flac or wav?

Both just as easy to do, but flac takes up less space.
However, if you want to burn them onto a cd for replay on a normal cd player you will need to convert back to WAV. I did mine in WAV as I make a fair few cd compilations (for my own use) and it seemed most straight forward
I use dBPowerampRipper - seems easiest and fastest (I have almost 3000 cd's to rip...)
 
Look up a free program called Exact Audio Converter (EAC). It's an excellent FLAC encoder and will do mp3s of varying bitrates too. Wav files have little to no advantage over FLAC, which is mathematically lossless and uses a much smaller file size. It's easy enough to burn CDs from FLAC files with various freely available programs.
 
EAC is meant to be one of the best, but I found it hard work for some reason - I am not the most pc savvy !
You can easily burn cd's from flac, but to my knowledge mayny domestic players don't play fac, so you need to convert back to wAV first
 
marc2003 said:
and apart from the fact wav files waste space, you can't tag them either. completely useless. :p
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Can you explain more please - what are tags ?
My wavs have all the info I need, like artist title, album date etc - are they not tags ?
Also, can I now convert my wavs to flac, and what software is good..?
 
steveinspain said:
My wavs have all the info I need, like artist title, album date etc - are they not tags ?
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i can only assume your wavs are named with all that info? tags are that same information embedded in the file itself. it makes managing your collection via whatever media player you use much easier. :)

i see you mentioned dbpoweramp in a previous post. although i don't use it myself, i thought it could do all the converting to flac as well?

personally, i use foobar to convert/tag all my music (and i use EAC to rip cds to wav) but some people are put off by the fact it's not quite as easy to use as some other programs. it's very good once you get used to it though.
 
you can tag .wav's with id3 but it breaks the functionality and compatibility. really you can tag just about anything, but there's no garantee the player will then play it.
 
Well thanks guys, but I am still struggling here - my wavs must be named, but in what way will tags help manage my music - I use winamp as my media player, and Roxio media creator and sound editor to make compilations, but mainly as I know of nothing else that is so easy to use and allows easy cross-fading where I can choose what and how to fade in and out.
marc2003 - yes, dbpoweramp will allow me to convert to flac, so convince me...

ANY advice about what to use and why would be much appreciated !
 
james.miller said:
you can tag .wav's with id3 but it breaks the functionality and compatibility.
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really? :confused: i never knew that. :p

@steveinspain, it sounds like you're happy enough with your current system of using winamp. i guess that just displays the filename of the song that's playing and that gives you all the info you need. if that's fine, there's no need to change.

tagging is primarily needed for mp3s and hardware mp3 players. many portable devices won't function properly unless files are properly tagged.

but tagging can make your life easier on pc too if you want to use advanced filtering/searching of your collection. for example, with all your files tagged with year, you can generate playlists containing only songs from a certain year. another popular use is the "genre" tag (rock, pop, whatever). this is so you can just pick a "genre" and your media player will play random songs from any artist/album but in a particular "genre". and so on....... :p
 
tbh i have a reasonably good setup...CS4397 based DAC, a couple different amps, and sennheiser HD 580s and can't tell any difference between 320kbps mp3 and FLAC. I've got a decent ear as well, played the violin since I was 3 years old although I quit shortly after I turned 16.

I think flac is a waste of space. Just like all these audiophile grade power cables and digital coax cables are a waste of money.
 
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I would go with .flac

As for gurusan, 320kbps mp3's are considered high quality. You can say that nobody would tell the difference but as l have found out that depends on what kind of music you are listening to.

With good gear as gurusan's you can spot the difference in orchestral and rock music l believe. Some types of music benefit more by having a lossless format like a .flac or a .wav
 
CDj-Rossi said:
I can tell the difference between flac and WAV trance tracks.
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Even though there is no difference when you look at a spectral frequency? FLAC isn't a lossy codec whereas mp3 is, so you lose zero musical information.

Are you comparing the FLAC and WAV ripped properly by yourself from the same CD with the same software?

If you rip a CD to flac properly, then convert back to WAV and burn the CD properly then the burned CD will be identical to the original.
 
marc2003 said:
really? :confused: i never knew that. :p
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yeah :) .Wav is a container much like .MKV is, but it was never design to hold id3 tags. PCM is the bare audio stream that .Wav contains and its PCM thats ripped straight from the cd :)

If you rip a CD to flac properly, then convert back to WAV and burn the CD properly then the burned CD will be identical to the original
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he's not wrong you know :)
 
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