Best way to rip my CDs to a lossless format?

[Agent]

Crazy isn't it? The differences between even minor revisions of the "same" drive can have a huge affect on how it rips. It's really not an area that's transparent from the manufacturers.

I know Plextor used to be very highly regarded, but I'm not sure what they are like these days.

I do always try to rip at a lower speed where I can though, I've found that can help a lot on some disks.

[Butuz]

Question is: do you want to go bonkers on it and try and preserve every single byte? Or do you just want to quickly rip and play in a decent reliable high quality manner?

I chose the latter and just use iTunes and rip to AIFF. Simples and 99.9% quality.

One thing that does matter as mentioned above is the CDP you use to rip can drastically affect perceived quality. Do not ever use a laptop CD rom, they're all useless for ripping losless. Stick with a high quality 5.25 SATA drive from a decent brand.

Butuz

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I heard that Plextor are highly regarded still. Anyway,had a much around with both FLAC and Apple Lossless. Both Apple Lossless and normal FLAC seem to have similar filesizes. However,uncompressed FLAC seems to be around 50% bigger!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I just realised,that AIFF,WAV and uncompressed FLAC are exactly the same size(not surprising I suppose as there is no compression),so which one to go for?? I going towards FLAC as it seems to be more supported more widely.

[Agent]

FLAC is supported by any manufacturer that's not crap and almost any software will be able to use it. No way I'd go with Apple over FLAC for an application like this.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

OK,I need to look for an alternative to iTunes then. MediaMonkey looks promising:

http://www.mediamonkey.com/information/free/

I have also been looking at Songbird and Foobar2000.

[Bluecube]

I'm a bit late to the party but I rip all my CDs to ALAC (Apple Lossless) for convenience. I use OSX and iTunes so it makes sense. Plus ALAC allows metadata to be stored within the file, something I'm not sure FLAC allows. I'm pretty sure ALAC is just FLAC with Apples proprietary bits and bobs added so the two formats are comparable in quality, certainly I've never noticed any difference.

[sam3]

Flac allows metadata too

EAC is often considered the gold standard for creating exact back-ups of CD's. Dbpoweramp is also very good but I dont think it creates a .cue file (the last version I used, 12 I think, didnt) and the ripping log isnt as detailed as EAC EDIT: Latest version now supports cue sheet creation. Dbpoweramp offers multithreaded encoding (can compress/convert more than 1 file to flac at a time) though this is usually limited by your ripping speed and dbpoweramp has a slightly nicer interface. Both use accuraterip to verify the tracks (it compares the tracks you ripped to a database of other users that have ripped the same CD).

Ive had a few old well used CD's fail the accuraterip test but the majority of CD's passed first time. And it also depends on the drive your using to rip. No CD's have failed the accuraterip test on my Desktop DVD drive but My laptop struggled with a few.

FLAC is free open source with no DRM and is the most popular lossless codec.

I havent tried many media players for FLAC but foobar2000 works great. Its not the prettiest looking media player but it works great and has very low resource usage. It works by you creating playlists. Its similar to a web browser such that you have multiple tabs open for different playlists you have created. Playlists are very easy to create (drag/drop/search ..) and tabs/playlists remain open when close and restart the media player and everything is lightning fast.

Edit: Also EAC is free, dbpoweramp you have to pay for

[Agent]

Dbpoweramp is also very good but I dont think it creates a .cue file (the last version I used, 12 I think, didnt)

DBpoweramp is designed from the ground up to be a plugin based system. Even the official download is distributed as such. So to get a cue file, you just
install the plugin for it. Its designed to be very lightweight and you just customise it as needed

and the ripping log isnt as detailed as EAC.

Should be!
CD Ripper >> Options >> Secure Settings and enable a consise log.

Not a fanboy of either EAC or DbPowerAmp, both are excellent, I just find the customisability of DBPA amazing

edit - the other brilliant thing about DBPA is the way it can handle batch jobs on multiple threads (i7 fun ). I remember when there was a new FLAC version which made it a few more percent efficient. You could literately tell DBPA to "upgrade" your entire music collection to the new FLAC version and leave it overnight. Knocked a few gig off my collection

[sam3]

DBpoweramp is designed from the ground up to be a plugin based system. Even the official download is distributed as such. So to get a cue file, you just
install the plugin for it. Its designed to be very lightweight and you just customise it as needed

Ah cool - I remember lots of people requesting a cue sheet plugin when I last used It guess they added it!
I preferred the user Interface of dbpoweramp over EAC and the multi-threaded encoding was nice the lack of cue sheet creation was the only thing preventing me from using it.

[Funkstar]

I just realised,that AIFF,WAV and uncompressed FLAC are exactly the same size(not surprising I suppose as there is no compression),so which one to go for?? I going towards FLAC as it seems to be more supported more widely.

Why would you bother with uncompressed FLAC? Everything that supports FLAC will support compression, and as the compression is verifiably lossless, there is no issue with sound quality.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Daft question - what is the advantage of using a Cue sheet image over just ripping the files normally??

Is this better support for the gaps between songs,if you intend to make a cd copy??

[jim]

AccurateRip does nothing but allows you to compare your result to other results.

Oh I get that... just know that a lot of discs I've used don't show errors until you check with AccurateRip and therefore I'd never rip without it.

[jim]

Daft question - what is the advantage of using a Cue sheet image over just ripping the files normally??

Is this better support for the gaps between songs,if you intend to make a cd copy??

Cue sheets are just an additional file that goes in the rip folder, and yeah as I understand it, it's for when you want to make a new CD from the FLAC and keep the gaps.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Why would you bother with uncompressed FLAC? Everything that supports FLAC will support compression, and as the compression is verifiably lossless, there is no issue with sound quality.

Then,why have they included an uncompressed option if it makes no difference(I understand what you mean as lossless encoding would mean lossless decoding during playback)?? Is it to reduce processing overhead on weaker systems??

[jim]

Then,why have they included an uncompressed option if it makes no difference(I understand what you mean as lossless encoding would mean lossless decoding during playback)?? Is it to reduce processing overhead on weaker systems??

I think it's just for completeness. There is no point to it whatsoever, .wav would make much more sense - I can't imagine there's a system out there that supports FLAC but not WAV.