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.

  • davdev@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Quality wise WAV and FLAC will be exactly the same while FLAC allows your to tag and add metadata so I would suggest FLAC

  • ConsciousNoise5690@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    If you want to preserve the quality of the original CD, a lossless format is the only answer.

    WAV is lossless but tagging support is poor.

    Better use FLAC as is is lossless as well but does have excellent tagging support.

  • skycake10@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    FLAC and WAV are effectively the same thing as far as audio quality goes. FLAC has the advantages of compression and better tagging support, so there’s zero reason to use WAV.

    It’s true that most people won’t be able to tell the difference between something like 320 kbps MP3 and FLAC, but for archival storage there’s little reason to use anything but FLAC. I also have a bunch of those FLAC files transcoded down to VBR MP3 to put on my phone.

    • Nerdy1980s@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Considering that FLAC is effectively a 1:1 transfer of CD music, I always felt that WAV was file format that never needed to exist.

      I vaguely recall that .wav files were used for ringtones and years earlier, used with super short animations that had sound and I think, but not sure, Microsoft used (maybe still uses?) .wav files for system sounds with Windows 3.x

      I never recalled .wav files ever being widely used/accepted as a major file format for larger files like songs.

      I think the *early days of sharing music as .mp3 killed any chance of WAV files having more acceptance.

      *before the DMCA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

  • samiles96@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Storage is cheap now, so the size difference between WAV and FLAC doesn’t matter to some. However, WAV is an old format and was developed before people cared about tagging. WAV has very poor tagging support and you can only tag it in the file name. You can’t add additional details like you can with FLAC. That’s why I would go with FLAC.