Audiophiles unite!

Submitted by PandabeaR on April 25, 2006 - 12:20pm

So I decided to take up some community service, right? Yeah. I did. Surprising I know, but who better to serve than those who served all of us in such a way that we could never hope to pay them back. Veterans. Thats right, I DJed a dance for a group of veterans who are part of an organization named "N.A.M.I." or "Nation Alliance for the Mentally Ill". This is a group of veterans who prodominatly suffer from PTSD(Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) and other war-related mental illnesses. Aside from giving me a great since of accomplishment in community service, it also brought to my attention that that may be a profession I choose to emerse myself in. Given my love for music and my outgoing personality I think that someone like me would have a lot of fun. I wouldn't necessarily play that kind of music or do it in that environment, I would probably want to do more dance clubs and rave type gigs and such. But the main point of my post is my lust for greater quality of sound. If I hear a crack from a scratch in a CD I go nuts. I can not stand bad quality music or damaged files. I almost go so far as to delete the whole album entirely and just find somone else with the same CD and re-rip it to attain a cleaner version of the album... but I usualy do a good job of keeping my CDs clean. But there is still one factor left besides the CD cleanness. Thats the quality of the audio file itself when its imported. That brings me to the breaking point of this blog entry... I want to attain the best quality of sound possible in all my imports. I dont care if I can hear it or not, because thats not the point. I want to be able to sleep at night knowing that the CDs that I ripped are sitting in my computer with the highest quality of audio possible. So, how can I get the absolute highest quality files from my CDs when I import them? I have access to both my Mac and my PC. I would prefer to use my pc cause it has a dual layer dvd burner and is leagues faster than my Mac... also it has a nice fat 250 gig HD. So how about? Any Audiophiles out there?

Comments

Eudimorphodon's picture

Submitted by Eudimorphodon on April 25, 2006 - 12:56pm.

Just import the sound as 16 bit 44.1/khz .wav files and don't compress them. Then they will be *exactly* as good as they are on the CD. They'll also take up exactly the same amount of space. (Fixed rate, about 10MB/minute.)

--Peace

Edit: For archiving then of course you could .zip (or some other lossless compression algorythm, like .lzw) them up to save a little space, but being essentially random data they won't compress that much.

eeun's picture

Submitted by eeun on April 25, 2006 - 1:06pm.

Here's a ripping primer.

The most basic summary is the higher the bit rate, the more accurate a copy you will have from the CD.

If quality is more important to you than space, consider encoding to FLAC or another lossless format.

A fast computer helps.

On the PC side, Audiograbber works very well, and supports a variety of encoders.