Ripping Audio CD's with maixmum quality

[mridang_agarwal]

Hey Everyone!

I havent around for a while but this place is killa as always. I need some help guys. I got a bunch of Audio Cd's that i want to rip. I have no clue what format to rip them into! i want retain the original CD sound quality. What should I use FLAC, OGG, MP3, WMA...Lossy or Lossless....birtarate? I have an excellent set of speakers so I dont want to compromise on audio quality. Anything apart from WAV please! Thanks in advance for all the help guys. Cheerios!

[mats.hogberg]

Ripping is ripping, and doesn't alter the content - just copies it from disk to HDD, the q after a rip is always 100% (and from a CD, it's a 44.1 kHz 16-bit wav)
What to convert to after that is up for debate. High bitrate mp3/ogg (lossy) or FLAC (lossless) would be my choice. WMA is too proprietary to my taste.
Why not keep it wav, as that's 100% original quality? Or do some to us unknown parameters come into the picture?

/Mats

[mridang_agarwal]

If i use some losless kinda lossless codec. It keeps a small file size and can restore the file to the orignal quality right?

Does is retore it at during playback or suring conversion. If i can hear the good quality during playback then im going to use a losless codec.

[mats.hogberg]

If i use some losless kinda lossless codec. It keeps a small file size and can restore the file to the orignal quality right?

Yes. That's the general idea. But "small" is subjective - FLAC compress 30-40%, where as MP3 usually is compressed to ~90%

Does is retore it at during playback or suring conversion. If i can hear the good quality during playback then im going to use a losless codec.

The original q should be retained both when converting back to uncompressed, as well as when listening to a FLAC. The downside of FLAC is that it's not widely supported - supported by "dozens of consumer electronic devices" may sound like something, but if you think about the hardware support for MP3, it's next to nothing. But if you do have hardware capable of FLAC playback, by all means use it!

/Mats

[hech54]

If i use some losless kinda lossless codec. It keeps a small file size and can restore the file to the orignal quality right?

Does is retore it at during playback or suring conversion. If i can hear the good quality during playback then im going to use a losless codec.

If you rip the CD to your computer and play the .wav files....no quality loss.
If you alter those .wav files....you have quality loss.
Once they are altered...they are altered (damaged - have less quality) forever.

[Noahtuck]

If i use some losless kinda lossless codec. It keeps a small file size and can restore the file to the orignal quality right?

Does is retore it at during playback or suring conversion. If i can hear the good quality during playback then im going to use a losless codec.

If you rip the CD to your computer and play the .wav files....no quality loss.
If you alter those .wav files....you have quality loss.
Once they are altered...they are altered (damaged - have less quality) forever.

They have lost quality only if they were altered, as in converted to a lossy format, mp3, wma, ect.
If you flac the wav they will be compressed with no quality loss and you can extract the wav file back out of the flac file and have the original unaltered wav.