Originally posted by: Jeff7
Originally posted by: MichaelD
Originally posted by: PurdueRy
My suggestion is to go with FLAC.
This way you will never have to rerip your CD to avoid compressing the song twice. You simply use DBpoweramp to convert that flac file to whatever format you need at the time and it will be just like you ripped from the CD. Plus then you get the added benefit of having a perfect CD quality track on your computer.
Best of both worlds IMO
Heh, now I'm curious! I know that FLAC offers the best audio quality for digitizing CDs. But, aren't the files almost the same size as the original CD/.wav files? A CD ripped to 320KB/s .mp3 is about 150MB in size...substantially smaller than say, 600MB.
It depends on the music itself. I get compression ratios from maybe 32% for simplistic instrumental tracks, to 75% for more complex rock/pop songs.
FLAC is nice for archiving, or regular use if you've got the space. The benefit of course of lossless compression is that you can encode to other audio formats from the "original" FLAC files, with no loss of quality other than that of simply encoding to a lossy format.
Concerning the original post, I also suggest MP3. It's just a more widely accepted format. If you encode with LAME, use the q=0 (or the highest quality) setting. What that setting does is control the balance between encoding time and quality. q=0 tells the encoder to do the best possible job it can, so it squishes more quality into the given bitspace that it has been given, but it takes longer to do it. So queue up plenty of work, set it to high quality, and go do something else. Or set the encoding process to Low Priority, and it won't slow things down.