copying cds to hard drives

pedrothefish

I am getting rid of my cd collection but i am saving them to a couple of hard drives.
what is the best format to save them in for the best sound? i.e. mp3, wav, flac, ogg etc etc.
thanks

closed

flac or wav

pull62

I would say use the highest quality which is lossless. Uses a fair amount of disc space but with the price of HD's coming down all the time is well worth it.

jestyenot

I would keep your cd collections, what happens if your hard drives go down?

You can still put them onto your HDs to listen to though.

WhiteChristmas

It is obligatory for someone to come along now and say, "you know, of course, that it's completely illegal to keep the copies once you've disposed of the CDs, don't you?"

Flac seems to be the format of choice for audiophiles.

fwor

It does also depend to an extent on what you plan to play them on. FLAC is more processor-intensive than ALAC, for example, and this may be an issue on portable devices.

Apple has recently handed ALAC over to the Open Source community, though whether free codecs will become universally available remains to be seen.

chunter

For practicality, all mine are now in MP3. Does your selected music/media player allow FLAC?
I certainly would avoid the itunes-only format aac.
And also the Windows format WMA.

So I'd plump for 320 kbps mp3.
At this stage I think flexibility is more important than out and out quality.

billywhizz

FLAC for lossless quality but they won't play on an iPod, as Chunter says 320kbps MP3 is enough. To be honest 192kbps MP3's are fine if you mostly listen on earbuds or an ipod anyway.

http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3-sound-quality-test-128-320/

Hammyman

pull62 wrote: »

I would say use the highest quality which is lossless. Uses a fair amount of disc space but with the price of HD's coming down all the time is well worth it.

Hard drive prices have shot up by a lot the last week or so as there is currently a shortage due to the factories being hit by natural disasters.

Asus won't have any to put in laptops after the end of the month.

googler

WhiteChristmas wrote: »

It is obligatory for someone to come along now and say, "you know, of course, that it's completely illegal to keep the copies once you've disposed of the CDs, don't you?"

Flac seems to be the format of choice for audiophiles.

Darn, you beat me to it.

OP, by all means tuck the CDs away in an attic, garage or cupboard, but surely you must realise that it would be useful to keep them in case you need/want to rip them again...?

SmileySteve92

MP3 is probably the best format to use, It's also compatible with most phones and ipods and stuff.