I’m about to take on a large CD collection and archive it to my NAS. Are there any go-to apps to accomplish this (Windows)? Ideally, they will be FLAC or 192kbps MP3 or higher.
I think the “industry standard” tool for ripping is this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exact_Audio_Copy
Nowadays I see no reason not to use FLAC. I’ve not ripped anything less than 320 CBR mp3 for almost 20 years.
My reasoning is that I’m an audio engineer with good equipment and I can’t hear the difference between v0 and flac
My favourite tool on Windows to do that is fre:ac.
I should mention, however, the benefits of flac audio depend of the equipment and the person listening. Me, personally, I can’t, no matter what I do, tell the difference between a 245 kbps VBR mp3, and a cd-quality flac, even when doing side-by-sides. So, I think that it’s not worth wasting time and storage space using flacs.
For Windows, Exact Audio Copy has been the standard for some time. In Linux, what I run, I tend to use Ruby Ripper which should be available in most repositories.
Either path ends with me adjusting the tags using Picard. Which reminds me, it’s been a few years, I need to check and see if there are any new rippers available for Linux.
I’ve just always used abcde in terminal personally
Very big difference in quality between mp3 and flac. My advice is if you’re going to do it, do it right the first time. Flac is for sure the way to go. You can always make mp3s from those flacs. Ripping CD’s take alot longer then converting files. fre:ac is a great CD ripping application. It’s similar to Exact Audio Copy but easier to use.
I like V2 VBR MP3s for a balance of quality and size, or V0 for best quality and still VBR
Do you want and can deal with no compression at all?, what if you made an ISO of each CD and then archived that as a lossless option.
Strictly speaking, you cannot make an ISO from an audio CD. Yes, you can make a bin cue file pair as another commenter has suggested. But realistically what you’ve then got is uncompressed wav audio with the metadata in separate files. The only real advantage this gives you is something that theoretically allows you to recreate precisely the original layout of the audio CD, together with the appropriate length of silence in between the tracks, etc.
When you convert to FLAC there is no loss in audio quality, you use approximately half of the storage space compared to wav, and you can have all of the metadata such as tags and art images embedded in the file itself.
Bin/cue is not really very useful unless you’re not listening directly from a computer or burning to a CD and listening to that. For every other use case, it’s better to have a file that you can play directly and index directly.
I don’t have a need beyond .flac and storage costs will become a concern at some point.
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I don’t think you can make .iso’s of Audio CD’s. .bin and .cue files are the standard I think.
