hi freaks,

I want to backup all my CDs as wav files on my harddisk or on other CDs, because I'm not really careful with my CDs.... normally I encode all my CDs with audiocatalyst (before I got to know lame). I just thought that catalyst is state of the art

but I dont want to backup my CDs as mp3 files anymore, because maybe in 2 years we have lame 5.0 and I can't reencode my CDs because they dont play anymore

so my question: which CD ripper should I use ? Is the quality always the same ? (should be?!?) or is the wav format developing too like the mp3 format does ?

Well, in general answer is "Yes, wave files and CD audio is almost the same".

But devil is in the details.

In my opinion, EAC is the best grabber, but, of course, it should be right tuned.

.wav format is not developing.

.wav format gives a perfect copy of the audio data on a CD if it's ripped properly (thought things like track start and end offset in the reader and writer take their toll - EAC tries to correct this)

If you treat your CDs so badly, maybe you should copy them all 1:1 onto CD-Rs in audio mode, and then use the CD-Rs everyday instead - hide the original CDs at the back of a cupboard or somewhere for safe keeping.

If you decide to keep the CD-Rs as backup, then burn them as data CD-Rs, so you have .wav files on there, rather than having to rip the audio to .wav again. There may not be enough space to do this for very long CDs, since data format CD writing includes more error correction than audio format CD writing, hence the amount you can store is less.

D.

thanks

I will burn the wav files, because I can't play them in my CD player. SO I can do nothing with them but store

You might consider using a loss-less compressor on the .WAV files before burning, you'll be able to store approximately twice as much on each CD-R.

http://www.monkeysaudio.com/
http://www-ft.ee.tu-berlin.de/~liebchen/lpac.html
http://flac.sourceforge.net

for storage you could also use the lossless format optimFrog.

Though decoding takes extremely much power.

yeah thats true, I mean I could also store them as wav files on my harddisk, I have enough space but I still want to share my files or burn them as mp3 CDs so I can listen to them on my portable mp3 players... otherwise I would use MPC or something else

so I guess I will use rip my CDs as wav files and then just burn the files on CDs

and when I want to encode them I just copy the files to my disk...

If you use FLAC to losslessly compress your wavs before burning, then you can directly transcode to .ogg (see sonice) or .mpc (in the next release of FLAC, couple of weeks i hope) without having to first decompress to .wav.

I haven't looked into mp3 transcoding. but for the days when we have ogg portables ...

cheers, tonderai