Anyone who’s interested in music by definition has a huge collection of CD’s, and when I started university I had to think of a better solution than lugging my entire collection around with me. Unbeknownst to me, when I first did it my solution was to archive my music onto my computer in .flac (free lossless audio codec) format, luck points to me! There’re many ways of doing this, some of which are better than others… here’s how:
Everyone in the world (well at least in the parts of it which I’m interested in) have heard of MP3′s, but not everyone in the world knows that these files are ‘lossy‘. This basically means when you rip your CD to the computer it removes some data that it deems inaudible (as well as some other fancy jiggerypokery to optimise the file size). The thing is, that the loss of information does have quite a noticeable impact on the quality, which is no problem at all when you’re listening to some music on the bus – but say you scratch your CD, it’s not going to sound as good through your Hi-Fi as the CD did. Enter [Stage Right]: (Wow I’ve written less than 5 articles and I’m already repeating myself, this doesn’t bode well!) the flac file which has the advantage of not losing all the nice detail from your music files.
Flac files may be ‘lossless‘, but they are compressed (if your interested in this kind of thing you can read about it here). Basically they’re a complete representation of what’s on the disc but take up the smallest amount of space possible. However, no matter how good the file type is, as any audiophile will tell you, music can only sound as good as its source. The source is the initial bitstream containing the raw music data supplied by the CD reader and much to my surprise, I found out that even this differs in quality. Traditionally, audio nuts have got around this by buying some very expensive CD players, there is however an alternative (see, I told you reading this blog was worthwhile!). The solution? Use a piece of software called EAC (Exact Audio Copy) which is downloadable for free from www.exactaudiocopy.de
Right out of the box EAC is configured to rip your CD’s as accurately as possible, from re-ripping certain parts to checking the result against an on-line database, the whole system is very well thought out. You can even fiddle with the advanced settings to try and better the result but in my opinion it’s not worth the hassle. All you need to worry about is setting the compressed option to ‘flac’ and decide how you’d like the album info to be written to files (found in the normal settings). Google is your friend if you’d like to find out about improving the default setting, there’s no one website which has all the info.
And that’s it, you’ve now got a solution to backing up and archiving your music in the best possible way… get ripping! Just to warn you it will be a long term effort, EAC is tremendously accurate but this does cause it to be quite slow – to the tune of up to 40 minutes a CD! You only have to do it once though and it’s thoroughly worth it in my opinion.
So what can you do with your new music archive? Well I play mine through a Squeezebox as a replacement CD player, you can read my article about it called Wirelessly Stream Music With The Squeezebox Duet. I also use it to create my MP3′s – you can easily convert flac’s to any format you like using another free program called Foobar. Have you archived all of your music yet, are you happy with MP3s or are you planning to get your rip on after reading this article? Let me know in the comment section below.
Ste Quinn 
Clive Randall 
Ollie Norman
Hey, I know that great audio fidelity is what we are aiming for but I’m in the position where I don’t have the memory or the time to rip all my CD’s using a FLAC encoder. I was wondering if you knew about any of the other choice of encoders like LAME which is the meant to be the best MP3 encoder out there.
Is there still a considerable difference between these betterly encoded MP3s and FLAC. Also what do you think of Ogg Vorbis, the open source encoder and is there any point of FLAC if I’m just using the DAC in my lappy?
Regarding your comments about EAC do you agree with the people who say the 0.9 beta4 version is better than the latest? and how come there’s no mention of the main rival converter dBpoweramp?
What do you think of the CDex which offers paranoia settings which you obviously know is not secure-mode ripping. Iv also heard about a program called AccurateRip, which I’ve never used, but it sounds a lot like Secure mode, doesn’t it? It’s compatible with both dBpowerAMP and EAC but I can’t find any detailed reviews of it.