cdparanoia vs. cdda2wav - which to use ?

[MorgothSauron]

Yesterday I started to look at command line tools to RIP Audio CD after having an other problem with K3b plugins. I'm not afraid of the command line, so it is not a big deal to use a different method rip Audio CDs.

I quickly found that I could use cdda2wav to extract CD to WAV files. From there I can use whatever encoder I want (e.g., flac).

I kept searching and found that cdparanoia is also an option/alternative to cdda2wav.

However, I didn´t find any information that describes the clear difference between cdda2wav and cdparanoia.The only thing I found is that cdparanoia is also part of the tools from Xiph.org, like flac.

I ran a quick test with a specific CD and both program achieved the same results: all wav files had the same size and checksum.

Is there a preferred tool between the two that I should use first ? My single test didn't show any difference, but there must be some difference(s) if two tools exist

[Ionen]

cdparanoia has always served me well, not that I've needed it in a while.

Its selling point always been to be good at handling errors (i.e. cds in poor condition), but cdda2wav also bundles libparanoia (from cdparanoia) so it can offer the same thing with the -paranoia option or so (haven't actually tried cdda2wav). Ultimately I guess you just get a different frontend for commands line and such making it up to preference.

That aside, cdrtools (which gives cdda2wav) has always been bit of a mess (horrible build system, licensing, history). Can't say I'm overly fond of it ... but I still use cdrecord at rare occasions just due to being what I'm used to and not feeling like exploring other options.

[mv]

I'd use cdda2wav as it covers the functionality of cdparanoia (AFAIK, using parts of the original cdparanoia code), was written by the expert in cd/dvd code Jörg Schilling, and was maintained when cdparanoia was practically long abandoned.

That being said, Jörg Schilling has decayed. So things might eventually change. But last cdparanoia release is still 2008 which is way older than last cdda2wav release. Note, however, that the version in the portage tree is rather old. I recommend using app-shells/schily-tools from the mv overlay which contains the last release of all tools from Jörg Schilling.

[MorgothSauron]

[arnvidr]

Without really knowing it, I've been using the cdparanoia implementation of dev-libs/libcdio-paranoia as far back as I can remember. Last release was in 2019, so fairly maintained I guess.
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