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Ripping CD's to hard drive

What is the highest quality way to rip a collection of CD's to a hard drive?  Does it require a high-end transport and DAC of some sort?  How have others gone about this when loading their Lumin, Aurender, etc components? 

cjlundberg
oltexan
35 posts
 

I just used my PC CD player and FreeRIP to make 16/44 flac files.  There is no advantage to upsampling. I tried EAC. It's very slow and I could not hear any difference. "Bit perfect" is a bit of a fools errand. Even the factory CDs and players are not bit perfect and 99 times out of a 100 the dropouts are too small to be audible. Every part of the reproduction chain can have drop outs. There is no retry strategy or error correction  built into USB, SPDIF, AES etc nor I2S, only ethernet.

yoyoyaya's avatar
yoyoyaya
637 posts
 

Another mention for Innuos. The Zen Mini S is more affordable than the Zen but also acts as a CD ripper, NAS and streamer. Its a good solution if you don't already have those components. For clarity, it is not a DAC so it needs a DAC connected to play music.

audionut22's avatar
audionut22
43 posts
 

I’ve used JRiver to easily rip thousands of CD’s flawlessly to FLAC with excellent metadata results. I’ve tried Exact Audio Copy but it didn’t get the metadata correct, but maybe I didn’t have the settings correct because EAC wasn't very intuitive for me. 

Someone here said 192kbps MP3 is all you need, but that is laughable in this day and age. It’s highly recommended for you to use FLAC or better.

acdvd
122 posts
 

Do the speed settings for flac in dbpoweramp matter much if it still gets reported as an accurate rip?

thanks 

cd318
2,636 posts
 

@m_j_s

I can’t believe that some are talking about ripping to mp3!? I don’t even rip to FLAC, I choose AIFF or WAV. I mean, storage is not a problem, so why bother with FLAC. If you can’t hear the difference between mp3 and a lossless file type, you need your ears tested

 

Ah, that old chestnut, MP3 v higher bitrates?

Well, I’d defy you, or anyone else, to tell the difference between MP3 192kbps and anything higher.

Unsighted of course.

As far as I’m aware, no human being reliably can.

It’s hard enough distinguishing 128kbps from 192kbps.

So enough with yet more misleading MP3 bashing.

 

Let’s not also forget that MP3 still remains the most compatible file format in the world even today.

You can play back MP3s on virtually anything, add album art and metadata with ease, normalise tracks or albums with MP3 Gain and edit to your heart’s desire on software like Audacity if you so wish.

 

That said, as an archival format, FLAC is to be recommended and it does gradually seems to be replacing MP3.

No doubt in time it will become equally as compatible and versatile as MP3 is right now, but some of us resent having to wait.

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