Ripping CDs - is flac the way forward?

Drew_TNBD

Get an mp3 player that can support OGG Vorbis, and do it at the highest bitrate. It's basically undetectable, and the file sizes are smaller than FLAC.

I'm in this boat at the moment. My phone is terrible for music, I want a dedicated mp3 player again. Apple can go fuck off though.

ICBM

Just remembered, there's a check box in iTunes that gives you the option of converting higher-res files to AAC (128, 192 or 256kbps) when syncing to your iPod. If so surely you just need to keep them on the computer at full AIFF/WAV. It might make syncing a bit slow but presumably it only needs to do any new files each time.

Drew_TNBD

So I'm looking for a player right now... and is it me, but are all modern day mp3 players a load of shit? Android based, so probably slow as fuck... or you've got the iPod, which doesn't support the lush playback formats. *sigh*

monquixote

You need a Pono.....  )

Drew_TNBD

NO U!

Rocker

PolarityMan said:

I guess what I had in mind was a central store in FLAc on my copmuter for listening to on good sources, streaming in the house and whatnot and then when i load onto phone (android) or ipod transcoding to a smaller format so I can fit more on teh device.

It doesnt sound like other people use this approach though.

That seems a sensible way to operate.  I listen to almost all my music [on the hi-fi system] streamed FLAC using Sonos - digital out to my system.  I have a decent quality DAC, the sound is more or less the same as CD.  I say 'more or less' as I cannot tell the difference.

Mobile use, I use a ZEN player and copy a dozen or more FLAC albums to it.  Keep on changing the music so it stays fresh.....

imalone

FLAC's other advantage over wav, apart from getting around 50% compression, is it makes better use of metdata (i.e. it stores it and things read it). Don't know much about AIFF, but since it's Apple's WAV I suspect it doesn't.
I've got a Sansa clip and it supports most things I throw at it. 50% is not to be sniffed at, movies are bigger, but if you've got a lot of albums it quickly adds up, especially on portable players where space might be limited.
I tend to rip CDs straight to high quality Vorbis since for me the disc itself is the high quality backup. For things like vinyl I'd rip to FLAC because doing the rip itself is much less easy (have to get the gear for it and do at 1x speed, then do all data entry manually), but I don't have many of those.

PolarityMan

Well i went for flac in the end, im going to try media monkey for syncing. So far done 63 artists so it's not taking too long.

PolarityMan

So having ripped quite a bit now...does anyone know why some cds seem to take forever and other are really quick? doesnt seem to be jsut related to the track length

monquixote

What are you using to rip them?

EAC can take a long time if the disc has errors.

PolarityMan

CD-Ex