Threshold for digital silence in HTOA is too low

[the-confessor]

I noticed a couple of my of CDs end up with a completely silent HTOA ripped.

I do see a number of CDs where whipper detects and ignores the silent HTOA, but for these two CDs I end up with a completely silent track 0.

One CD is Lush - Split (ce67f98a-bfa7-43f7-88fa-38a9df8835c8). Debugging reveals that the peak of the HTOA track is 1.

The other is Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights (83f64ffa-c945-316b-bd16-10ad714ec334). Debugging reveals that the peak of the HTOA track is 3.

There's nothing listed in MusicBrainz about a pregap track for these CDs, and there's effectively nothing there. I think the desired behavior for these would be to ignore the HTOA.

I wonder if the threshold to consider HTOA digital silence should be increased to a little above 0?

[kevmitch]

Please don't "fix" this. Unless there is literally no data, the track should be saved. The user can then use their own decision process as to whether they want to keep it.

[MerlijnWajer]

The Internet Archive (archive.org) has the following policy for their Audiophile CD collection:

If the HTOA is less than 75 frames (1 second), or has a peak less than 1e-10, then discard it.

Mostly driven by the fact that a lot of the process is automated. I agree that it should probably be up to the user to discard the HTOA in whippers case.

[the-confessor]

Ah interesting. So there is a standard defined. I agree with following the standard.

I wonder if it is worth making it configurable to give the user more control. The problem I have with simply deleting the file is that there may still be references to it in the related files (toc/log/etc.)

[JoeLametta]

I would like to know what's @Freso's opinion about this.
I think the default behaviour for whipper is fine as it is but maybe we could decide to make both the minimum peak level and track duration of the HTOA configurable as settings.

Edit: In a similar vein there's also #282

[the-confessor]

The option to skip the HTOA file would be a good compromise actually. Whipper can still follow the standard. If a user rips a CD and finds an HTOA track they would rather not have, they can just re-rip and tell it to skip the HTOA this time.

The ability to reconfigure the thresholds might be useful if this were frequently occurring, but my guess is it is pretty infrequent. In my collection of close to 700 CDs I encountered it twice.

[JoeLametta]

I would like to know what's @Freso's opinion about this.

Ping.

[ghost]

FWIW I'm ripping a pair of box sets where every disk has one of these bogus tracks. Most of them were discarded for being silence, but I did have a couple that were inaudible noise - which is now cluttering up my otherwise pristine logs.

I think there are also examples of HTOA tracks that people wouldn't want, although I think the reasoning for skipping them would largely be related to the logs and cues.