CD Ripping Format

[Oline61]

I have a large collection of CDs that I want to back up to my computer for ease of playback. I have the computer hooked up to stereo via optical SPDIF. I need an extremely high quality playback format. I have Nero 6 Ultra, and use it for ripping. I have tried VBR AAC @ 275kbps and at high volumes (the norm for me) I can hear artifacts in the audio that aren't apparent when playing the CD. I have thought about 500 kbps Ogg Vorbis and 300+ kbps VBR AAC. I have tried FLAC, and it produces excessively large files, and refused to play in Winamp after installing the latest FLAC package. Nero, which is what I use for ripping would not print tag information into the .fla files anyway. WMA lossless is out of the question for even more massive files than FLAC. I would like to stay with an open format like AAC or OGG though.

The main question I have is what format are you using for storing CDs on your computer?

[BillLeeLee]

I rip with EAC and encode them to FLAC for storing on my comp.

FLAC's filesize is expected, since doing lossless compression on audio really doesn't do too much tot he original filesize.

Musepack and APE are other lossless formats, but I mainly use FLAC.

Perhaps your audio artifacts are more from using Nero to rip. Try EAC first, you can rip in secure mode (best way to rip) which tries to rip an exact 1:1 bit by bit copy of the song from the CD.

www.exactaudiocopy.de

edit: guess I can see why you're so worried about space, since it seems like you only have a single hard drive?

[Oline61]

Being a poor high school student doesn't allow me to buy any more hard drives. I am lucky that since I live with my parents, I can store on their Dell (120GB+80GB). I may look at one of those SATA 3GB/s 16MB cache drive soon, as they look very enticing.

Thanks for the recommendation. I will try EAC.

[Oline61]

EAC fixed a few artifacts on older CDs. Thanks for helping. Using ~300kbps AAC on the wavs produced by EAC sounds great!