Mp3’s are fine for most people, but for audiophiles who want the best music cd quality there’s only only one route to go and that’s ‘lossless’. Lossless formats preserves the original quality of the music cd with no quality loss hence the name ‘lossless’. This is great for backing up your music cd collection so you will always have that identical perfect copy on your hard drive so you can pack your cds away in a safe place.
There are many types of lossless formats out there so it’s up to you to do the research and see which format will work best for you. The most popular ones include:
- FLAC – stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. This is my personal favorite because it’s free and open source, I’m a sucker for open source.
- WMA Lossless
- WAVE audio format (WAV)
- OGG Vorbis file format (OGG)
- Apple Lossless
Now you will need to convert the cd’s to a format so here’s one of the best audio converters out there dBpoweramp this thing converts audio to just about every format.
A common thing people do is rip a music cd into mp3 format and later burn a audio cd with the mp3 files and the problem with that is sound quality is lost due to compressing and decompressing. Here’s a better way to do it, first rip the music cd in a lossless format and then create an audio cd from those lossless files that way you will have an exact copy of the cd in terms of quality.
Here are some things to keep in mind when ripping cds to a lossless format, lossless formats are much bigger file sizes when ripping them onto your harddrive, an average cd ripped in mp3 format is about 100 mb but ripped in lossless the file size could get up to 500 mb. Another thing to keep in mind is most portable cannot play these type of formats, although I have seem a few here and there. So after you ripped the cds in a lossless format you may need to compress them into mp3’s to play on your mp3 player.