handmadeandroid

Hi there, this article prompted me to join and comment! If you want to get the best from your CD collection or future purchases I recommend the following: Using any decent brand of CD drive, rip your CDs using a freeware called 'Exact Audio Copy'. This should be configured prior to ripping for the first time. There's advanced functions that could be of interest to audiophiles contained in the menus. In particular is the error checking function. As far as I can remember this checks the CD at a bit level during the ripping process to make sure that precise and accurate data is retrieved. This will slow the process down somewhat, but it can be worth it especially when extracting from old and damaged discs. Next for archiving and playback, you can compress it using 'free lossless audio codec' (FLAC). This will compress a disc to approximately half of it's original size, so about 350mb. This may seem large compared to mp3, however bare in mind a 2tb hard drive is somewhere in the region of £65 so storage shouldn't be an issue. The only caveat to this, is some portable players will not playback FLAC, however just use 'LAME' to encode to MP3 for portable devices. For regular home playback, most audio players such as winamp will handle FLAC,others may require a codec or plugin (for example WMP). To my ears at least, through a half decent sound card into my trusty old Rotel stereo amplifier, the sound quality is fantastic, with no loss of top end detail and mixing of the sound stage I get from MP3 playback.