Most of us HH'ers seem to use dBpa, rip to FLAC. As the programmers say, lossless is lossless. I like to say, if FLAC is good enough for Meridian, don't worry about it.

Sonics for lossless codecs don't seem to be an issue, so the primary question is metadata & cover art.

The last CD I purchased I tried with the latest XLD for fun (the last time I used XLD it seemed like an obscure Japanese app...).

It seems to use FreeDB for its metadata, the cover art was not found but it accurately found the CD metadata and the fact it was the 1987 U.S. Wax Trax reissue. (Front 242 Back Catalogue.)

dBpa (run under Vmware Fusion on my Mac Pro) uses 4 metadata sources by default ( AMG, GD3, music brainz, and freedb).

Freedb was started as a reaction to CDDB taking its crowd sourced CD metadata and going private (eventually getting sold to SONY as Gracenote). I was always disappointed with the quality of the freedb crowd sourced data and was elated to discover dBpa.

Of course, dBpa found the cover art, (primarily GD3 art is higher res then AMG's by the way). They both ripped losslessly and used AccurateRip checksums to verify the rips, and either rip could easily be imported into Sooloos.

If you've read this far, you might be pleased to read that Spoon has promised a Mac beta of dBpa in Q1 2014. Now we only need to convince Zappiti and Mp3Tag to port, as well!

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