Best way to rip completely lossless?

[quackerww]

Best way to rip completely lossless?
Any hints? Thanks! Im confused with the compression on lossless, what program should I use?

 

[VIAN]

I like itunes.

 

[Jeff7]

EAC is supposed to be excellent at ripping. For saving the files, there's FLAC.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I used EAC + FLAC to rip my 1,000 CDs to a music server box, it used about 300 GB of disk space (300 MB per CD) and worked very well.

If you use FLAC encoding for the lossless you can use dbPowerAmp to mass-transcode to any other lossy format for use with portables or to burn car CDs. I transcoded about 250 CDs into 192kbps MP3 to use with my Zen Xtra portable.

 

[CKent]

EAC + FLAC. I like dBpoweramp as a conversion frontend as well.

 

[quackerww]

Whats the diffrence between 320k mp3 and lossless flac? I tryed em both and hear no diffrence.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: quackerww
Whats the diffrence between 320k mp3 and lossless flac? I tryed em both and hear no diffrence.

320kbps mp3 has thrown away at least half of the original audio information, but in a way that most people can't hear.

FLAC is around 600-800kbps but is 100% identical to the audio on the CD.

Also, if you take a FLAC file and convert it to a new format, that new format has exactly the same quality as if you ripped it fresh from CD. If you convert from mp3 to another lossy format it's like making a photocopy of a photocopy, a bit blurrier.

 

[Jeff7]

Problem is, dbPoweramp doesn't let you enter your own commandline for flac or lame.

CDex allowed that, but 1) CDex hasn't been updated in a long time, and probably never will be again, and 2) It likes to crash frequently on my system - error in ntdll.dll. It might not have been an easy method to learn, however, CDex did use an effective way of passing parameters from the CDDB info to the encoder of your choice - FLAC in my case. I just like being able to set customer parameters for the encoders - I don't mind if it takes a long time for each song, so I like to set them to the absolute highest quality that they can manage, while still getting good compression ratios. The drop-down menus just don't give that functionality.
CDex also keeps the original directory structure, negating the need to re-sort all your files.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Personally, I just use Windows Media Player with WMALossless. Works fine.

I can convert/tanscode with dbpoweramp just like anything else. But since I haven't bought that program, I mass-transcode into ogg, for my portable, using foobar2000.