Originally Posted by
Decibel2015
Thanks for that. I've set my option to "Secure" as per your advice. All the options in "Accurate-rip" are ticked by default, it seems. Any other settings in there which I should have as default? re "Defective by design" setting...what do you mean by "non-standard" CDs? By "problem CDs" I assume you mean audio CDs which may be in less than pristine
condition and so are buggy in some way, play-wise?
Defective by design is one of those things you only monkey with when nothing else works. It may become necessary for messed up CDs, ones with troublesome copy-protection, things like that.
That leaves me with what option to go for in the Encoding section. Ok, so ALL options are lossless. Are there practical reasons to choose one option over another, apart from storage
space? E.g. would an uncompressed library pose difficulties for lower specced computers or something? If not, what exactly is the problem (if there is one?). If you want to imagine that
you're going to be an audiophile ripper, what setting would you choose? What would be the difference between the default setting's ripping time vs uncompressed? Is there a consensus
on what the default should be? What is it?
The only considerations when choosing a lossless compression level are (1) processing time, and (2) file size. There is no "audio" or "audiophile" consideration, as we are talking about the exact same, perfectly identical audio data.
Here's an analogy, with something that may be more familiar: I don't know if you ever use file compression programs to archive stuff on your computer....I have and use both 7zip and WinRar. So let's say I want to archive of all my AmEx statements from last year. I select all twelve .pdfs, then I use one of those programs to put them into a compressed package (that I'll file away on some backup drive somewhere and never look at again!
) These programs have settings that allow me to prioritize/balance between speed and file size.....on the one end, the slowest setting makes the most compact file but it takes noticeably longer to do it, and at the other end, the fastest setting is very speedy, but the file it creates is definitely larger. But the point is, if I ever need to open up the .zip or .rar package and access those files, the .pdfs are identical to the originals. They're not less clear, less sharp, less complete, they didn't drop a word here and there. They are the
exact same files as the original .pdfs, irrespective of which speed vs file size settings I used when I archived them.
This is the nature of lossless compression, for both data files and music files. Nothing is lost in compression. Any player that plays .flac has an decoder that knows how to open the .flac file and feed the audio bitstream into its digital-to-audio converter for playback. The package it arrived in is irrelevant. (This is also why all lossless codecs have the same audio quality....once the package is opened, the audio bits fed into the DAC are indistinguishable from the original CD.)
I don't have to imagine....I do consider myself an "audiophile ripper" , and I just leave it on the default. I'd only consider changing the compression setting if I were really squeezed for storage space or if I had a huge number of disks to rip.* I'm well past that now, and seldom have more than a handful of disks to rip in any one sitting. And I have abundant storage space. So lossless compression levels just aren't on my radar as something to worry about when ripping music.
*Even then, faster ripping wouldn't speed up the process, as metadata processing is usually the bottleneck.