I used dBpoweramp to rip my entire CD collection years ago. It’s a solid program, especially because it confirms the accuracy of your rips in the AccurateRip database. May I suggest trying FLAC Uncompressed instead of WAV? FLAC files have superior tagging capability. In my experience, metadata is often lost or corrupted with WAV files.
FLAC also has an uncompressed option. The data is uncompressed, just like WAV. The advantage of FLAC is its superior tagging capability. For WAV files, the metadata is "attached" to the file, but for FLAC files, the metadata is stored within the file. Metadata is much more reliable with FLAC. With WAV files, the metadata has a tendency to become lost or corrupted. Just a suggestion.
I'm looking at the audio properties of wav files and they seem detailed. What additional information would I put in the metadata of a FLAC file and why?
The difference is not what information is stored; WAV and FLAC can store the same metadata. The difference is how the metadata is stored. For WAV files, the metadata is “attached” to the WAV file; that is to say, the metadata is actually stored in a separate file. For FLAC files, the metadata is embedded within the FLAC file itself. The bottom line is that you’re more likely to lose your metadata with WAV files.
Like I may have mentioned, I'm a complete novice. I've read that compressed audio files require decompression and as such require on-the-fly use of the CPU during play back which may add jitter to the audio. I've also read that storage is cheap, which is true, and as such, why compress at all? Hence my efforts to go lossless uncompressed and wav seemed like the right choice.
I was unaware that flac could write uncompressed but I also read that flac has limited bit-depth and sample rate as compared to wav. Given the gear I have it's unlikely I could discern between one format or another, but I'd like to avoid re-ripping these CD's. Perhaps I'll read more before committing more hours. Thanks!
It’s true that compressed files will require more on-the-fly CPU usage, although I’m not sure that this really makes a difference for sound quality. That said, I use FLAC Uncompressed because it satisfies my audio nervosa. As you said, storage is cheap.
For bit depth and sample rate, FLAC will give you everything you realistically need. I don’t know what the upper limit is, but FLAC handles at least 24-bit/192KHz files, which covers like 99.9% of the music commercially available.
IIRC, the different compression levels in FLAC do indeed require more or less computer processing to both compress and uncompress. This is my point of view:
Don't bother to massively compress unless you really are working with a tiny finite storage. But don't use uncompressed just because of nervosa. The default setting, whatever that is, is probably fine.
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