni ... B00OLZCD5K

IIRC the VLK or "Corporate Edition" of XP Pro should require no activation whatsoever, then we could share the GHOST image of a working CF card somewhere online.

It's just something quick and dirty that I could remember right now, there must be better stuff out there so let's do it.

When you get XP to this size you do not have to worry about being prompted for veritification.

c: folder now just below 50 mB - that includes dBpoweramp which I have also removed components that are not being used.

AS much as I dread re-ripping it much be done.

To put it simply - it is as if a gauze has been lifted and there is an initial impression of dullness to the sound whcih turns out to be the great reduction in the digital "sparklies". After going back and forth one can hear the false "excitement" this gives to music but it is tiresome and unnatural.

I realized yesterday I need to use REGEN between the computer and the SD card writer. Had dismantled the jkeny battery mod and now I need to put it back together again. I think I am going to be glad I had not got rid of that thing.

Thanks to gstew I have the WONG XP files which will, if they will work, make a big difference in sound quality.

I think and hope this thing will work with any H81/Haswell machine and might work beyond that.

This is not a minor improvement.

Now I do realize my impressions have as much to do with my previous rips as to how good this thing is but I feel confident this thing will make better rips than anything I am aware of anyone using.

THANKS to Randy for the inspiration. You can get mad at him for having to re-rip your collection, too.

seebeeyou,

I have my ASUS reader weighted down and on the floor. I am curious to try a better reader and the PIONEER at $100.00 is not out of the question. I worry that, at this point, I have removed the ability to recognize a new drive.

I plan on making another FINAL install and will consider getting of those for that.

Hey Rick
Great news!!
I was hoping for a little improvement, sounds like you're better than I would have hoped for.

Looking forward to trying your new xp ripper.

I have a msi H81 motherboard and a haswell processor (Xeon E3-1225 V3), so I think I have a pretty good chance that your stripped down os will run on my PC.

I have a generic dvd drive, need to check what kind it is. But I think the sata interface to the dvd drive is pretty standard, so your os may work with different dvd drives.

Over the weekend, I got a Audiophile optimizer Server R2 core version running with the dbpower ripper. Now I need to set up my dvd drive. Then, I'll be able to compare the R2 Core versus your tiny XP ripper, and see if I can tell the difference.

I will also be curious to see if your rips sound different from my rips.

Randy

I never understood why people had a hard time to believe that ripping make a such big difference?!

I'm curious, Randy, in your comparation between R2 and striped XP ripper.
I hope that it will not me much of a difference!!

sima66 wrote: I hope that it will not me much of a difference!!

I just like to make work for you guys ;)

In my case it makes a big difference, in the obsessed audio kook frame of reference.

Randy, I will send you the thing on Friday, if not before.

You should be able to copy it onto a disk and it should work.

I am using a 7.5 mB partition. It might be a good idea to use the same size. ALSO, FAT 32 formatting for OS and music disks seems to sound better. NTFS has many excellent qualities but it was not made for music (of course, neither was FAT32).

FAT32 seems to keep the files in the same general area instead of throwing them all over the disk. NTFS is more efficient but this is audio - the only time I like efficiency is when it comes to loudspeakers.

If you do not mind trying things I might go ahead and send you what I have tomorrow. It will be easy to enough to copy in a later, and hopefully better, version, subsequently.

rickmcinnis wrote:

If you do not mind trying things I might go ahead and send you what I have tomorrow. It will be easy to enough to copy in a later, and hopefully better, version, subsequently.

Send away, but I won't promise that I will try it right away, should be able to try in the next day or two or three.

My next step is getting my dvd drive connected again, with some kind of isolation and weight on top. I may even open it, and see if I can add dampening inside of it.

Randy

of course you could just rip it any old way and then rewrite the files using an optimised rewriter

I am just an interested spectator here, but I saw this and wondered if you SD card player crowd are using this 'official' SD card formatter. Would think, if not, it would be advisable.

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

I am also confused about the 'best' formatting of drives/cards. NTFS as Rick says is suspect.

Here is a clear explanation of the three different FAT-based formats for SD cards http://www.integralmemory.com/faq/what- ... le-systems.

I suspect that exFAT would apply to you. I did see though that you can hack a reformat of exFAT to FAT32, but not sure why you would want to do that?

No question that SSD drives do have a lot of internal software that is all targeted at wear levelling and for ripping purposes that has to be bad news. USB 3 external hard drives are these days quick and cheap.

Lastly, I would have thought formatting the music store drives to which the rips are copied in the same format as you are using for the SD cards in the player, would be a sensible move to avoid unnecessary 'throwing the files around the disc'.

But what do I know? Excuse if all this is pretty damn obvious.

Jonathan