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'Best' ripping format for CDs

keith1962 said:
There is a thread on the Naim Forum at present about an event at Signals recently where they did dems of the new psu regulators. As part of the event they used the new NDS and did a dem to show that wav sounds better than flac. If they are both lossless how can that be???
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Because Naim can't make a competent streamer. I find it unbelievable that they blame the format, rather than their own inability to transduce any lossless format equally. You simply cannot say "WAV sounds better than FLAC" - all you can say is that a Naim NDS can't play FLAC as well as it ought to. Their story is that the (trivial) amount of processing that decoding FLAC requires causes extra work for the CPU which puts noise into their DAC and loads the power supply. Why can't they screen the DAC better? What is the power supply running so close to its limit? WAV requires twice the amount of network traffic than FLAC. Why doesn't this cause extra noise?
 
I'd be very surprised if there was any difference at the Signals demo, things like this are so easy to queer.
 
I use FLAC and listen quite happily on my iPhone and iPad using the FLAC player app. I also listen to music on my PC and a streamer and didn't want everything in an Apple format.
 
Doesn't matter about the format you can convert with no loss of quality between formats.

Just make sure you use a proper ripper like EAC or dbpoweramp and use 'secure' mode or set it to use the AccurateRip database to verify the rips.
 
I just use windows media center to rip my CDs to wav lossless and then put it all on a 1T external hd that i plug into my Sony blu-ray player with usb then coax out to my dac then hi fi.

Works ok for me never had a problem but i'm sure others here do things differently but i just find it easy to stream from the blu-ray player.
 
sq225917 said:
I'd be very surprised if there was any difference at the Signals demo, things like this are so easy to queer.
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Its bizarre to me - shouldn't they be ashamed or at least embarassed that several thousand quids worth of streamer couldn't manage to deal with FLAC properly. Back to the drawing board time IMO. Naim seem to me to be seriously under-resourced in the R&D department - especially on the software side.
 
AndyU said:
Disadvantage of using iTunes to rip (whether to apple lossless or anything else) is that the artwork is "hidden" inside iTunes.
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This is not true, or at least does not have to be true. It is perfectly simple to imbed the artwork into the music files, so that the artwork can survive a move outside of iTunes.

100% of my music files have imbedded artwork.

Of the other points you make, the only one where I feel I am missing out on something is the verification database.
 
canyelles said:
This is not true, or at least does not have to be true. It is perfectly simple to imbed the artwork into the music files, so that the artwork can survive a move outside of iTunes.

100% of my music files have imbedded artwork.

Of the other points you make, the only one where I feel I am missing out on something is the verification database.
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I agree that it is possible to manually embed artwork, but not that it is "perfectly simple". To me it is tedious, aggravating and unnecessary - and takes a whole load of time. Sure there are scripts that automate it some extent, but why put up with the hassle if it is avoidable? As well as the verification database you are missing out (potentially) on ripping to two formats, discovery of hidden tracks, extremely persistent error recovery, choice of tags from richer and often better sources than iTunes .. Not to mention that dBpoweramp is just lots quicker!
 
AndyU said:
I agree that it is possible to manually embed artwork, but not that it is "perfectly simple". To me it is tedious, aggravating and unnecessary - and takes a whole load of time. Sure there are scripts that automate it some extent, but why put up with the hassle if it is avoidable? As well as the verification database you are missing out (potentially) on ripping to two formats, discovery of hidden tracks, extremely persistent error recovery, choice of tags from richer and often better sources than iTunes .. Not to mention that dBpoweramp is just lots quicker!
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I use an iMac. If they ever produce a version for osx I am sure i will try it out.
 
I just use iTunes and search for the missing artwork on Google. iTunes usually gets 95%.
I use iTunes as a library for my Squeezeebox Touch. The artwork does not display on my PC interface that well but it does on the Touch, where the display is usually turned off anyway. The artwork is ok to have but once I have it I don't bother looking at it anyway. Its not like looking at a well crafted LP cover is it.
 
keith1962 said:
There is a thread on the Naim Forum at present about an event at Signals recently where they did dems of the new psu regulators. As part of the event they used the new NDS and did a dem to show that wav sounds better than flac. If they are both lossless how can that be???
Click to expand...

It can't be.

The demo was flawed in some way.
Put it another way. If their kit sounds different when playing wav against compressed lossless, they have designed exceptionally poor and inadequate kit.
I doubt that to be the case.

keith1962 said:
No not a blind dem I don't think which could be a factor. Take a look at the thread over there. I am puzzled by it but as you say if it is not blind that could be a factor, but then why choose wav to be better rather than alac or some other?
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Because wav is perceived as being pure, unadulterated full fat digital and anything else is seen by many as second rate.
 
Thanks for all the advice. FLAC via dbPoweramp looks good. Particularly like the customising of the folder structure it goes into, multiple databases and error checking. I only want to do this once...
 
After you've ripped ten or twenty CDs pause and see how they behave in your player/ UPnP server of choice - and perhaps an alternative. Checkout that tracks are played/served in the right order, check that multi-disc sets are handled to your liking, same for compilation albums. Check the folder structure makes sense - folders for artist are good for much popular music, but folders for composer suit classical music more. Make sure you are getting sort composer, sort artist and sort album artist fields set to your liking, otherwise Thomas Ades follows The Beatles ...
 
I ripped a loudon wainwright's new album "Older than my old man now" using windows media player. It tells me that the album is "so Damn Happy" with the track listings for that album and not thevcorrect one.

How can it do that?
 
I use dBpoweramp and second many of the points made above. If you have a big cd collection, it is not a quick job. I have made some mistakes on the tagging of my classical CDs and that is taking a little while to sort out. Both JRiver MC and dBpoweramp make this an easier process.

It's easy to get in a mess so a bit of thought at the start definitely pays dividends. (Note to self...)

Regards

73c
 
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