I want to back up all my CD's on to a hard drive, aprox 400 CD's then pack them away. Do not want to burn in .mp3 mode. I would like to play them back on my pc and in the future on my stereo.I Would like to know the best way I should aproach this. Should I use 16 bit .wav or 32 bit .wav?

You may want to consider a lossless codec, which would retain the full quality of the original at a smaller size than uncompressed wav files (thus saving HD space ). Two of the most popular lossless codecs at the moment are FLAC and WavPack.

Since the source audio (CD) is 16-bit, your ripped files should also be at 16-bit.

The HA wiki is a good starting point, with several articles on creating a backup/archive, CD ripping, audio compression, etc.

Thanks heaps. I will look into that. I was using Adobe Audition to copy but got confused with all options.

So I dowloaded FLAC and it wont let me work with a .cda file? What now...

Whoa, there's a lot to learn here, be patient with it.

Firstly, you'll want a good ripper / CD audio extractor (Soundforge is a more of an audio editor). The most popular ripper around these forums is Exact Audio Copy (EAC). Here's a link to a guide I used when getting started with EAC, I found it to be excellent.

Essential Ripping Guide for EAC

Next, you need to configure EAC to take the uncompressed audio data it rips from a CD and encode it to FLAC. FLAC isn't what you'd consider a normal windows application, rather it's a command-line program that accepts instructions from apps like EAC. These wiki pages will help you out:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...th_EAC_and_Flac
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_Flac

Again be patient with it and take you time. Something like that your doing (ripping/archiving a few hundred CDs) is worth doing right.