[ffooky]

Blimey, I'm going cross-eyed here !! I've been ripping pretty much all day.

I've come to the conclusion that "atom" numbers after repeated extractions are likely to be bad news. Anything with them causes 5+ red lines in EAC's little indicator and leads to sync/read errors or at best "suspicious positions".

Yes, you should try again if you get "minor problems"...a lot of tracks I came across with those today were successful on the second attempt.

My big problem has been finding discs that are not too heavily damaged but from what I've found the Finder is pretty good but definitely not reliable. I tried multiple extractions with two different drives and on occasions both of them would produce non-matching results from the same tracks, though the differences were at most 5 samples.

The most remarkable result I got was:

100% track 7 'Track07' recorded successfully
100% 0 rderr, 0 skip, 0 atom, 0 edge, 0 drop, 0 dup, 0 drift
100% 1131 overlap(0.5 .. 0.5)

This 18:30 track had plenty of 1 or 2 lines of red lights during EAC extraction and I'm now pretty sure that "overlaps" are re-reads. The remarkable thing was that I got a matching extraction from the Finder. My second attempt differed by 5 samples but the fact that Finder could produce an exact match for what took xACT 1131 overlaps and EAC plenty of red bars suggests to me that some form of correction must take place, even though the transfer from disc to HD is much quicker than either of the DAE programs.

Tracks with "atom" numbers after repeated extractions always produced non-matching rips with multiple extractions from the Finder but as I said before, you're pretty much screwed with them anyway.

I think the bottom line is that though dragging to the desktop can produce perfect results with undamaged discs, one has absolutely no way of knowing if any errors have occurred. If someone is determined to use that method I'd recommend making (at least) two full extractions and comparing them with Toast, shntool, 'diff' in the Terminal or by making MD5s for one set and running that against the second.