Chapter 7 Ripping and Encoding

The general consensus is that Exact Audio Copy is the the ripping program de jure.

This tutorial is the most popular, followed by this one.

Probably not, but it is likely OK. iTunes is a music management program with a single checkbox entitled, “Use error correction when reading Audio Cds”. EAC's sole purpose is to obtain the most error-free rip possible.

If you have an iPod and you like the fact that iTunes provides one stop shopping for your ripping, encoding, tagging, and management needs, then go for it.

Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) and Apple Lossless compress raw audio data without loss of information.

The average compression ratio is approximately 55%. (reference)

No. Any differences you may hear are probably due to Replay Gain if you have enabled it.

You will save disk space.

You will save network bandwidth.

Your backups will take less time.

FLAC is open source software. It is designed to be easy to implement in hardware so that it can be used royalty-free in many devices. Apple does not support FLAC in iTunes.

Apple Lossless is proprietary. Its encoding is faster than FLAC, but it doesn't matter.

One does not sound “better” than the other. Every lossless codec encodes audio data without loss of information.

The question, “Should I use FLAC or Apple Lossless?” is better asked, “Should I use iTunes or not?” See previous question, “Can I use iTunes?”

Yes. You can select the iTunes checkbox “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC for this iPod” when your iPod is connected. This will allow you to rip your music losslessly and transcode to a compressed format for your iPod. You will pay a CPU penalty at sync time, however.

You can use Media Monkey.

You can use the command line program metaflac that comes with the FLAC distribution.