For comparison, try watching your favorite sports team or television program broadcast or played out in HD on a wide-screeh high definition TV set for a week.and then go back and watch the same programming on an older TV set with a cathode ray tube and a 4x3 aspect ratio (narrow screen, like15-20 years ago). If you were to listen to your music in a lossless format only on a high-quality system for a month or so, you would be astounded at the poor quality of the mp3 versions if you then had to go back to the "old way" and revert to your current playout equipment. 2) A side-by-side comparison called blind A-B testing is inappropriate for judging perceived quality. There are two reasons for this: 1) Their playout system is inferior and not capable of reproducing recorded sounds faithfully. Today, many people cannot hear the differences. Perhaps your equipment used for playback now is not capable of displaying the better fidelity of a lossless music library. Your mp3 collection will have to be converted to the new format, whatever it is, but the loss of quality you generate now cannot be restored. Mp3 is an unnecessary and technically obsolete format developed to overcome storage and net bandwidth limitations of the day.Įven if a new format is introduced and becomes the mainstream, starting with a lossless format ensures that your collection retains its original quality. If not FLAC, then one of the variations of DSD (Direct Stream Digital) will prevail. I don't know how old you are, but you will most likely find that in 10 years from now, FLAC will be the format of choice for high-resolution, studio quality mullti-channel music distribution.
If you are pleased with the quality of 320k mp3 files, and if you are only interested in a casual listening experience, then by all means feel free to rip CDs to that format.
I did try OGG for a while when it first came out but that never shined.Ģ) Because it is the most popular format? Would you suggest I use FLAC from now on? How much better is FLAC compared to ripping the songs to MP3 I thought that with 320kbps you almost have no quality loss? correct me if I`m wrong Why rip to MP3 if I want quality? a few reasons:ġ) In my head, MP3 was always the norm for having audio tracks ripped from a CD since the old days. Now I will set Secure Ripping as you suggested. We use FLAC exclusively to ensure that fidelity is maintained and not lost forever.ĭennis.aka "d2b"Hi Dennis, thanks for educating me about this as you can see I'm a total n00bie to dBpoweramp I just bought it for when the day I need it and today the day has come. If you're really concerned about quality, why rip to mp3? The resulting file is already degraded from the original track on the CD. A single sample submitted previously may have had a few minor errors due to any number of reasons. Having said that, if a few tracks don't match perfectly, it doesn't necessarily mean your rip is defective. If there is a match, you will only have a higher degree of confidence that your rips are "accurate." Of course, having the AccurateRip database is good, because it can make your ripping go faster while improving your confidence in the quality providing there is a match for each track. It has nothing to do with the quality of your result. If the CD you are ripping is NOT in that database, dBpoweramp will say "Not in accuraterip." All that means is that your rip will take longer because of the secure ripping process. If the CD you are ripping has been ripped by someone else and the results sent to the AccurateRip database, you will be able to rip your CDs faster if the result of your first pass at ripping a track securely matches the results of the previous rip(s) of that track by previous contributors to that database. Start by going to Options > Ripping Method and select the Secure (Recover Errors) button.ĪccurateRip is an on-line database which contains some information about previous rips of CDs by other users.
If you're concerned about quality, first make sure that dBpoweramp is configured for Secure ripping.