Ripping music – transferring it from a physical format into a purely digital form stored on a computer drive – was once regarded with suspicion by those who prize sound quality. Surely changing music, even music already stored in digital form on a compact disc, from one format to another would result in a loss of quality that would outweigh any gain in convenience?
But it’s an opinion that just doesn’t hold water anymore. Formats like MP3 and AAC may sacrifice some quality in order to keep file sizes small, but the emergence of lossless digital audio formats, able to preserve every piece of information from a CD recording, means that the ripped file can be sonically indistinguishable from the original.
You might still ask why you should spend precious time ripping your CD collection. It’s all a question of convenience: a lossless digital music collection saves shelf space and is easy to move and back up; for larger collections, it also makes it far easier and faster to locate individual songs and albums. You can also access a digital music library from multiple sources simultaneously, for example from several network music players located in different rooms in your house.
On the hardware side, storage devices like NAS and external hard drives offer huge amounts of space at low prices. And with high quality DACs widely available, computer hardware now offers excellent playback and can be easily connected to your existing hi-fi setup.
File types: which should I use?
So you’ve decided to rip your CD collection to a lossless format, but which format should you choose? Here are the main contenders.
FLAC
The Free Lossless Audio Codec is fast becoming the most popular choice for audiophiles. Like MP3, OGG and AAC, FLAC is compressed to keep file sizes relatively small, but unlike those formats it’s lossless and therefore indistinguishable from CD quality. CD audio converted to FLAC will typically be reduced to around 50 percent of its original size; a typical three-minute song on a CD will take up 30-40MB of space, while a ripped FLAC version of that song is 15-20MB.
FLAC supports metadata (artist and song information can be embedded into the file and artwork can be referenced by the file) and will play back on a wide variety of software and hardware, some of which we’ll explore later in this article. Crucially for many, it’s not currently supported by Apple products like iTunes or the iPod.
Apple Lossless
As you might guess from the name, the Apple Lossless Audio Codec (or ALAC) was developed by Apple and works with the company’s products like iTunes, the iPod and the iPhone (as well as being supported by a number of other hardware and software players); if you’re an avid user of Apple gear, this will probably be the format for you. Like FLAC it’s compressed and supports metadata, and files ripped from typically take up around 40-60 percent of their original size.
AIFF and WAV
AIFF and WAV are lossless but uncompressed, so ripped files take up the same amount of space as they would on a CD (around 10MB per minute of stereo sound). This large file size makes them less desirable than FLAC and Apple Lossless, as you’ll need about twice the storage space for the same library, but they are compatible with a wide range of devices and software. WAV handles metadata but in a clumsier way than FLAC and ALAC, so if you transfer a WAV library to another device there is a chance some of the information may not appear as it should.
Ripping software
Max (Mac)
Available for Apple computers running Mac OS X 10.4 and higher, Max is a free app able to create audio files in a variety of formats, including all four lossless codecs mentioned above. If your CDs are slightly scratched, Max incorporates “Cdparanoia”, which corrects any errors that might occur during the ripping process. It also features MusicBrainz, which looks for CD information online and then embeds this metadata in the ripped files (this works for FLAC and Apple Lossless, but not WAV and AIFF).
Max’s interface isn’t the slickest or most user-friendly thing we’ve ever seen, and if you’re not au fait with ripping software you might need to consult its built-in help documents. That said, once you’ve got to grips with it, it’s a fast and accurate ripper, and should you wish to rip your CDs to more than one format (perhaps you want one lossless copy for home listening and one lossy but smaller MP3 copy for your portable player), you can do so simultaneously.
Exact Audio Copy (PC)
If you’re using Windows and want to convert your CDs to FLAC, Exact Audio Copy does the job very ably indeed, and its accuracy and error correction make it extremely popular with PC-owning rippers. It uses the freedb CD database for metadata retrieval. Oh, and like Max it’s 100 percent free.
iTunes (PC and Mac)
Chances are, you already have iTunes on your PC or Mac – and that could save you downloading and installing another ripping app. iTunes can rip CDs to three lossless formats (Apple Lossless, AIFF and WAV) and features error correction for damaged discs. iTunes automatically retrieves album and artist information from the Internet.
Playing your files
Of course, iTunes also functions as a software player for several lossless formats, as well as a way to get the files onto your iPod or iOS device for portable listening. As mentioned above, iTunes will not play FLAC files, so if that’s your audio format of choice, you’ll need to find something else.
Windows users have a wide choice of FLAC-compatible players, including the highly popular likes of Winamp and MediaMonkey; you can also add a plugin to Windows Media Player in order to make it play FLAC. There’s also VLC, Songbird and XBMC Media Center, all of which work on both PC and Mac.
In terms of portable hardware, Apple Lossless, WAV and AIFF will all play on iPods and iPhones, as well as a handful of other physical players. FLAC won’t play on Apple devices, but it works on many Samsung Galaxy smartphones, a number of AV receivers and almost every portable audio player made by iAudio.
Does anyone have any experience using ‘BitPerfect’ for playback? It offers FLAC support and supposedly higher quality audio on higher end equipment.
And if anyone is interested, here are some of my thoughts on .WAV files. http://www.solutions-inc.co.uk/index.php/staff/steven-miller/item/410-the-song-remains-the-same
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012One thing about using lossless-compressed formats is it’s then easier to broadcast them around the house. A WAV at 10MB/minute consumes 1.3Mb (megabits) of bandwidth, whereas an ALAC takes only half of this. Even when using structured cabling and 1Gb switching, halving the data traffic helps with network congestion, buffering etc.
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012Actually Apple’s app store sells a FLAC player:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flac-player/id390532592?mt=8
most of my stuff is already in FLAC, so i may use that to play FLAC
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012Pay attention when using Itunes Match…
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012This service is based on the quality of the music files that are sold in Itunes witch is AAC 256kbps (not lossless).
So if you activate this service, you will have your files in “the cloud” but in a worse quality, so don’t go by deleting your locally ripped files to solve storage problems ;).
Another good free program for Mac OS is ‘XLD.’ It is also a bit-perfect ripping program that can search on-line databases for metadata. Better interface than Max.
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012You can’t forget XLD (http://tmkk.pv.land.to/xld/index_e.html), a much better ripper for Mac. It supports all the formats, has cdparanoia and its own improved ripping engine that always does the trick, has freedb support and doesn’t crash EVER, unlike Max on most Macs past Tiger.
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012I personally think the program XLD works better as MAX for macintosh, but that is my opinion.
XLD can be found at:
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23430/x-lossless-decoder
Regards,
Richard
From the Netherlands
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012Nonesense, nothing beats XLD for ripping CD’s on Mac!!! Tried Max but went back to XLD in a jiffy. Its open source and gives perfect rips with one of th most easiest GUI’s ever developed.
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012I like EAC but I use dbpoweramp more often.
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012My advice. Listen to less music. Then when you do, do it justice. Listen to a live concert, or set up a high quality hifi and listen to that. Your life is to short wasting it ripping all your cds. Just get a good cd player and listen to them direct. Having a music collection is nice. LPs, cds. What about sacd? you cant rip that. Sacd is still the quickest and best route to high def audio and multi channel too. Get a life away from your pc mac. Stop using ipod, it sounds crap anyway. Music should be respecred. By proper b@w speakers or others!
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012Jake is dumb.
Consider Foobar2000 for your playback software on PC. It’s the best.
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012After ripping to lame v0 mp3 last year with EAC, I’m ripping again the whole CD stuff to FLAC at the moment. :-/
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012Its not the difference in Sound quality, but its the good feeling to get the most out of my new CM9! :-)
I used Rockbox on my 4th generation iPOD to play FLAC files – it was like getting a new portable player, what’s more Rockbox allows your iPod to dual boot (Rockbox or the original Apple firmware).
Posted: Wednesday, 12 September 2012When my iPod came to the end of it’s long life I was so attached to Rockbox that Apple lost a sale on the basis that Rockbox didn’t yet support the latest iPod, at which point I discovered the Colorfly C4 – ok so it too isn’t supported by Rockbox and it’s UI is archaic, rather like a 1st generation CD player, but it does do a damn fine job of playing music (inc FLAC files) and doesn’t have any other distractions.
Why is lossless WMA left out? Most people don’t have a Mac but a Windows based PC. Lossless WMA is also half the size of the CD, you can use Windows Media Player (which comes free of charge with any PC) to both rip and play lossless music. It is actually much better than iTunes or Foobar2000 for that. Yes, it will play FLAC as well.
I know it is so cool to hate Microsoft and pretend they don’t know what they are doing, but if you are going to have a page dedicated to ripping and playing lossless music at least be impartial and more complete? +90% of all ‘PCs’ are Windows based.
Posted: Monday, 24 September 2012Excuse my ignorance but if you already have iTunes installed on your mac or PC why do you need the previously mentioned ripping software options vs just using iTunes? Thanks
Posted: Friday, 19 October 2012If you have iTunes on your Mac or PC what’s the benefit of using the previously mentioned ripping software (Max, EAC etc.) to rip your CDs? Obviously new at this. Thanks.
Posted: Saturday, 20 October 2012Way to go Jake totally agree. Stop turning music into another diminished commodity or worse sonic wallpaper.
Posted: Friday, 23 November 2012Hi,
Posted: Monday, 17 December 2012There is a noticable difference between a CD ripped with iTunes or with XLD or MAX.
You just can listen the difference. iTunes is not an accurate ripper at all.
All informations here: http://www.accuraterip.com/
itunes is not also an optimum reader. I personally use AUDIRVANA+ with itunes database.
The difference is also audible in a simple P5 Headphone, but is obvious with a pair of 800D.
Even the best CD reader cannot compete with a correctly ripped CD or a Studio Master file, when read with the right tools.
Thank-you Jake and Alain. Refreshing to read others who appreciate the difference these formats make.
I will try those programs for ripping and playback.
I have resorted to iTunes as my ripper and means of playback, all the while saddened by the loss of realism and dynamic range when compared to my 20 year old CD player routed through the same signal path.
Posted: Wednesday, 19 December 2012A CD works with 44.1 Khz and 16 bits , in most cases !!! The question is : how do you get more of it, assuming you already read the CD with a very good CD player (implementing a very good DAC such as a Burr Brown or so) . If you rip such a CD with a DDC up to 192 Khz, 24 bits …. what the hell is this producing a higher definition …..the definition stays the original one ………… Question is : when are we going to make high quality recordings and bring them to the user ? This was supposed to be something like SACD , some SACD players are available but where is the software to feed them ????
Posted: Thursday, 20 December 2012Hi Claude,
Posted: Saturday, 29 December 2012We are not talking of any upsampling, but just ripping and reading these files with very little or no errors.
Even the best CD reader makes errors, a lot of errors and these errors are replaced with silences by the error correction of your reader. This is altering the quality of sound. Again have a look to this site: http://www.accuraterip.com/ for a better understanding. Try to rip one or your preferred CD and compare, I am sure it will be a positive experience.
On an other hand I fully aggree with you when you ask; ” when are we going to make high quality recordings and bring them to the user ?”
It has started with the aviability of Studio masters recording like those offered by Society of sound or site like QUOBUZ, FIDELIO and many others. But even the higher sampling rate will not replace a good recording, I mean a good sound capture. Some 16/44,1 recordings are beautifull when correctly played back and some highres ones can be very bad.
Concerning SACD, the format used is DSD, you can buy music in this format on several site, and the offer is slowly growing. Try BLUE COAST RECORDS, FIDELIO, some are also avialable at HIGHREAUDIO. You can read them with several readers like AUDIRVANA+ that I mantionned on a previous post. But then you will need a DAC DSD compatible.
I wish to everybody the best (recordings) for the incoming years.
Alain
I have a question regarding this topic. I use Windows, and have been reading and doing research about all of this CD ripping. Although most of my library came as a digital download in the first place, I have some CDs that have not been ripped into WAV or MP3, so I was trying to decide which format to use.
I am hearing arguments for and against FLAC, MP3, MP3HD, and now Opus. I am at a loss as to how I should save my discs on my hard drive. Because I have half a terabyte of storage space, I’m not too concerned with storage space.
One option that I am considering is just ripping the discs into WAV format, since I have a bunch of space. The other option I am looking at is using MP3, or even MP3HD, at either 256bps, or 320bps with Constant Bit Rate, and NO Joint Stereo option. But if I go the MP3 route, then there is the encoder to think about. LAME or Fraunhofer. Decisions, decisions.
The other ‘problem’ that I have is that some of my WAV CDs have track names that appear in VLC media player when played, but these do not translate into song and artist names when ripped. Any ideas on that would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks and Happy New Year!
~Antonio :-)
Posted: Friday, 4 January 2013Antonio,
For me there is no doubt. You should rip your CD in a non destructive format. That means WAV or FLAC.
I would choice FLAC, as it needs four time less space onto your storage device, for the same result if you use a reader that uncompress the file in RAM BEFORE reading it. As a MAC user, I am not familiar with the PC tools but I know they exist and a you will find them easily on Internet.
Alain
Posted: Monday, 7 January 2013Hi Guys,
I find this thread interesting as I am also convinced of the need to rip my CD collection so I can access all my albums and tracks in an easy manner from an IPAD. And no more searching my CD racks with failing nearsight much to the amusement of my younger or more IT savy friends. The thing is I am a bit of a Techophobe. I have a very old 20 years Nakamichi receiver and CD player. I am considering keeping my CD player should I want to listen to new CDs – but I figure once I have ripped and stored by CDs at the highest audio quality possible and once I splash out on a networked solution then I am quite unlikely to be buying CDs in future. I can lease the music I like via forums such as Spotify which eventually will be of HD quality. Any tracks/albums I like from the network I can always download and archive alongside my ripped CDs. Be great to be able to do all this from the comfort of my couch with the use of an IPAD or equivalent Android bit of kit.
Now here comes the rub: being a technophobe I like / prefer the idea of entrusting the ripping process to a “solution” that will be as painless as possible whilst giving the highest quality audio replay e.g. capturing the album covers and storing safely and easily onto a hard drive. For that reason I have considered a dedicated solution such as the NAIM Unitiserve product or the Olive products. The downsound is that such a solution is quite expensive and can only be used for audio tracks ( I assume?). Plus, once I’ve ripped my CDs I am probably not going to do much ripping, except maybe very occasionally. The alternative is to go the PC route linked to a NAS. This would be a cheaper solution and presumably the NAS can store all sorts of date such as movies (ripped Blueray’s ?) and photo albums etc. Hence a good quality NAS should be a more flexible solution too I should think?
But I haven’t got much of a clue of how I could go about doing this or what software and hardware to purchase. I have a 4 year old laptop that I could make into a dedicated PC ripper but how would I go about doing this all? I was advised by my local hifi shop to remove all software on the PC not related to the ripping process.
Go gentle on me guys. What advice can you give on the two options I mention and what else might I want to consider? Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Celt
Posted: Monday, 7 January 2013I’ve been ripping much of my music to FLAC and transferring it to an old iPod 3G, with RockBox installed and all the old iTunes files deleted to make room. It is wonderful to be able to carry 100 CD from room to room and play them at top quality.
Am i right, however, that there is no point ripping to lossless old recordings (Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billy Holiday) that were not originally recorded in high fidelity? Would MP3 or OGG do just as well?
Posted: Tuesday, 8 January 2013Alright, this (and other posts on the subject) sent me into a bit of a panic mode. I have a large iTunes library containing over 21’000 song, the vast majority are full albums.several years ago I ripped my entire CD collection of at least a few hundred to mp3. Since then I haven’t touched a cd, they’re all boxed away in boxes in my basement. But I have bought a lot of music from iTunes and Amazon.
So yesterday I dug up a CD and ripped it anew to ALAC, to see if I can tell a difference between that and the version that came from iCloud, which is probably better than what I originally ripped it to. The CD was The Police – every breath you take – a best of. I listed to it on the computer, with Sony v6 headphones.
And here comes the kicker: I couldn’t tell the difference. Maybe I’m getting old (41), or maybe the equipment is t good enough. I use these headphones to listen to music both at home and on my commute, and at home also steam to a zeppelin air, which I find sounds great for its size.
So for no I’m not going to re-rip all CDs and punch myself for buying mp3s.
Posted: Saturday, 12 January 2013Hi Alex,
Are you saying it may be better for me to set up an iTunes service and purchase (or lease?) all of my CD Albums rather than to rip them as FLAC files? By “better” I mean in terms of the sound quality being at the same level of FLACs combined with the ease of convenience and avoiding the outlay cost of purchasing a NAS and the ripping software etc??
I know that tracks from Spotify are not at CD quality yet (but no doubt they will be in the future). Hence why I thought it’d be good to rip my CDs in a professional/quality way; either via a NAS + Ripping software solution or via a dedicated music ripping & storage solution such as NAIM or Olive – as I describe in my initial comment above.
Any other AudioFile Guru’s like to comment ?
Celt
Posted: Tuesday, 15 January 2013dBpoweramp also supports FLAC format.
Posted: Tuesday, 5 February 2013For mass music CD collections, with dBpowersmp Batch Ripper software and an disc autoloader, ripping with FLAC format can be an easy thing.
Yes holdouts you can continue to use your audiophile CD/SACD players and ignore the blah blah of audio servers, DSD Dacs, asynchronous USB, NAS, control apps and ripper and tagging software – but the future is audio files, not those shiny discs and jewel boxes. If you’re an old timer you might as well go to your grave not worrying about this computer audio stuff, but if you’re around mid-forties or so you should consider joining the computer audio bandwagon. Take a look at the Lumin Network Player. Super HiFi without the price tag of Ayon, Aurender, Linn, Meridian, etc. – yes still a nice chunk of change this Lumin, but you don’t have to be a tech geek obsessed with SOtM or CAPS or whatever computer nerd stuff some spend their days thinking about. Just my ten cents and of course YMMV.
Posted: Friday, 8 February 2013Does anyone have any thoughts about the xACT ripper for Mac?
I’m currently ripping my CDs as I’ve had to put much of my hi-fi (along with vinyl and next CDs) into storage due to apartment size issues. I hope to have them out again soon. Nothing even comes close to a proper hi-fi stereo with good speakers. Hails Jake!
Posted: Thursday, 14 February 2013xACT I used to convert one file format to another. Max I use extensively for ripping music from a cd. Max has great tagging options, and can output your music into iTunes in whatever file format you like. Apple Lossless is a great way to go for archival storage.
Posted: Friday, 15 February 2013The idea of starting to rip my audio cds to NAS was encouraged since I spoke to an employee of World of Yamaha. The subjects discussed were CD’s that lose quality over a period of time and CD’s unplayable over a period of time. Comments on this would be appreciated….
Posted: Friday, 12 April 2013