FLAC files vs. WAV vs. mp3/4 vs. wma file

[Rastus]

Ok, I came to the digital age kicking and screaming.  CD's don't record enough data slices to sound as well as albums...never mind direct-to-disk half mastered albums.

So I have CD's and I have those itsy bitsy players.  Way back...10-15 years I could tell the wma file was much better than the mp's file at the time.  WAV extension files are lossless but larger.  However, who cares today when you can get a 128 GB thumb drive as big as your thumbnail for $25?

So...I transferred 115 or so CD's (with space for more) to wav format for the thumb drive.  Ooops...wav format is not standard so some car stereo players don't keep up the album name and artists...some may but my car stereo does not keep up with the album name and artist unless in mp3.  It may do FLAC (FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec) but it's a pain and needs to be replaced anyway as I digress..... 

So are any of you guys out there audiophiles or technogeeks enough to suggest a good program to transfer CD's to FLAC files and keep the album names and artist names...ie., the data about the songs you are listening too like the mp3/4 does?  I'm going to start all over now...any suggestions for software to convert CD to FLAC?  I downloaded one that's poorly documented and that can't go out and grab missing album data....I need a good program. 
 
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[tombogan03884]

I understood all of it up to "CD's don't record enough".

[alfsauve]

Since you're starting with CD audio it's not going to get any better, you just don't want it to get any worse.

Did you look at AIFF?    You can rip the CDs with iTunes for that.

For the few wax albums I want to transcribe I got a 96K USB interface and played them through that into WAV files.   I keep the WAVs but the ones I wanted on my phone I converted to MP3s.  It's a phone not a lot of quality there.

[Big Frank]

Last night there was a Lita Ford video and today she's gone and there are a bunch of other videos. Where did she go? When I copy CDs I record them as WAV (lossless) flies so I can't help you.

[alfack]

I would go with mp3 and make sure you rip them at 320 kbps or greater. That way you can get all the metadata/tags, have sufficient quality and save some space. I am an audiophile and use USB keys for my car. Still prefer the uncompressed CDs for home tho.

[Sponsor]

[Rastus]

I swapped Lita out after I perused a few more artists.  She's back now...

Alfack I suffer through the mp3 even at their best setting so I've been doing wav files.  The sync crap in the car doesn't pick up the wav data and I was planning FLAC because I thought it may. 

[alfack]

I hear ya. MP3s sound like they are coming out of tin cans to me, even tho they say the human ear can't tell a difference once you hit a certain sample rate. Monkeys audio might be another format worth checking into.

[Rastus]

"They" say that but I say it ain't true.  The dynamic range is missing on a lot of it. 

Monkeys audio....never heard of it.  I bought the wife a Kenwood dn991 a year ago and it does the wav's and flac's.  I have not tried to see if the wav metadata that Microsoft puts in the music shows up on her Kenwood yet.

[Jim Kennedy-ar154me]

You might want to try Audacity at https://sourceforge.net/projects/audacity/ 
It is a freebe and what we use where I work. You can use the "export" option to save wav in other formats.

[Rat1969]

(first time poster)

I'll try to keep this short... Audacity uses the freeware LAME encoder, which is known to produce so many of those poor early MP3 files.  iTunes uses the commercial Fraunhofer encoder, which IMHO produces far superior results.  And since Apple paid to license the Fraunhofer encoder for you, it's the only legal way I know to have it unless you pay for another commercial program like Adobe Audition (very expensive!)

I've used both PCs and Macs in music production, and I always encode the final MP3s using a Fraunhofer encoder.  I'm not a huge fan of iTunes, but it definitely gets the job done, and for free.  Just remember to set the Import Settings to MP3 Encoder.  I typically set most of my recordings to 128k stereo, no VBR, 44.1 kHz sample rate, joint stereo, and I always check to use error correction whether the disc needed it or not.  It doesn't slow most new drives down too much.  Oh, and I also check the Smart Encoding Adjustments and Filter Frequencies Below 10 Hz (20 Hz is the lowest the human ear is supposed to be able to hear, so why have the extra noise in there?)

Try ripping one track.  If you don't like the results, set it to 192k and rip again, but above that and I don't think you're getting much value out of the increased data size.  I know people swear by 320k, but I've made my MP3s with Fraunhofer's encoder at 128k since 1996 (starting with Cool Edit '96, which eventually became Adobe Audition) and have rarely needed to set the bitrate any higher.

Hope that helps, and happy ripping!