Part of being frugal isn’t just saving money on the things you buy. You must also spend some time taking care of the things you own. As many people know, CDs are not perfect, and as they get old they can fall prey to CD ‘rot.’ You may notice that older discs will start to show holes through the label, rendering them unreadable. I will not discuss the legalities of ripping music, but if you own the disc you should legally be able to back it up.There are numerous free programs available to manage your music, and I will cover just a few of them here.
What you will need:
1. A ripping program, such as EAC or iTunes.
2. A large hard drive. For lossless formats estimate about 350 MB per disc. Lossy formats will be much smaller.
3. A burning program to make backup copies.
The ripping program
For PC users, the best program for ripping your CDs is Exact Audio Copy (EAC). EAC has two useful modes, secure and burst, that can be used for different situations. For newer discs or scratch free discs, burst mode will quickly back up your discs. But where EAC really shines is secure mode. When ripping damaged discs, such as those with scratches, secure mode will read and reread a small section of the disc until it gets two matching reads. This drastically reduces the number of errors that you hear on ripped albums, such as pops, cracks, or skips. If EAC cannot get a matching read, it will record an error and the location, then move on to the next section. After the rip is complete, you can review the error report, listen to the section where the error occurred, and determine if the error is audible or not. 95% of the time, you will not hear anything wrong. If you do hear a problem, you can try to repair the disc or consider replacement. EAC also comes with accuraterip, which compares the results of your copy with other users, increasing accuracy even further.
If you are using EAC you will also need to download a compression program (more on that later). The FLAC program can be downloaded here. LAME can be used to rip mp3 files, and can be downloaded here. Once you have downloaded and installed the FLAC or LAME encoder, you can point EAC to the program, and it will automatically compress the music files for you. If intend to use FLAC, keep in mind that many music players, such as the iPod and iTunes, do not support FLAC.
iTunes is also available to both PC and Mac users for ripping their music collections. iTunes is far more simple to use than EAC, but the iTunes error correction setting can’t touch EAC’s secure mode on damaged discs. I have not seen an EAC equivalent available for Macs.
What is compression?
A little background into what you’re actually doing. When you rip a CD to your computer, the program will convert the small pits in the CD into a digital file. At first this will come in as an uncompressed WAV file, which is then compressed. A compression program will create a music file that allows you to listen to your music on your computer. There are two types of compression types to look into, lossless and lossy.Consider a deck of cards. Laying each one side-by-side, face up, will allow you to easily read the data on each card. This is the equivalent of music burned to a disc. Each pit of the CD can easily be read by the CD player and then converted to the sound you hear. Now take that same deck of cards, stack each card on top of each other, and then put them into a small box. The same information is available if you need it, but instead of taking up a large amount of space to lay the cards side-by-side, they now occupy the space of only a small card box. This is essentially how a lossless compression format works. All of the data is available, it just needs to be extracted by a player to be read. Think back to the deck of cards, now in a small box. If you start taking cards out, the amount of space used shrinks. But you also start to lose information that may or may not be important. At first you might get rid of the card with game instructions, then the jokers. Then you might start losing more valuable data. This is how a lossy compression format works. It shrinks the music file further than a lossless file, but at the expense of some data. For a music file, a lossy format gets rid of some of the highs and lows of the music that it thinks you won’t notice. The further you compress (with a lower bit-rate) the more information that is taken out. You have probably already heard of the most popular lossy compression format, mp3.
The most popular lossless compression formats are FLAC and Apple Lossless. The most popular lossy compression formats are mp3 and the newer AAC, which is used by the iTunes music store. EAC users will likely use FLAC for lossless copies, and mp3 for lossy. iTunes users will have to use Apple Lossless for CD quality rips, and can easily use either mp3 or AAC for lossy compression.
What format should I choose?
As stated earlier, iTunes users will have to choose Apple Lossless for lossless backup, and EAC users will have an easier time finding the open-source FLAC encoder. Both create the exact same quality file, as lossless is lossless, and no data is lost. For lossy compression formats, mp3 is ubiquitous, and so that is what I use for my portable player. There is some debate that other formats have higher quality per file size, such as AAC or Ogg Vorbis.
The big decision is whether to use a lossy or lossless format. Since the purpose of this is to make an actual CD quality backup, I highly recommend ripping into a lossless format first. Once you have a lossless file, you will never have to re-rip your music collection again. Hard drive space is relatively cheap, especially in comparison to the cost of buying a replacement disc should the one you have get damaged, lost, or stolen.
Since hard drive space is so cheap, I also recommend making a second lossy copy for use with portable players. Using a smaller file in a portable player will allow you to pack more songs into the limited space available, and will increase the battery life. Portable players are often used in noisy environments, and with cheaper headphones, so it’s unlikely you will notice a huge difference in sound quality.
iTunes makes creating two copies extremely easy. Once a CD is ripped as an Apple Lossless file, make a duplicate of that disc to convert. Then simply choose the songs you want to convert, control-click (right click for PC users) on the selections, and choose to convert to mp3 (or AAC or Apple Lossless, depending on your import choice). If apple lossless is the choice, simply open the options panel, choose your new compression format, and reselect the files to convert. Don’t forget to change it back to Apple Lossless before you import your next CD.
For PC users, a useful program for converting FLAC files into mp3 is foobar. This is also a great lightweight program if you want a greatly customizable music player. You will have to download the LAME encoder (for mp3) and then point foobar to the program the same way you did with EAC. Then simply choose the songs you want to convert, select the destination directory, and convert.
Burning a copy
Again, I won’t discuss the legalities of this, but I feel that if I own an original copy of the album I should be free to create a copy for my own use. Backup CDs are great for the car, where they will see more abuse. You also don’t have to worry about losing the original should they be stolen, and you can put them in a CD case while keeping the original at home with the jewel case and liner notes.
If you are on a PC and chose to use FLAC, a great free burning program is Burrrn. iTunes users can burn straight from iTunes.
Further reading:
EAC
This awesome guide covers pretty much everything, including how to set up the FLAC or LAME encoder, and should get you setup correctly.
Here is another overview on EAC drive settings.
Foobar 2000
The Hydrogen Audio forums have a huge thread on resources for setting up and customizing foobar.
iTunes
For Windows users, Apple has an iTunes setup guide. Mac users will likely have iTunes installed already.
Summary
- iTunes is a convenient all-in-one solution for both PC and Mac users, and is the easiest (but not necessarily best) solution to use
- EAC is the best solution for creating backups from damaged discs
- Foobar and Burrrn can be used on the PC as a complement to EAC for playing and burning FLAC files
- Lossless codecs like FLAC and Apple Lossless are superior for creating CD quality backup files.
- Lossy codecs like mp3 and AAC are better when you have limited storage
- An ideal backup would have lossless copies for archiving and a lossy copy for portable use
If anyone has any questions, or finds other useful resources, please feel free to leave a comment.
