Ripping CDs, which format??

[kilohawk]

I'm mainly an iTunes user (i know, but i use mac and windows ) and i have loads of different rips in different quality and in different places, so my music files are very unorganised.
I want to rip everything in a lossless format, which can be tagged for viewing in iTunes and be used across iDevices without the use of additional apps.
Storage isnt a problem, and i know some formats are larger than others.

FLAC then, is a no-go as iTunes doesn't support this.
AIFF looks a good option, but i think there are problems with tagging?
ALAC (Apple Lossless) seeeeeems to be the better choice, and appears to be a proper lossless format.
WAV I'm not sure about, the tagging seems a but off in itunes, and I don't think it carries artwork?

But if I chose ALAC, could this have repercussions if i were to get an audio streamer from the likes of logitec, ARCAM, Teac etc...?
Do most systems like ALAC, or is this only licensed for apple software/hardware?

Im using DbPoweramp, but I do have EAC and another good program (forgot the name )
Music will be played through a decent HiFi from my Xonar DX and streamed from a readyNAS Duo.

Using one format for everything is my aim, because im fed up of having a messy music folder with different fomats and wrongly tagged tracks

Sorry if this has been covered countless times, but when googling the subject, people are saying to use all kinds of alternative players and rippers
And i hope this is in the correct section!!
Thanks for any suggestions....

 

[Hamish]

If you NEED lossless i'd go Apple Lossless.
Then get an Apple TV for streaming. iTunes converts everything to apple lossless when it sends it to AirPlay, if you have it Apple Lossless already it's less work for your computer.
Apparently ALAC is open source too so i would guess it would work on most streamers

But seriously - just use high quality AAC, i promise you even the most accomplished audiophile using the best equipment can't tell the difference. plus it saves you space and anything will play it.

 

[Vonhelmet]

ALAC if you've got plenty of space or you are mental about audio quality and have a sufficiently good hi-fi system that such quality differences would even be discernible. AAC if you are tighter for space or don't have the system or the mentality.

 

[kilohawk]

I'm leaning toward ALAC and FLAC dual rip now.
I'm only 20 and will be buying higher end equipment as life goes on (which regards lossless ripping).

I only want to rip once, and encode once, hence the dual rip.

The dual rip is because as far as i can work out, only NAIM supports ALAC, and NAIM is rather an expensive buy just to enable ALAC streaming.

My step dad is buying a media streamer soon, probably the marantz, which doesn't list ALAC as a supported format.

 

[Martynt74]

Whats wrong with something like a Sonos or Squeezebox as a streamer?

 

[Meatball]

As someone who has their entire library in ALAC, I say go for ALAC . It supports metadata, is open source and supported by XBMC to .

 

[cokecan]

ALAC here too mainly because all of my portable devices I'd play music on are Apple-based, iTunes is my main music player and Subsonic music streamer will happily transcode them to other formats if I want to listen over the network/net via a web browser.

Am I right in thinking that I could convert ALAC to FLAC in the future without much bother or loss in quality should I ever want to?

 

[CaptainCrash]

Am I right in thinking that I could convert ALAC to FLAC in the future without much bother or loss in quality should I ever want to?

Yes, you can transcode from one lossless format to another a million times, and assuming nothing goes wrong the final output will be bit-identical to the original.

The process isn't particularly bothersome - it can be time-consuming depending on the size of your library and the amount of CPU power you can throw at it, but once you've pointed the software in the right direction for source/destination, you can just go away and leave it until it's finished.

 

[kilohawk]

Cheers guys!

Yeah, you can convert from one lossless to another as many times as you like

So I started ripping earlier, to ALAC format, simply because everything we use currently supports it, and theres nothing stopping me leaving the PC converting to another format over-night should we need a different format.
I'll be doing this anyway to AAC for my iphone and mac (because of small storage) and the pc is ripping straight to the NAS, ready for converting.
I've put 3 dvd drives into the PC which takes the ripping time to 13 mins for 3 CDs....this is going to take a while

 

[Martynt74]

Yeah its a pain. I'm in the process of re-ripping cd's that i converted to mp3 years ago before i had the disk space for FLAC. Not made easy by the fact there are no rippers i can find that just rip on cd entry and then eject it

Just as a note, if you have all your files in ALAC in Itunes you can set it it convert them to AAC when syncing devices on the fly rather than having 2 versions of the same file

 

[Meatball]

Yeah its a pain. I'm in the process of re-ripping cd's that i converted to mp3 years ago before i had the disk space for FLAC. Not made easy by the fact there are no rippers i can find that just rip on cd entry and then eject it

Just as a note, if you have all your files in ALAC in Itunes you can set it it convert them to AAC when syncing devices on the fly rather than having 2 versions of the same file

Love this feature! Before the newest iTunes release it was limited to 128Kbit which sucked but Apple have allowed different bitrates now .

 

[arad85]

Not made easy by the fact there are no rippers i can find that just rip on cd entry and then eject it

I use REACT (a wrapper around EAC) to rip my CDs. The process is:

• Insert CD
• check CD is actually what the system thinks it is
• Press F10
• Click link of picture I want as album/folder art
• Eject CD

The result of this is a single image FLAC file with embedded cue etc and folder art in Artist/Album/* AND an mp3 set of tracks fully tagged in an mp3 folder in Artist/[YEAR] Album/* I think you can set it up to rip ALAC too.

It is the most streamlined method I have found of ripping CDs.

 

[Martynt74]

I use REACT (a wrapper around EAC) to rip my CDs. The process is:

• Insert CD
• check CD is actually what the system thinks it is
• Press F10
• Click link of picture I want as album/folder art
• Eject CD

The result of this is a single image FLAC file with embedded cue etc and folder art in Artist/Album/* AND an mp3 set of tracks fully tagged in an mp3 folder in Artist/[YEAR] Album/* I think you can set it up to rip ALAC too.

It is the most streamlined method I have found of ripping CDs.

I have DB Poweramp which is pretty much the same. My only problem is that my server is headless. So i either have to use DBpoweramp on my laptop and then transfer the files or remote onto the server.

This wasn't an issue when i had a vortexbox, it was fully automated and there were very few cd's it didnt rip accurately. The size of my collection nowadays means i'm better off with WHS2011 though

 

[kilohawk]

Yeah its a pain. I'm in the process of re-ripping cd's that i converted to mp3 years ago before i had the disk space for FLAC. Not made easy by the fact there are no rippers i can find that just rip on cd entry and then eject it

Just as a note, if you have all your files in ALAC in Itunes you can set it it convert them to AAC when syncing devices on the fly rather than having 2 versions of the same file

Excellent, very glad you pointed this out as I would have done just that

On a another note, I have a CD which found its way onto the car floor and one track won't rip properly, Is there a feature which repairs the track using a database or something?