Ripping Audio to CD - Soundcards

[r1ych]

Hi there,

I have a whole heap of CD's that I want to store on a hard drive (both on the Thinkpad's drive and externally).

I found a great comparison of the Codecs to use from http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php ... comparison

My question is this: When I am ripping from CD to one of the Lossless formats (flac, alac, wma, etc) does the quality of soundcard come into play all? Say I converted all the CD's to wav files, then would the soundcard be used?

Surely I am just taking one digital format (CD) to another and therefore the conversion just takes places by number crunching by the CPU?

What does the "enable digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device" do?

Appreciate any help/recommendations on digitising my CD collection.

[tfflivemb2]

You can actually convert them without a soundcard at all. A sound card isn't required for anything other than playback.

Just so you know, .wav files will be quite large. You might want to consider mp3 format, with a higher bitrate (minimum of 128kbps)

With wav. format each song will most likely be about 10MB, whereas with .mp3 format, it will be about half to a third.

"enable digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device" enable the digital playback of the CD, I believe through the sound card.

[r1ych]

Thanks tfflivemb2!!

I didn't think the soundcard was important during the conversion process from CD....I'd just heard of audiophiles complaining about the quality of those fitted as standard to laptops. If it's only for playback that this becomes an issue, then that's OK for me for now.

I was going to use one of the lossless formats rather than mp3 as ultimately I want to get rid of the CD's that I own - hence I want to keep the tracks in as high a quality as I can. For personal playback I can play them back via my Thinkpad or in the future a desktop/media center with a decent soundcard.

Any advice on lossless formats?

[christopher_wolf]

Any advice on lossless formats?

Well, you could go with FLAC as it is a high quality lossless format, but the rendered, finished FLAC files tend to be significantly larger than even several MP3s. There is also, for high quality, the Windows Media Audio 9 WMAL, ALAC Apple, Monkey's Audio, RealAudio Lossless RAL, OptimgFrog, Pegasus, etc.

Go with whichever one you like the best after trying them out for awhile; some of the more common include ALAC, FLAC, and WMAL. Each have their own little extended feature set; e.g. some offer hybrid/lossy compression as well whilst others can fit inside the MP4 container.

[r1ych]

Thanks Chris. Do you know/have any experience of playing back WMA Lossless on Linux? I think it will according to the document shown at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Audio

I don't have an iPod device (no plans to get one yet) and having the ability to play/store the files on either Windows or Linux would be a plus. Guess I am after having a good "gold" copy of my files.

[f1reverb]

If you get rid of your CDs (if factory releases) then your copies, regardless of format, would be illegal IIRC. If they are not factory released discs then they are illegal now.

If you keep the originals and want to back them up properly, use Exact Audio Copy to clone the originals. I do this for any audio disc I want to use in the car, and I use a back-up copy of any data disc as I have been victim to CD-ROM drive failure, i.e. a hand-grenaded W98 factory install disc when the drive failed.

Artists deserve payment for their work as the great majority don't make any money and are grateful to break-even with a release. Another reason I use the backup discs is that most artists I own put out one disc in a tiny run and I'll never find another copy if my original was damaged.

[christopher_wolf]

You should be able to get it to work well on Linux. You do, however, have to get the ffmpeg packages, depending on what distro you are on, as well as some extra files that Windows uses. Once that gets done, however, it sounds pretty good.

EDIT: I would like to take this time to point out that this isn't a thread about DRM and ripping audio from CDs is *legal* given that you are owner of the original, licensed CD.

[r1ych]

Thanks f1reverb - they are indeed all original disks. It's more a problem of storage as I simply have too many of them and am moving overseas, so before I put them into storage I want to rip them to disk.

Thanks Christopher - I'm using Gentoo, so I should be able to grab those packages and integrate them.

Next - up, the choice of external hard drive to use! I'll dig through the forums and see what people are using....

[christopher_wolf]

Next - up, the choice of external hard drive to use! I'll dig through the forums and see what people are using....

I use a 500GB Western Digital MyBook; I got it for around $150 at BestBuy. So far, they have had two sales like that and will probably have a third. Really good deal if you can grab it.
The MyBook has been an excellent desktop external HDD thus far and it looks like it wil remain so for quite awhile as a well.

[r1ych]

Great advice - I was looking at those and at that price it's a bargain. I'll keep my eyes pealed for that third sale Cheers Chris!

[f1reverb]

An even cheaper route is to get a USB 2.0 adapter that connects to both 2.5 and 3.5" drives (PATA or SATA) for 25 bucks or so and use any hard drive without even a case. Figuring stereo digital audio 44.1k 16-bit stereo files at 10mb a minute of disk space when converted to a WAV file, and getting a Seagate 400gb PATA at outpost.com (Fry's) for 109.95, you can bring the equivalent of 600 one hour CDs with you. You can get 200gb drives for fifty bucks and still have 300 or so CDs with you. The Seagate drives come in a nice plastic container to carry them in.

[skitty4gzus]

Honestly though to simplify things with absolutely no insult on your intelligence here is my opinion. Unless you are mastering cd's for some record label mps format is quite sufficient to use. Like it was said earlier at least 128k or even AAC format. For simplicity sake use iTunes. I know some people are gonna rock on me about that choice but whatever. Just have iTunes library saved to your external hard drive. Simplicity, quality of music, organization. Soundcard matters nothing until playback. Hope that helps.