Ken Hardman;141301 Wrote: > > Pat Farrell says that all lossless formats are much the same. > Tommypeters suggests using xACT for ripping. joncourage suggests EAC > and mauidj seems to be in the same situation as me, being an Apple guy. > Can anyone finally clarify what the best solution for optimum audio > quality is?
Note that ripping and encoding are two different things. Ripping using EAC, xACT, CDEX, etc. is the act of extracting bits off the CD and recording them in a lossless, uncompressed format. The only potential loss of sound quality here is if there are errors in this process, which is usually caused by scratches on the CD. These programs try, sometimes very hard, to eliminate these errors. Encoding is an entirely different matter and is independent of ripping, although almost all rippers will automatically call an encoder. And, provided you have a clean rip, it doesn't matter which ripping program calls which encoder - in fact you don't need a ripping program at all, provided you already have the rips in some sort of lossless uncompressed format. And yes, lossless is lossless - every lossless format should produce a bit-perfect copy of the original or the format would be very quickly abandoned. The only consideration as to which lossless to use would be ease of playback for your devices. FLAC is the way to go for the Squeezebox, but you might want to use Apple Lossless if you want to play it back on an iPod. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=27846 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
