Ripping software for 2014

If on a MAC use XLD, on a PC use Dbpoweramp.. As for WAV it has almost zero support for metadata! I'd suggest if you are worried about even a lossless format that's compressed then use either AIFF, or use FLAC setup with zero compression, both will support artwork and metadata and sound great.

Notec,

"It aint worth the time and effort. Unless of course you have no life..."

Or if you have a wife... :-)

It aint worth the time and effort. Unless of course you have no life...

I use iTunes on my MAC Book Pro computer and rip my CD's using the AIFF Format. I check the error correction box and have had no problems.

My albums are being stored on the LaCie 3TB d2 USB 3.0 Thunderbolt Series Hard Drive. I also back them up to a Seagate hard drive.

Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Computer in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format (IFF, widely used on Amiga systems) and is most commonly used on Apple Macintosh computer systems.

The audio data in a standard AIFF file is uncompressed pulse-code modulation (PCM).

I continue to use basic Windows Media player to .wav. Have ripped several thousand CDs this way over last few years.

I continue to prefer to use .wav. Just make sure tags are good prior to ripping. I recently found an inexpensive program that can edit .wav metadata/tags when needed, but always better to get this right from the start.

Getting good auto tags for many classical CDs is the biggest problem with this approach. THere may be better auto tagging web services available via other tools if this becomes a problem.

On Windows, dBpoweramp is a very good ripper. Personally for clean CDs I use J River ripping, since I use the J River player. I use dBpoweramp from damaged disks. It just seems to handle them better.

EAC used to be very popular, but dBpoweramp seems to pretty much replaced it for many people. EAC is very versatile but also somewhat hard to use and slow.

dBpoweramp has a feature called AccuRip which compares the checksums of your rip against those of previous rips by others. I have never had a rip that did not match, unless the CD was badly damaged. For me, it is nice but hardly essential. When I compare the bits in a file from J River and dBpoweramp they are always the same. dBpoweramp is a faster ripper, but then it takes time to get the files into the player. I would try dBpoweramp and your player and see how it goes.

Many people shy away from iTunes, either as a player or as a ripper on Windows.

wav files have no meta data. flac files are a common choice since they contain meta data. Some feel that wav sounds better than wav, but people are split on this. Without meta data in the file, if you change players you may have to redo all the meta data. If you do not want a compressed format, you can use flac at zero compression. There are implementations of wav that have meta data but they do not seem to be standard across players.

Why use the WAV format? Does it maintain metadata?

If using a Mac XLD is probably your best and maybe only choice, outside of ripping with iTunes. On PC you have lots more choices. Check out the Empirical Audio and Computer Audiophile websites for more information. These are very good sources of information for computer audio in general.