How to maintain audio format when ripping

[blackrose_2c]

How does one maintain the audio format when ripping without converting to WMA or MP3 etc etc. I just want to rip cd's and leave as they are for those of my family who don't own mp3 or wma players.
Any suggestions/support would be great.

Thanks.

[LtData]

Re: How to maintain audio format when ripping

What do you mean "maintain audio format"? Do you mean you want to rip a CD then burn off a copy of it as an audio CD?

[xoas]

Re: How to maintain audio format when ripping

Your question is a little confusing since it is not clear what what you are trying to maintain with your rips or what your plans are with respect to making your music available to other members of your family. So let me toss out a few ideas/thoughts:

1. Assuming your eventual goal is to make copies of CD's in CD audio format you have a few options:
-Most software for making CD's seem to have built-in ability to make copies of CD's and this would be the technically most simple solution (although this would be achieved without storing the CD audio tracks on your computer);
-If you wanted to copy an entire CD to CD and also copy the audio tracks to your computer, the old school solution would be to rip the CD to your computer in wave format and then burn a CD from the wave files to CD for the copy you want to make.
As a solution this has certain drawbacks. Wave files, although lossless, are very large compared to other file formats. Wave files (by convention) do not carry tag information (although dBpowerAMP Music Converter-dMC, MusicMatch and some other programs can and will create tags for wave files but these may not be useful for playing back of tracks).
-A better bet is to rip your music to your computer in a format of your choice and then convert it a second time when you burn it back to CD. Here you could either rip to a format that your CD burning software could automatically handle on its own or else you could convert to a format that suited your needs and tastes best and then convert it back to wave using dMC.

Here the question is also what format to choose. If you want to make sure that you have an exact copy, you might want to use a lossless codec. These codecs (Flac, Ape or Monkeys, Shorten, or Wavepack) will produce files that will be roughly 4/10 to 6/10 the size of a wave file but which will preserve of of the audio information from that file. Check your CD burner software to see if your burner can manage any of these formats. I believe Nero can handle Flac files (but it may require a plug-in), for example (dBpowerAMP CD Writer, also known as dCW, can handle conversion from any of the formats for which you have the right codecs installed but it is not currently compatible with dMC r12 so you would have to have dMC r11.5 as a separate install with the "Legacy" codecs installed if you are otherwise using dMC 12). For some other lossless formats, you may have to convert back to wave prior to burning. Since these codecs, as well as wave, are all lossless, you do not have to worry about losing audio quality through the conversion/reconversion process.

Your other alternative when it comes to choosing codecs is to use a "lossy" codec such as mp3 or wma. The advantage of a lossy codec is that it will be quite a bit smaller than either a wave file or a lossless file of the same track. A higher quality copy will be 1/4 to 1/6 the size of the corresponding wave file. Most CD burner programs seem to be able to burn CD's directly from Mp3 and some can manage wma (although ogg vorbis and musepack seem to do a better job than mp3 or than wma). In other cases, you will have to reconvert your files back to wave format before burning. You will lose some audio quality when you rip from CD to a lossy format (although you would not lose additional audio quality converting back to wave). However, at higher bitrates (exactly how high has to do with listeners, their listening equipment and environment, and the music itself), you should not notice any decrease in audio quality. For mp3 either the standard preset or the extreme preset (although that may be the old terminology) should suit your needs very well.

2. The other possibility that occurs to me is that you are concerned not so much about perfect audio replication as much as the more practical problems of keeping albums and CD's intact as they are stored on your computer. If that is the case, let us know because that is a subject for a whole different tutorial.

Hope this helps,
Best wishes,
Bill