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Audio-Update (2)


As promised – here the details of my undertaking regarding my CD collection. One day I really got fed up for having to keep a huge rack of CDs in my living room. It just doesn’t look good. And I don’t really like handling the CDs. So I decided to rip them all. I already started with some CDs using Windows Media Player and an mp3 codec with 320bit/s setting. But I didn’t like the quality. After some research regarding lossless audio codecs, I decided upon FLAC (free lossless audio codec). Here’s why:
  • wave format does not support tagging (song title, etc) and is creates huge files
  • mp3 and other “lossy” formats: the quality is not good enough for me
  • wma format: has DRM in it and I simply do not trust Microsoft in this matter
FLAC has all benefits I was looking for:
  • free, open source format, no DRM
  • lossless compression
  • support for tags
  • available on all platforms
Then I went ahead and searched for a tool that supports ripping CDs and automatically compressing and tagging the resulting files. Exact Audio Copy (EAC) seems to be the tool of choice for this task. EAC It allows me to control all aspects of the ripping process, from naming of the files, compression options and best of all: It supports a plugin called AccurateRip which compares checksum of ripped songs to a central database in order to determine if your rip has been without errors.

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