Let me apologize in advance if this post is too newbieish for this forum. I have spent some time reading Q&A's on this site but I still have some questions.

I have about 500 cd's which I want to rip. I tried EAC but it took way to long, too much space, and could not read cd's with the slightest of scratches. I spent much time trying to fix the problems with no luck.

I was going to just use Magix at 320kbs but I would like better compression than about 100MB per cd.

I have read some pages about FLAC. Some say that this format is the best to rip in if you are concerned about being able to change to other formats or even future formats without having to rip from the cds again. Is this correct? Any recommendations?

If not, then can anyone recommend a program that rips cd in less than 12 minutes at very good sound quality in the least amount of space? Oh yea the format must be supported by i-pod.

Thanks in advance for any advice. I know a lot of this stuff is really subjective.

MP3 (and AAC) is a lossy format. Sound quality varies depending on the source material and your bitrate. FLAC is a lossless format. Sound quality is exactly the same as the source and will stay that way forever. Transcoding, encoding one format into another, will never result in a quality loss if you use lossless codecs (FLAC, Monkey's Audio, et cetera). It will result in a quality loss each time you convert lossy codecs (MP3, AAC, et cetera).

Search for transcoding and you will find even more information.

FLAC is great and does exactly as you describe, but it won't address your goal to use less than 100MB per CD. FLAC generally compresses about 40%, so a 50-minute CD is going to be about 200MB.

To get any smaller, you're going to have to use lossy compression. And, if you want to play the files on iPod, they are going to have to be MP3 or AAC at this point.

Why not use iTunes? It works fine and is very easy to use. Set your encoding for 192kbps AAC and your tunes will sound great. At that bitrate, you will be well within your 100MB goal.

Thanks so much for all your comments - you've really helped clear things up for me!

IMHO, the time it takes to rip and encode a CD is inconsequential. You will be spending much more time listening to it in the end than you will spend encoding it, so don't worry about ripping time. What ultimately matters is disk space and how it sounds.

OGG Vorbis at Quality=4 works the best for me, very good compression (usually in the 100-128 kbps range) and transparent to my ears. You might even be able to get away with q=3 or even 2.5 depending on your ears. You'll just have to do listening tests and find out for yourself.

If you're paranoid about audio quality, you should go with a lossless codec. They all get within a percentage point or two of the same compression ratio. What decides it for me is openness. FLAC is the only completely open format I know of. There is no guarantee that you'll be able to play your APE files with future software, while anyone can implement the freely available FLAC source. The choice is a no-brainer for me.

You could do what I intend to do, and what many people have done before us.

That is to make your FLAC archive first. This will be your backup of your CD collection.

This lossless archive will also be your master source for any future formats that you need. You want LAME encoded MP3s today? WMA tomorrow? With the appropriate front ends and convertors, you can now easily generate music in whatever format you need it, and not have to touch your CDs.

Disk is cheap. I think this is the way to go. I just need to buy more disk to proceed. I've found at least one FLAC archive guide here on the forums.

I just recently ripped EAC + LAME 3.95 --preset extreme. I'm happy with the results. I did a lot of testing of problem samples from my music before going ahead with this. BUT if I'd known better, I would have done it all with a lossless format first, then used that as the source for all future conversion needs. I'm leaning towards FLAC because it seems to have the widest, fastest growing support right now.

Best of luck on your ripping.

Thanks again for all your comments.

Ok- I definitely think a lossless codec is what I am looking for --and from what I have read FLAC is the way to go – I’ll just get a big hard drive for my backup FLAC files.

From what I gather FLAC a format that ripping programs convert to – like MP3 (except FLAC is lossless, of course). Right? I downloaded FLAC from their site but it doesn’t seem very user friendly for a newbie like me. So any recommendations on a program that meets the following criteria:

1) Newbie friendly
2) Rips into FLAC
3) Rips cds in 12 minutes or less (more or less)
4) Supports Artist/Title tags through CDDB or Cdindex
And preferably
5) Can convert FLAC files into MP3, MP3+Lame, Ogg, WMA etc… and other formats?

Or is there some mistake in my understanding?

Again, thanks so much in advance for your comments and tolerating my ignorance on the topic. I understand this stuff is really subjective but I enjoy learning everyone’s opinion. I Hope this thread can help future newbies too.

This is the EAC + FLAC document that I found.

EAC and FLAC image

That's where I started. I have gone ahead to start this yet. Too busy at the moment. But if I were you, I'd search the web and the forums here for FLAC and see if there are any other "Creating a FLAC archive" documents.

I know for myself, I don't intend to create entire CD images. I am leaning towards one FLAC file per track instead. Now I'm not sure if there are any disadvantages to this, but as long as I can get it to retain it's gapless features, I'm satisfied with one FLAC file per track.

Since I've used EAC + LAME before, EAC + FLAC probably won't be too bad.

So that's the first step, getting your CDs into FLAC format. The next part is going FLAC to whatever format you need. Again, you'll want to search the forums here and the web for FLAC and whatever other lossy format you want. You'll find mention of the other programs you need to convert FLAC -> MP3, WMA, etc. I'm not certain about them all, but I think some are basically a front end plus a convertor, like EAC + LAME, where EAC is just the front end to batch files into LAME which does the actuall MP3 creation. Others are all-in-one, front end and convertor, I think. I've heard mention of several of them, but rather than send you down the wrong path, hopefully you can find this info without too much trouble.

Sorry I can't give you more help; I'm just starting on the FLAC thing myself. Hopefully someone more experiened can help you get going with the right choices.

Best of luck.

If you'd like to know more about FLAC, EAC and ripping your cd's in general, just browse through the Lossless forum a bit (there are threads on this subject quite often). The CD Hardware/Software forum is probably also a good place to look. And the search button won't kill you either (a search for FLAC and EAC will probably return quite a lot of more or less relevant results).

You should check out the dBpowerAmp Music Converter.

It can be found at www.dbpoweramp.com
Once you've downloaded and install it, go to the Codec Central of the website. Here you can download extentions for the Music Converter, which will make it support additional formats.
Just download the FLAC extention and you're set to go.
One thing to be aware of though, ripping time depends on several factors, mainly your CD-ROM drive / CD's and your processor speed.

The Music Converter supports FreeDB which is a variant of the CDDB/Gracenote technology. By installing additional extentions from the Codec Central, you can make it handle virtually any format, such as Ogg Vorbis or Windows Media Audio.

I've found the dMC to be newbie friendly.

Exact Audio Copy and FLAC work very well together. It's basically a one-step operation once everything is installed and configured.

Here is a good resource for setting this up:

http://goweropolis.no-ip.org/MediaGuide/EAC-FLAC.html

foobar2000 is a great front-end for batch converting FLAC files to many lossy formats.

Good luck.

BTW, if you want to stay in the Apple camp, new version of iTunes (v. 4.5) introduces a new "Apple Lossless" codec that is supported by new iPod software update. iTunes also does easy batch conversion to supported lossy formats.

Aye, I ripped my cd's into flacs, backed those up onto dvd's (10 to 20 cd's per once compressed) and then foobar2k converted them to lame alt preset standard. That's what I store on my hard drive. End result is about 500 albums is becoming 40 gig on the hard drive, and 40 backup flac dvd's. The originals go into cool storage, and the backup dvds are handy whenever I want to play around with the source.

Foobar plays very well from flac plus cue sheet, exactly as output by EAC. I believe there is also a foo_tunes extention that works with the Ipod, though I am less sure how compleat it is. Foobar2k's forum is hosted here, so you can pop over and look if you choose.

Raederle

the ipod extension for foobar2000 is foo_pod or foo_ipod i believe, foo_tunes is an alternative GUI for foobar2000 that makes it look somewhat like iTunes