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21 years back, we created AccurateRip, previously secure rippers required frame re-reads to detect errors, which has a detection hole, in that an error might not be random and repeat. Even C2 has a detection hole, so the idea was to compare rips against a central database was born. The idea here is there is only effectively one true error free rip, and any errors would not be present of someone else's different disc / drive.

Shortly after developing AccurateRip we found out pressings were an issue, that is when a CD is made it is made with an offset called the pressing offset. When the stocks of CD run low, they send it off to be remanufactured, and a new offset is introduced. This made the work of AccurateRip much harder, especially as part of the initial phase of AccurateRip is to find the drive offset (previously it was done manually).

Fast forward to today: AccurateRip has processed half a billion rips!, knows there are 5 million unique audio CDs out there, and has half a million people using it over the years. Impressive numbers for something which started small.

We are introducing meta.accuraterip.com as a community meta database (track titles), based on a few principles behind accuraterip, that the correct result is the result verified by multiple people. This is to replace gnudb which has gone rouge.

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TSAC: Very Low Bitrate Audio Compression

TSAC is an audio compression utility reaching very low bitrates such as 5.5 kb/s for mono or 7.5 kb/s for stereo at 44.1 kHz with a good perceptual quality. Hence TSAC compresses a 3.5 minute stereo song to a file of 192 KiB.

An Nvidia GPU is necessary for fast operation. CPU only is also supported but slower.

Technical information

• TSAC is based on a modified version of the Descript Audio Codec extended for stereo and a Transformer model to further increase the compression ratio. Both models are quantized to 8 bits per parameter.
• The transformer model is evaluated in a deterministic and reproducible way. Hence the result does not depend on the exact GPU or CPU model nor on the number of configured threads. This key point ensures that a compressed file can be decompressed using a different hardware or software configuration.
• In order to get reasonable speed, you need an Nvidia Ampere, ADA or Hopper GPU (e.g. RTX 3090, RTX 4090, RTX A6000, A100 or H100) with CUDA >= 12.x. At least 4 GB memory should be available on the GPU. x86 CPUs are supported too but the program is much slower. The CPU must support the AVX2 instruction set in order to run the program. The FFmpeg utility is required to convert input files to raw format.

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We have restored freedb.dbpoweramp.com as a replacement for gnudb (which took-over from freedb.org), why? gnudb.org have started requiring emails to access their system. We do not agree with this type of intrusive data collection to access a publicly created database. It goes against the ethos of running a public database, especially as dBpoweramp users would have submitted a very significant percentage of all discs in that database.

Currently no submissions are allowed (there is little point in collecting good data in a bad design, there are so many collisions in freedb).

Going forward we will create a new community populated metadata database, it will be branded as part of the AccurateRip family, and will be open to all, correct many issues of freedb, and have a simple REST interface for looking up discs (based on AccurateRips disc ID). AccurateRip has existed without restrictions for almost 20 years, together we will create a high quality database. Watch this space...​

We are understanding that EAC will switch over to the new database also.

(this is the output of gnudb currently)