Lossless CD ripping

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metallfan

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Aug 31, 2013
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Hi all,

I have a lot of music CDs and recently decided to join 21 century and digitalise my collection. What software would you recommend for 'ripping' my collection if the storage space is not an issue but I'm mindful of the quality? What software and what format should I consider?

Thanks in advance
 
Solution
Solandri

This. Use Exact Audio Copy, not something like Windows Media Center. Music CDs are encoded with a metric ton of error correction. That's why you can scratch it up and it'll still play perfectly. Unfortunately, the vast majority of CD playing (and ripping) software ignores all of this and relies on Windows to read the data off the CD cleanly. Windows treats the CD as a filesystem, and if it encounters errors, it tries to read it again a few more times, then gives up and tells you there's an error...
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Tip from me, the big advantage of digital is music on mobile devices but the lossless cd rips can be anything between 200-450mb for a cd which can be quite limiting if you have a 16 or 32gb device. I did this as I am very fussy about audio but am now re-recording everything I have in 192 kbps to get albums down to a much smaller size so I can get a good selection on devices or micro SD cards without too much quality lost.
 
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This. Use Exact Audio Copy, not something like Windows Media Center. Music CDs are encoded with a metric ton of error correction. That's why you can scratch it up and it'll still play perfectly. Unfortunately, the vast majority of CD playing (and ripping) software ignores all of this and relies on Windows to read the data off the CD cleanly. Windows treats the CD as a filesystem, and if it encounters errors, it tries to read it again a few more times, then gives up and tells you there's an error.

EAC gets the raw datastream read from the CD (if your CD reader allows it), giving it access to the pre-error corrected data. If it encounters an error that the error correction can't fix, it plays around with this raw data stream, trying to read it different ways in order to get a clean read. It has recovered clean rips off of CDs which wouldn't even play in my best audio CD player anymore.

Most rippers will default to WAV, which is a lossless format native to Windows. It doesn't have very good compression though (actually I don't think it has any compression), which is why most audiophiles convert it to FLAC, which is losses and will give you about a 2:1 compression ratio over WAV. The lossy formats of course get better compression ratios. But if the point of all this is to backup your CD collection, then you want your primary backup to be lossless.
 
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Solution
Thank you all so much for the imput. I just got my 2TB USB 3.0 external hard drive that I intend to use as a storage. The EAC sounds like the besg answer here, is it a free software? Also if FLAC is exactly same quality as WAV then no point in wasting space, is there?
 
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I really don't need more storage space. I store my audio files on a 500GB disk which is more than enough for any conceivable amount of music that I would wish to store. If I did need more I'd just buy a bigger disk; they cost next to nothing nowadays. Why waste CPU cycles compressing/uncompressing files?
 
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I use a PPC Mac Mini to stream audio to my Hi Fi system. CPU cycles are precious but I can attach any cheap USB disk drive. There is no one size fits all solution to this question.

6TB of audio data is an unbelievable amount.
 
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