After some months with my cd collection in 320 kbs Mp3, I am not pleased with the sound. I made the files with Windows mediaplayer and Intervideo Mp3 "plugin".
The sound is rather flat and dull.
Now I think I am going to rip my cd's again, and I want to keep them as wav on my pc. Harddisks are cheap so I have plenty of room for the music. Is EAC ok for this job? Is there any settings I should be aware?


Snire. (My first post here)

Same answer as this one. In addition: yes, EAC is the way to go.

EAC even supports several lossless audio compressors; maybe you'd enjoy a few more files with still the same quality.

Yeah hard drives are cheap etc. Believe me space will eventually be an issue when storing wav or even lossless compression. Maybe not on a brand new drive but just wait till you want all those pictures, dvd rips and other things non musical.

I would at least consider a lossless compressor like flac, monkeys or wavpack.

Thanks for the answers, I go for EAC, and no compression. Then it is easy to make mp3 or anything else later on.

Actually, with the right tools *cough* foobar2000 *cough* I find it easier, or atleast as easy, to convert to another format, using lossless compression. Thats because the wav container doesn't support tags, but most (all?) lossless compression formats does. And foobar will copy the tags from one format to another. I personally dont see any advantages with using wav instead of e.g. FLAC, APE or Wavpack etc.

I see. I shall think over it. But Winamp sorts my wav files by artist, album title and tracknumber anyway.

I'm about 100 CDs into ripping 400+. This process is extremely automatic:

I'm using:

EAC -----> MAREO
MAREO kicks off LAME ----> To make 320kbps mp3s
MAREO also kicks off FLAC -------> To make lossless FLACs

Then I never have to rip again, ever. In the future, you can always convert the FLAC to any other format.

Why do you not want to use compression? After all, you can make an mp3 from a lossless compressed file just as easily as you can from a wav file. Plus full tags, which can include more than just album, artist, and track number, are retained when transcoding with foobar2000.

The main advantage to lossless compression is that it allows for easy tagging information. Also it does save some space. The drawback would be slow decoding time for some formats on slow systems. If this poster wants his files in wav format than so be it, but there are more advantages to having files encoded losslessly.

Even on very slow systems, this will hardly be the case with Apple Lossless, FLAC and Shorten (at any encoding level) and WavPack (at any of the fast levels).

how can 320kbps MP3s sound bad? have you tried the LAME conder? what music do you listen to? tried other lossy formats?