Ripping as lossless from now on Nov26 '06

I've been considering this for quite some time now, and this article has pushed me over the hump.

I think for all future CD's, I will rip them in as lossless, meaning they are not compressed at all.

The reason?

I hate sound quality reduction, and in today's "cheap storage world," there is no reason why CD's should not be ripped as lossless. Why would you want to give up sound quality, just to preserve space?

Space is very cheap, these days, and it's only going to get cheaper.

Even if I absolutely have to shell out a few extra bucks for storage space, today, it pays dividends 10 or 20 years down the road, when my music is still at the highest quality possible.

With iPods and car radios, you can hardly notice the difference in sound quality. However, with impressive sounding home entertainment speakers, the difference is noticeable, and often embarrasing.

Space differences

Obviously lossless audio files are much larger than compressed audio files. The difference can often be estimated by simply multiplying by ten. For example, if I rip a 4-minute song in at 128 kbps, it may be somewhere around 4 megabytes. If I rip that same song in as lossless, it may be somewhere around 40 megabytes.

Many people may point out that this decreases the amount of songs that I can store on an iPod, or other digital music device.

True, but digital music devices are also increasing their storage, at a rather hurried rate. I'm not worried about that.

So, from now on, I will rip all CD's as lossless.

Early confusion with Bit Rate

My first CD ripped as lossless is Rearviewmirror, a "greatest hits" collection by Pearl Jam. I noticed after ripping it into iTunes, the Bit Rate's were all inconsistent:

Screenshot of iTunes

Maybe this is how it works, but I'm slightly confused. Normally, if I were to set a Bit Rate upon Import, all songs would carry that same Bit Rate.

Categories: Digital Audio , Music

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In principle I agree on your assessment of the space/quality tradeoff. However, you have to keep in mind things like iPods where using the lossless ... Read more.

Ssp, thanks for the clarification on the varying bitrates, and mentioning that lossless is still compressed. Makes sense... ... Read more.

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