Best music format for Firefly and SoundBridge

[mwalsh]

Hi,

Quick question…

I’m about to embark on digitising my CD collection using iTunes 6 and seeing as I’m doing this pretty much from scratch I want to make sure I use the best format I can.

I’d prefer a lossless format but I wanted to check what other Firefly users are using and what seems to be the most reliable in terms of playback on the SoundBridge?

Thanks.

[richdunlop]

@mwalsh wrote:

Hi,

Quick question…

I’m about to embark on digitising my CD collection using iTunes 6 and seeing as I’m doing this pretty much from scratch I want to make sure I use the best format I can.

I’d prefer a lossless format but I wanted to check what other Firefly users are using and what seems to be the most reliable in terms of playback on the SoundBridge?

Thanks.

Lossless is the right choice. From there you can go to anything. I’m still working through the ‘Great Rerip’ having gone to mp3 initially 🙄

As your server is an NSLU2 flac would be a good choice although it requires transcoding on the server side as the Soundbridge doesn’t (currently) have a flac codec. Feedback indicates that the slug has enough grunt to transcode two or three flac streams concurrently.

ALAC is an alternative and Roku released an ALAC codec in the last firmware upgrade although from what I’ve seen there are some remaining issues with it.

I’m sure there will be other suggestions…

[mwalsh]

Thanks for your reply Rich.

I don’t see an option in iTunes 6 to rip to FLAC but I have Apple Lossless (ALAC) so perhaps the latter will be the best. I suppose there’s bound to be other utilities that can rip to FLAC but it’s nice to have a one stop shop with iTunes.

When I get a SoundBridge I’ll give Apple Lossless a try to see if it works well before I rip the lot.

Good luck with the “Great Rerip”!

[jtbse]

Yep…if you must use iTunes for ripping, ALAC is pretty much the only lossless choice you have, unless you wanted to go WAV or AIFF (which I wouldn’t recommend….big files, poor tagging support and so forth).

But there are other (better) tools than iTunes for ripping CD’s that would support FLAC. Not sure about for for Macs though since I don’t use one.

But agree with Rich that you want to spend what you need to on disk and go lossless. It just allows you more options….and believe me, you *will* change your mind or want to do something different with your music files in the future that you’re not thinking of right now.

[mwalsh]

Thanks for the reply.

I’m on PC so I’d be interested to know any other tools you could recommend for FLAC ripping.

[jtbse]

Many of the true audio “bitheads” out there seem to like Exact Audio Copy, because for quite awhile it was just about the only tool for doing secure rips. But for me it’s not the easiest to use. I’ve used it in the past, but mostly just for damaged CDs that I couldn’t rip any other way.

My favorite ripper at the moment is the “CD Input” app that’s part of dBPowerAmp Music Converter found here:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/

Spoon’s new version 12 is really nice for cd ripping, allows both AccurateRip and secure ripping modes, and you can download and install almost any codec you would ever want to use.

[mwalsh]

Excellent, thanks for the advice. I will take a look at those.

[sansp00]

I use dBPowerAmp also, but it’s not as bulletproof as ExactAudioCopy. But it will do the job 99.9% of the time. When it fails, I go to ExactAudioCopy …
Patrick S.

[richdunlop]

Another vote for dBPowerAmp from me. I just got the R12 ‘reference’ version. I’m not sure if it comes in the standard version or not but the reference version supports secure ripping which appears to give EAC a run for its money. As Patrick points out though you probably need both in reality.

[jtbse]

@richdunlop wrote:

I just got the R12 ‘reference’ version.

Hey Rich…

Curious…what’s in the reference version that pushed you to it? Did you get it for the “ultra secure” ripping mode? Or something else? Other than ultra secure ripping, I didn’t see too much in the additional features list that I would use enough to compel me to pay the extra for the reference version.

Am I missing out on something?

-Tim

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