Hello everyone from a diyAudio newbie 
Through the years I've built up almost 75gig of music on my PC (all 320k mp3's) but as now live in an age where a 1Tb drive can be purchased cheaply, I want to restart ripping my CD collection into a lossless format.
I apologize if this has been asked a zillion times before, but as space isn't really an issue, is it worth ripping my music into Wav or should I think about the alternatives like Flac which on the plus side, has music tags like MP3?
I'm currently using Winamp as a ripper, although a friend has recently told me that he has had issues with distorted Wav's from Winamp before. Should I use this if I go down the Wav route? What are the better alternatives (free if possible)?
I'm also currently using Ashampoo Burning Studio 2009 to make compilations from my CD Collection. Are there any good burners out there which support CD Text?
I really appreciate any help offered.
Many Thanks
Through the years I've built up almost 75gig of music on my PC (all 320k mp3's) but as now live in an age where a 1Tb drive can be purchased cheaply, I want to restart ripping my CD collection into a lossless format.
I apologize if this has been asked a zillion times before, but as space isn't really an issue, is it worth ripping my music into Wav or should I think about the alternatives like Flac which on the plus side, has music tags like MP3?
I'm currently using Winamp as a ripper, although a friend has recently told me that he has had issues with distorted Wav's from Winamp before. Should I use this if I go down the Wav route? What are the better alternatives (free if possible
)?I'm also currently using Ashampoo Burning Studio 2009 to make compilations from my CD Collection. Are there any good burners out there which support CD Text?
I really appreciate any help offered.
Many Thanks
I use WMA (Windows Media Audio) Lossless and have been very pleased with both the quality of the sound and the tagging abilities. If you are using a Windows PC, you can use Windows Media Player to rip your CD's. There is no additional software or CODECs to install. The vast majority of my collection (94,000 songs) is ripped into this format and I have the metadata tags for most all of them (that part was a PITA). Of course, be sure to either run a RAID setup or keep a copy of your music archive on a backup disk. You don't want to have to rip and setup metadata twice.
Q:Is WAV still the best Lossless format?
A: In short, only if you have unlimited space.
You can have all the quality of WAV but compressed to take up half or less the hard-drive space. WMA lossless is one option but my personal favourite is FLAC which is fast to encode, fast to decode, has good compression and is widely supported.
Don't forget to use good CD ripping software. CDex is pretty good but perfectionists seem to adore exact audio copy (EAC), for bit-perfect rips.
Good luck, hope it's worth it
A: In short, only if you have unlimited space.
You can have all the quality of WAV but compressed to take up half or less the hard-drive space. WMA lossless is one option but my personal favourite is FLAC which is fast to encode, fast to decode, has good compression and is widely supported.
Don't forget to use good CD ripping software. CDex is pretty good but perfectionists seem to adore exact audio copy (EAC), for bit-perfect rips.
Good luck, hope it's worth it
Hi,
You can use various formats like FLAC, .APE, .WV etc to store the audio in a lossless format. FLAC seems to be the most popular. Also if you want to have HiFi quality, then go for professional softwares like WaveLab, Adobe Audition etc. EAC is also seems pretty fine.
Best regards,
Bins.
You can use various formats like FLAC, .APE, .WV etc to store the audio in a lossless format. FLAC seems to be the most popular. Also if you want to have HiFi quality, then go for professional softwares like WaveLab, Adobe Audition etc. EAC is also seems pretty fine.
Best regards,
Bins.
Hello everyone from a diyAudio newbie
Through the years I've built up almost 75gig of music on my PC (all 320k mp3's) but as now live in an age where a 1Tb drive can be purchased cheaply, I want to restart ripping my CD collection into a lossless format.
I apologize if this has been asked a zillion times before, but as space isn't really an issue, is it worth ripping my music into Wav or should I think about the alternatives like Flac which on the plus side, has music tags like MP3?
I'm currently using Winamp as a ripper, although a friend has recently told me that he has had issues with distorted Wav's from Winamp before. Should I use this if I go down the Wav route? What are the better alternatives (free if possible
I'm also currently using Ashampoo Burning Studio 2009 to make compilations from my CD Collection. Are there any good burners out there which support CD Text?
I really appreciate any help offered.
Many Thanks
Hello everyone from a diyAudio newbie
Welcome to the party
I'd go for a 1.5T drive (have good experience with WD 'green' series, slightly lower power) as that's the sweet spot for cost per Gb at the moment.
Space is always an issue, just less of one over time. So don't waste your money with WAV, it has no advantages over FLAC, just costs more.
I'm using Ubuntu Linux and K3b supports CD text direct from CDDB. Free of course
.wav indeed has a disadvantage over .flac in that there is no standard tagging mechanism. That's a real pain. Flac decoding is really fast and resource light, unlike for example .ape which gives better higher compression rates but can be slow to encode/decode.
Unless you are a mac user, FLAC is a great option.
For managing large libraries on windows, I'd recommend you check out J River Media Center.
abraxalito is right -- 1.5TB is the sweet spot for HDD capacity/$ at the moment.
Buy two. One as a back up!
Unless you are a mac user, FLAC is a great option.
For managing large libraries on windows, I'd recommend you check out J River Media Center.
abraxalito is right -- 1.5TB is the sweet spot for HDD capacity/$ at the moment.
Buy two. One as a back up!
FLAC 24/192 is the best choice
Certainly FLAC exhibits far better compression ratios at these higher sample rates - I guess because there's so little additional information to encode. WAV would be an even greater waste of money for fans of high rate audio.
I use and recommend "dbPoweramp" for ripping. I know the name sounds strange, but the software really does a great job.
It's not for free. But I think the price is acceptable. When you consider all the features you get. "BitPerfect" "Automatic Meta tags" and "Batch ripping" really makes this software shine. Especially "Batch ripping". You simply attach 4 or 5 cd drives to your pc, and then you start loading disc's. The software adjust's the speed to make sure every disc is bit perfect. And it rips directly to flac format. So you don't have to convert anything after ripping. That way you can rip 500 cd's in a day or so.
just my 5 cents
have a nice day!
It's not for free. But I think the price is acceptable. When you consider all the features you get. "BitPerfect" "Automatic Meta tags" and "Batch ripping" really makes this software shine. Especially "Batch ripping". You simply attach 4 or 5 cd drives to your pc, and then you start loading disc's. The software adjust's the speed to make sure every disc is bit perfect. And it rips directly to flac format. So you don't have to convert anything after ripping. That way you can rip 500 cd's in a day or so.
just my 5 cents
have a nice day!
There are several free players and encoders for OS X.
Back to the original questions:
I apologize if this has been asked a zillion times before, but as space isn't really an issue, is it worth ripping my music into Wav or should I think about the alternatives like Flac which on the plus side, has music tags like MP3?
I'm currently using Winamp as a ripper, although a friend has recently told me that he has had issues with distorted Wav's from Winamp before. Should I use this if I go down the Wav route? What are the better alternatives (free if possible
I'm also currently using Ashampoo Burning Studio 2009 to make compilations from my CD Collection. Are there any good burners out there which support CD Text?
1. There is little advantage in using WAV, especially on a PC. Flac saves you space, and adds tagging support. Since it is a lossless format you can re-encode it to virtually any format for mobile use, and with the efficiency of the flac decoder even that is hardly any slower than using WAV.
2. EAC is among the best, and it's free. I generally use EAC to rip my CDs to WAV, and afterwards use flac to encode the CD's in bulk. I then add tags & cover art and when I'm satisfied I add the batch to the music collection.
3. Virtually all do. It's part of the red book format since 1997. You'll be hard pressed to find one that doesn't, it's more a software issue to put the information in the right place. I know Nero supports it since 5.5.
.wav has tagging abilities too, but I'll defer to someone else who said it's non-standard (the .wav format has the ability to put really anything into it, and different programs apparently use different formats within the .wav file for their tags). You almost certainly want to store your copies on hard drive in FLAC format. Keep in mind it's always possible to convert between lossless formats, so any current .wav files you have can be replaced by FLAC which saves about half the disk space, then you can recreate the .wav file from the FLAC later if needed, for example to burn a CD-R where the burning software only uses .wav format.
You can of course create a .wav file from an mp3 or other lossy format to burn to a CD-R, but if possible you'd want to use the original CD or a lossless copy of it as the source instead.
You shouldn't choose a ripper based on your final file format - ripping and encoding are two different operations, though most rippers have encoders and do both steps at once for convenience. All rippers can do .wav format, and then that can be converted to whatever you want.
I second (third?) the recommendation for EAC for ripping, solely because of its error detection and correction capabilities:
Introduction Exact Audio Copy
If it has a problem reading a CD/CD-R, clean and/or polish it and try again. I've got excellent results on a CD with pinholes in it that wouldn't play one bit in any CD player. Getting a rip with EAC was the ONLY way to "play" that CD.
I'm also currently using Ashampoo Burning Studio 2009 to make compilations from my CD Collection. Are there any good burners out there which support CD Text?
I really appreciate any help offered.
Many Thanks[/QUOTE]
For burning I've used CDRWIN:
Golden Hawk Technology Home Page
I've only used the 1x "demo" mode of CDRWIN, but I've not considered that a problem as the slower burn speed makes a CD-R that can more reliably be played on an older CD player.
It's been a long time since I've burned audio CD-R's, I don't even know if the demo CDRWIN will work with the drive on my current PC.
More good info on CD-R's here:
CD-Recordable FAQ
Apologies if this is a bit 'pluggy' but it's a big issue that we are stuck with mashed up CDs - an old, slow, coarse, broken standard when we could all be enjoying 24bit/96k music.
The issue of distorted WAV files is not limited to Winamp, it's inside your modern CD. Next time you rip a modern pop CD (exception: Katie Melua) have a look at the waveform and notice a) how compressed it is and b) how the tops of all the transients are chopped off. Clipped. Gone. You can download free demo software (that I wrote when I discovered the problem when I bought a new DAC) from here to view the waveforms and count the clips.
This causes a big problem when you play them through a pro-audio DAC, because domestic hifi DACs are designed to handle these clips gracefully whereas many pro-audio DACs do not and sound awful - like there is a loose wire in the system.
So either play them with the volume digitally turned down (do the DAC never clips) or better, run them through something that reconstructs the CD peaks and hence some dynamics too.
Oh and FLAC will save you a lot of space (and is free!!!).
You could also add a text file with contents and lyrics to the directory plus a jpg with the cover art, as that's what "tagging" in WAV format really is: you add data in the info field, there is no collection of predefined fields like in FLAC. In essence WAV is a container format which can hold a lot of things, including a MP3 format stream. But that doesn't mean each and every player will understand and correctly present what you put into the info field of that file.
Be warned: that is becoming a modern day myth. It used to be true in the past, but with the inclusion of buffers in the burners and esp. disks that are optimized for higher speeds (generally above 24x as a minimum), the OPPOSITE is actually true. Only use low speeds if you are 100% certain you're using disks that are designed for low speed burning. A good guideline is to go no lower than 1/2 of your disks maximum rated speed. Going lower will at best increase the amount of read errors.
Thanks, those are good points. I recall hearing there are a couple of test points in CD players that toggle when it hits soft and hard errors, so the error rate of a disc can easily be measured, but I've never gone to the trouble to do it.
Again, I haven't done much of this in recent years, but it has become more diffucult to make more nearly "redbook compatible" CD-R's to play on older players, as only higher-density CD-R's (80 minutes and greater playing time) are easily available, and the spacing of the spiral track (among other things, such as the reflectivity of CD-R's being less than mass-produced aluminum discs) is smaller than the original CD spec and thus harder to read for older drives not made for them.
I hear people online and offline calling them "CD's" as if CD-R's were the exact same thing as the original mass-produced CD's but writable, and it irks me...
Apologies if this is a bit 'pluggy' but it's a big issue that we are stuck with mashed up CDs - an old, slow, coarse, broken standard when we could all be enjoying 24bit/96k music.
The issue of distorted WAV files is not limited to Winamp, it's inside your modern CD. Next time you rip a modern pop CD (exception: Katie Melua) have a look at the waveform and notice a) how compressed it is and b) how the tops of all the transients are chopped off. Clipped. Gone. You can download free demo software (that I wrote when I discovered the problem when I bought a new DAC) from here to view the waveforms and count the clips.
<RANT>
I don't really think that this is an issue with the 16bit/44.1kHz standard (not saying that 24bit/96 or 192 kHz doesn't have advantages, mind you, just that 16/44.1k provides more than sufficient dynamic range for these recordings). Rather, I think it is a production issue, the result of efforts to increase the average levels ever higher for marketing reasons. Modern digital signal processing enables compression ratios far greater than what was possible in the good ol' analog days. Remember when the reviewers would bemoan the fact that a pop LP had all the subtelty of a jackhammer with all the dynamics squeezed into the top 6 dB? To my ears, those LPs sound pretty dynamic compared with some of the modern CDs. Not better signal to noise ratio, but better dynamic range in the material.
Take a reissue of a classic pop album from the 70's and compare the peak to average signal levels to some of these ultra compressed modern CDs and see for yourself.
</RANT>
Anyway, add my vote for FLAC. Disk space is _always_ an issue, even if you don't know it yet
I have used SeeDeClip Duo Pro with a recent recording from Norah Jones that was painted with the "loudness brush'.
The result was a sound very much like previous Norah Jones albums, and
much more listenable to my ears.
I have also used SeeDeClip Duo Pro with LPCM Promo Music Videos to great effect.
SandyK
P.S.
I find .flac sounds a little veiled compared to the original .wav files through high resolution Class A amplification,especially higher resolution paid downloads. N.B. I am not saying that .flac is not capable of an exact copy of the original, but that increased processor load and PSU demands are more likely the cause. Recently I played a .wav file and a .flac file of the same source through a Western Digital TV Live using a plugged in 32GB Corsair Voyager GT USB pen and the .wav file version sounded clearly better to a friend and myself.
I will not be drawn further in this subject. If you don't agree, fine, that's your perogative.
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