The invention of the MP3 revolutionized the computer's potential for storing, organizing, and playing music. Although a great advance that signaled the start of the computer entertainment center, MP3 compression does cause some loss of sound quality (especially at lower bit rates).
The easiest way to play lossless audio on your computer is to simply play the original CD (or an exact copy).
Ever increasing hard drive sizes have reduced the barriers to ripping a literal copy of a music CD on to a computer without any loss of quality. Below is a brief introduction to archiving lossless audio.
Keep in mind that you'll need either the original CD, or an exact copy. Once the audio has been converted to MP3, information is lost and cannot be recovered.
Please respect applicable copyright laws, and support the artists whose music you enjoy.
The current version of Windows Media Player (the built-in music player for Windows) can rip music to full resolution .wav files (.wav's are standard audio files, and can be played by pretty much any machine that can play .mp3's.)
If you have Windows Vista, you already have Windows Media Player 11. Users of Windows XP will probably need to download the latest copy of Media Player from Microsoft. The download is free. (Note that you must use Internet Explorer for the download to work.)
To set up lossless ripping, go to the "rip" drop-down menu and select "More Options." On the "Rip Music" tab, select "WAV (Lossless)" for the Format.
Media Player can also rip to the "Windows Media Audio Lossless" format. This format requires less storage space at the expense of increased processor usage during playback.
Additionally, many third party tools and formats exist for lossless audio compression.
For the highest quality copy of your original CDs, another option is Exact Audio Copy (EAC). EAC features sophisticated algorithms to ensure that the data you record is as close as possible to the original data on the CD. In addition, it will report any possible problems, so that you can easily verify the integrity of the source CD.
Though many convenient applications exist, one of the easiest methods is to use iTunes.
In the iTunes preferences panel, click on "Advanced" and select the "Importing" tab. You can then select either "AIFF Encoder" or "WAV Encoder" for uncompressed lossless audio, or the "Apple Lossless Encoder" for compressed lossless audio.
In general, uncompressed audio files require more space than compressed audio files, but require less processing power for play back. On the other hand, lossless audio compression can offer approximately 2x reductions in size, without any degradation of the sound quality.
The swiss army knife of CD ripping for Mac is the program Max. It provides comparison ripping as well as offering robust error correction to insure accurate acquisition of the CD audio data.
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