Digitally archiving music, what would you use?

[Imola Ghost]

What products/software would you use to encode the cd's and gather the metadata?

I'm only wanting to do this once and I've got a lot of cd's to go thru. I'd like a full featured application that can give me the best results.

Would you encode them as FLAC or Apples Lossless version, I'm not sure which one of apples is the best but I want a exact duplicate (bit for bit copy) if I ever want to burn a cd again.

 

[AdrianK]

What products/software would you use to encode the cd's and gather the metadata?

I'm only wanting to do this once and I've got a lot of cd's to go thru. I'd like a full featured application that can give me the best results.

Would you encode them as FLAC or Apples Lossless version, I'm not sure which one of apples is the best but I want a exact duplicate (bit for bit copy) if I ever want to burn a cd again.

I use Max and encode as Apple Lossless. Just encode with whatever lossless codec you want, they're all bit-for-bit.

 

[treestar]

Definitely use XLD and encode to ALAC.

 

[Liquinn]

I don't digitally archive music, I would say anyway. Are those things the same or? xD I store my music files on my Windows (I hate to say that) but soon to be MBP. Should I move my music collection to my MBP when I get it?

Most of my music collection is 320kbps, that's a must for me.

Cheers

 

[buklau]

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@Imola: Definitley use ALAC if you primarily use OSX and iDevices, FLAC gets ever so slightly better compression rates (a few GB less than ALAC per 100 GB) but ALAC is more convienent for the aforementioned systems.

@Liquinn: Digital archiving usually entails creating bit-for-bit replicas of the CDs you own. You need to encode them in lossless codecs to do this. But your music seems to be in a lossy 320 Kbps format, so there's no need to worry about this. Just copy over your music to whatever computer you're using.

 

[DustinT]

I'm using iTunes and Apple's Lossless code. Its easy and convenient.

 

[Prodo123]

XLD for ripping
AIFF for archiving if space is not an issue
ALAC for archiving & main iTunes format

 

[ChrisA]

Would you encode them as FLAC or Apples Lossless version, I'm not sure which one of apples is the best but I want a exact duplicate (bit for bit copy) if I ever want to burn a cd again.

Both Apple's Lossles and FLAC are lossless and you can convert from one to the other and get a bit per bit copy. So flip a coin.

One thing is that iTunes and iPods can't play FLAC. So if you are going to use iTunes/iPod Apple's lossless is the way to go.

To rip the CDs you can use iTunes. Feed the CDs one at a time and iTunes will query the metadata off the Internet for you. The other option is XLD. If will rip and convert CDs and is a bit faster on multi core systems and XLD can place the converted files into iTunes for you.