Best way to save Audio CD's to pc?

[SPaulovic]

Hi,

I'm about to save about 20 Audio CD's to my PC. (in order to avoid changing them everytime ).
The problem is that i have a lot of cd's that are CD-Extra. (Iron Maiden especially)

Question: What is the best (uncompressed) way to save cd's?

Currently I think about the "CD-Copy" function in Nero, because the music is saved without any compression and the data track is also kept in the image.

Furthermore Nero has this function:
"Read Media Catalog Number and ISRC"
What is it about? I tried to enable it, but then the reading speed dropped to 700 Kb/s and that's very slow.

I pay much attention on audio quality, therefore I don't want to
rip the audio tracks and convert them into wma or mp3.

Can you give me some advice how to solve with my problem?

[hoxlund]

you could also rip them to hard drive using a lossless codec, meaning no loss in audio quality to hard drive

since i always do 192Kbps mp3's i wouldn't be the one to ask how to do this, but you could use an audio ripper like exact audio copy and just load a lossless compression codec

just search on google, it shouldn't be too hard

[burninfool]

The best uncompressed format is WAV,then there are lossless compression formats such as APE or OGG.
I recommend you use CDex to rip and convert.

[SPaulovic]

Thank you for your answers.

As I have a Plextor Premium drive I will use the Plextools Audio Extraction to create .wav files.

Unfortunately this method only extracts the audio tracks.

Does creating an iso image of the cd influence / lower the bitrate or is it the same as with .wav?

[burninfool]

Thank you for your answers.

As I have a Plextor Premium drive I will use the Plextools Audio Extraction to create .wav files.

Unfortunately this method only extracts the audio tracks.

Does creating an iso image of the cd influence / lower the bitrate or is it the same as with .wav?

Do you want to extract the video(extras) as well?If so use Windows Explorer to drag and drop to your HD.
Creating an ISO image will result in the same bitrate(1411kbps).

[SPaulovic]

Thank you for your answers.

As I have a Plextor Premium drive I will use the Plextools Audio Extraction to create .wav files.

Unfortunately this method only extracts the audio tracks.

Does creating an iso image of the cd influence / lower the bitrate or is it the same as with .wav?

Do you want to extract the video(extras) as well?If so use Windows Explorer to drag and drop to your HD.
Creating an ISO image will result in the same bitrate(1411kbps).

Creating iso files is not a good solution, as there is no error checking.
Now I'm using Plextools with error detection. The audio tracks are
saved as wav 48kHz, 16 bit, stereo files.

This is the best solution, I think.

Again, thanks for the quick advice.

[DoWnR]

I'm not sure but I think using 48kHz wave files to store audio cds on your hdd is useless and a waste of space since CDA are encoded @ 44kHz/16bit/stereo

[Spazmogen]

You can also use a lossless system called SHORTEN.

Basically, you rip the CD to WAV or Bin/Cue and then run shorten.

It's more of a storage/file sharing compression though.

After doing some reading, I see that FLAC has become more popular than .SHN.

[SPaulovic]

I'm not sure but I think using 48kHz wave files to store audio cds on your hdd is useless and a waste of space since CDA are encoded @ 44kHz/16bit/stereo

Yes, you`re right. I ripped the cd to wav. files with 44kHz, 16 bit, stereo.

Surprisingly a ripped track is bigger than a track within an iso file.
The difference is about 5 MB! / audio track.

Nowadays the storage of big wav. files cannot be regarded as a waste of hdd space as the disk capacity increases.
Digital images are also saved in tiff. files to ensure better quality, esp. for printing.

@ Spazmogen
Thanks for doing some research. I rather prefer converting into wav. files
because it's surely much more simple than editing them afterwards.

[pranav81]

I liked the lossless format of Windows Media Audio.I use Media Player 10 for encoding and play the files using Winamp.

Also anything greater than 192 Kb/s in MP3 is also great and you probably wont notice the difference.


::Pranav::

[xchagg]

You can use EAC to rip the the entire CD as a WAV and CUE sheet. Than use Dameon Tools to mount the CUE sheet, and play with your normal media player. This takes up anywhere between 500-800MB per disc.

Or if you want to save space (anywhere between 30-70% of the original CD), just rip the CD with EAC and compress using a loseless codec like Monkey's Audio or FLAC. Use one folder per album. I don't know if it is useful but I also save the CUE sheet of the CD together with the APE/FLAC files.

And of course play back using Foobar2k