2. pc-audio
  3. 1235064755

Rip This, Tag That, Save it This way...What the...

Forgive me of my ignorance. Prior to posting, I did indeed do a pretty thorough search of this site for answers – but I came away with more questions than answers. I will be using EAC to rip my CDs on my PC/laptop (Vista or XP – is one format better?). What is the best file format, WAV, FLAC, or AIFF (is AIFF even compatible with PC?). What the heck is “Tagging,” and what the heck is “Meta Data,” and what the heck do I need to know about EAC (I downloaded it, but I don’t have any instructions with the download – where do I learn how to run this puppy?)

Lots of questions – sorry, but I need lots of answers, and since you guys are so ridiculously knowledgeable, I know I’m in good hands………
2chnlben

Showing 2 responses by mozartrules

mozartrules
42 posts
 
Do NOT use WAV. There is no standard for how to store the metadata (title, categody, bitmaps, ...) so this is typically stored separately. Many people have experienced losing this data in connection with backup restores or move between systems.

I use iTunes with AIFF since harddisk is so cheap that I don't see a need for compression, but both ALAC and FLAC should be fine too (you can convert either to WAV or AIFF at any point since the compression is lossless).

AIFF is fine on Windows, but not all software will support it (I use iTunes for Windows on my desktop and for Mac on the Hifi).
mozartrules
42 posts
 
AIFF: Apples Uncompressed format
ALAC: Apples Lossless Compression Format

Pick any format that saves the metadata in the files itself and which doesn't lose data. You will always be able to find a program that can convert to another such format since no information was lost (I had ripped some tracks in ALAC and just asked iTunes to convert to AIFF).
More to discover