Ripping Yarns
Down the rabbit hole we go! I wanted to rip a new CD I purchased recently, shown at the left, of the reconstructed Elgar 3rd Symphony. Prestoclassical had the physical CD listed at £5.75, where the FLAC download was £8.04 -which, by the by, is a very oddly specific number!- so I went for the physical product rather than the digital download because I'm a cheapskate! Physical product is rather unusual for me these days, though. So I then had to rip the purchased CD to FLAC files myself -and that's where the fun started! Bear with me as I set the scene...
My desktop PC doesn't have an optical drive, so I use USB-connected ones when I need to. I have two: a DVD-ROM (i.e., reader only) that identifies as a TEAC; and a DVD-RW (reader/burner) that identifies as an HP device. So I ripped the Elgar with each drive in turn, using my own somewhat unloved CCDR program. Out of interest, I then checked the MD5 sums per ripped file (essentially, the digital fingerprint of the audio component of each file), using the command metaflac --show-md5sum "filename" and... they were different, depending on which optical drive they'd been ripped with! [...]