Why do the binary files from two reads differ when compared?
The usual problem is the beginning point of the read. Cdparanoia enforces consistency from whatever the drive considers to be the starting point of the data, and the drive is returning a slightly different beginning point each time. The beginning point should not vary by much, and if this shift is accounted for when comparing the files, they should indeed turn out to be the same (aside from errors duly reported during the read; scratch correction or any reported skips will very likely also result in different files). It is also possible to get different reads if the media is damaged and cdparanoia is unable to deterministically repair the error. Why do CDParanoia, CDDA2WAV et al. rip files off into WAV format (and other sample formats) but not CDDA format? WAV and AIFC are simply convenient formats that include enough header information such that multipurpose audio software can uniquely identify the form of the data in the sample. In raw form, mulaw, SND and CDDA look exactly alike to
