I am trying really hard to pick a format to rip 100+ CD's with. They will primarily be played on a HTPC player in a small Home Theatre. I encoded samples of RAW PCM, LAME at Alt standard, VBR 2-5, Big Endian and Little Endian.

Raw PCM, Little Endian, etc sounds so good but because space issues I need something that will produce smaller files. I was thinking something between LAME and RAW in quality and size. Any ideas would be much appreciated.






CDex 1.51
NEC1300a

You will save yourself a lot of time by just using EAC as your ripper, it can be set-up to get info from freedb, rip, encode, can log extraction & encode info which is a kind of authenticity of the quality.

Look into a lossless codec. Flac and Monkey's audio are probably two of the most used. WavPack is gaining popularity...

How much hard drive space do you have?

Just as rough estimates, 100 CDs will take...

In a compressed lossless format, maximum setting (FLAC/Monkey's/WavPack Lossless) : 35 GB
Using lossy compression at 320kbps (LAME, MPC, Ogg Vorbis, AAC) : 13.5 GB
Using lossy compression at 192kbps (LAME, MPC, Ogg Vorbis, AAC) : 8 GB

Planning for future expansion (and also considering how far over 100 CDs you have), if your HD space is 40 GB or less, I'd recommend a mid-to-high bitrate lossy codec. The rates shown provide a high level of confidence for perceptual transparency. If you have more than this much space, then lossless, as dreamliner recommends, would be a good consideration.

Thanks alot for the replies, while I am not new to encoding I am really out of date as too what is avalible. nHard drive space is not a limitation, currently have 80GB and a 20Gb but with HD's as cheap as they are I can increase HD space.

The concern is quality and to a certain extent compatiblity. My HTPC uses WMP 9 and I do like to play music on a Ipaq. SO I dont want to encode and then have to worry about what player I use. Are the many ways you can encode in .wav supported by most players these days??

PS I am looking into EAC today!! Thanks,

You may want to try OptimFROG DualStream



Or WavPack Hybrid

I have been encoding in Flac, WavePAck and LAME in EAC. Great program...the only thing I cant figure out is how to choose a higher bitrate in VBR in LAME, 192 was the highest.

Any crucial setting when using Flac or WavPack?

User Defined Encoder
Commandline options: --alt-preset standard %s %d


There have been some tests done by Den with Wavpack lossy here at HA which you can find by using the search function. Flac only supports lossless encoding & levels higher than 5 show very small improvements & encoding time is greatly increased so I would stick with the default value of 5.

Before I encode the CD in FLAC it shows the amount of compression to the right of the original compression but when I am done encoding there doesnt seem to be any compression. It still shows the oroginal size when I check the file??

Any idea what I a m doing worng? I have checked my settings pretty well...

How do you check it? My favourite way to check things like this (compression ratio/bitrate) is playing back the file in foobar2000 and watch the bitrate that is displayed (should be lower than 1411kbps for compressed audio from CD ).