If this is the wrong sub, I apologize, but the knowledge in here is off the charts.

I have hundreds of CDs I’ve collected through the years, and have ripped them to MP3 to play on my phone.

But, I started worrying when I went to replace a CD for one that had just lost its quality, I found out that it wasn’t issued anymore, and would be almost impossible to replace it.

So, now I’m wanting to rip my CDs so that they’re exact copies. I plan on burning my favorite ones to play in my car/home audio system.

I use WMP, and I just wanted to know which format is best, WAV or FLAC, to store them. I plan on using Anyburn to use to convert back to CD audio.

Any opinions?

Thanks!

  • kuriosty@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    EAC (or fre:ac in Linux) and for archival purposes the best is to rip to one-file FLAC generating a CUE sheet, saving the ripping logs, and generating a m3u playlist.

    There are tools you can later use to split to separate files and/or convert that to any other format you want, but if your goal is to preserve the data in a way that you can later regenerate the CD exactly as is, you need to do as above.

    There are players that will be able to play from that file using the information in the CUE file and/or m3u playlist, so you might not even need to split it later. That’s another advantage of using this format.

    Another alternative is to create a CD image with a CD burning tool (like a nrg file), you can save those for a rainy day, but the disadvantage is that they take a lot of space and you won’t be able to listen to it. That’s why I prefer the method I described above.