Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat CD-R ripping

Hi Nick

That�s a reasonable question as there are alternatives to WAV. There are also easier alternatives to XLD such as iTunes.

Using XLD is a real pain. First of all, it can take ages to rip each CD and all the information on the CD, such as the order of the track, name, artist and album name are all together under �Name� in iTunes.

Thankfully, I can use the Multiple Item Information feature in iTunes to add Artist and Album information in bulk. Of course, this is less useful for compilation albums. Then the order of the tracks has be input track by track and the track name cleaned up (as it contains all the other information I mentioned).

There is no album picture added automatically, so I�ll have to add that manually as well. Not sure how to do to this but one thing at a time.

The stupid programme doesn�t always rip the disc with a last few tracks missed with an error message. So I have to go back and select these again.

Ripping CDs is a boring, repetitive task � especially as I did this seven years ago when I originally ripped all my CDs to AAC. I can�t really believe I�m doing it all again!

I�m about 2/3 of the way though and, compared to many people, I don�t have a huge CD collection as I have about 350 CDs. So far, I have used 81.45 GB so about 100 GB - 120 GB will probably be needed.

I am using all my limited spare time to rip the CDs onto my NAS and could think of better ways of using my time at the moment.

So, with this background (and, yes, I feel much better having got this off my chest), I wouldn�t be doing this if there wasn�t a very good reason. That reason is the astonishingly good sound quality achieved when listening to the music which is being stored on my NAS. I spent some time comparing WAV, AAC, Apple Lossless etc. when using iTunes and XLD. I also used alternatives to XLD.

After quite a lot of testing there was no doubt that the sound quality using XLD and WAV was considerably better than any other approach. If there was a more user friendly, less time consuming and less data hungry way, I would have taken it. Honestly!