[HiAudio]

How inferior is this to a stand alone player?
 
My CD/DVD rom was little over $20 from newegg. I used it to play CD and use optical cable to connect motherboard to headphone amp icon HDP. With the same  HD650 I found this inferior to the setup that I used old Oppo 971 player and old low end Onkyo receiver.
 
So is this always the case that one use computer to play music? Any great CD/DVD rom that can be used for better quality playing?

 

[Edoardo]

Well, it depends... From the quality of the transport... From the output stages... From a lot of things.
 
For stereo audio only, ripping to an HDD is surely a nobrainer IMHO...

 

[HiAudio]

Quote:

Well, it depends... From the quality of the transport... From the output stages... From a lot of things.
 
For stereo audio only, ripping to an HDD is surely a nobrainer IMHO...

Which format should I rip them? In windows player there are 6 formats. The audio quality could be using the 192 kbps (best quality). But is this keeping the same quality as on the original CD? Also would the large capacity spin disk drive keep up withe speed? I ripped about 20-30 disks into mp3 and they used a about 7 GB on my Nook. I guess I may use a SSD internal drive to keep them.
 

 

[trog]

Hmm regarding Blu Ray : drop down to the HTPC sub forum in AVS and IIRC the common opinion now is that TMT5 is one of the best HTPC software for blu ray playback?

 

[Edoardo]

I am not very keen in Blu-Ray ripping.
 
To HiAudio, since you are using Windows I can suggest EAC as ripping software. 
 
I'd rip them in FLAC, without any loss of quality. A CD has a 16bit/44.1KHz resolution.
For storage, going to SSD is not necessary IMHO. An "old" external HDD is fine.

 

[HiAudio]

I tried to install the EAC ripping software and found this link
 
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
 
but the downloaded software is AudioConvert from foxtab. I ran it and there is no where it can read a CD and convert files. Is it the right software that I need to use to rip my CDs into FLAC files?
 
 

 

[joe_cool]

You have been tricked. Try this:
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/index.php/resources/download/

 

[HiAudio]

OK, I downloaded the eac-1.0beat3, the latest version, and installed it. While I was running it in the Compression options (using external program) I see no FLAC option available. Am I missing something somewhere? Thanks.

 

[Edoardo]

I don't use EAC, but look for something to to change the bitrate or compression options.
 
There I read "128kpbs". You want lossless encoding...! A CD is sampled at 16bit/44.1KHz
 

 

[HiAudio]

Yes, I intend to rip all my CDs into FLAC format and sotre them on an external hard drive, so I can listen to them anywhere I want and can. Meanwhile I read FLAC is a gret format to archive music and incase of CD disk breaks I can burn an identical CD I used to have.
 
Per this thread and my search on the web the EAC is one of the best software to rip CD into FLAC format. I had browsed all menus of the software and did not find the way to rip CD into FLAC. I wonder if I missed something.

 

[Edoardo]

Can't tell, sorry...
 
Try to give these guides a read
 
http://blowfish.be/eac/Setup/setup1.html
 

 

[Joe Bloggs]

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=EAC_and_FLAC

 

[HiAudio]

Thank you guys. I am now able to rip CDs into FLAC files after installing flac-1.2.1b and could also play with window player after installing madFlac-1.10.
 
However, the ripping result is a mess that all tracks from differnt CDs are put together as the picture shown. e.g. two CDs, Vivaldi - Four Seasons and Beethoven's sym 5 & 6. 21 tracks are put together along with othr files. And the album identity was lost and it's impossible to manage them in media library. As a result the playing is a pain because I had to choose each time it change tracks. I checked settings in EAC and could not find why.
 

 
 

 

[HiAudio]

A second thought: if the FLAC has to be converted back to WAV and be played why not rip CDs into lossless wav file and listen to them? My hard drive is 1.5 TB, huge enough to store all my music. Wouldn't play loseless WAV file the better option to enjoy the highest quality music?  

 

[Joe Bloggs]

What player are you using? You need a player that can read ID tags from FLAC files, such as foobar2000. wav files can‘t store tags so the result would be the mess you‘re getting now, with ANY player.