When it comes to music archival, I’m somewhat of a nutjob. Whereas everyone was (and is) using MP3, to me, it just doesn’t feel right to use a lossy codec and I’m not happy if I cannot be sure that the rip from CD was bit accurate. I’ve been using lossless compression and ultra-slow, bit-accurate ripping software for years, so I thought I might write a bit about it 
Ripping a CD
First, there’s the problem of getting the music from your CD to your hard drive. In the beginnings, I used CDex but I let myself be convinced that Exact Audio Copy is the better choice (there was take about some specific types of extraction errors CDex couldn’t detect).
Exact Audio Copy also integrates AccurateRip. This is a system that calculates checksums of any audio file you rip and stores them in an online database. The idea is simple: if your CD drive introduces errors into the data during extraction, these errors will be pretty much unique for every user (a scratch here, a fluctuation there…). But if your CD drive manages a perfectly accurate rip, you will end up with the exact same data, thus, the exact same checksum as everyone else in the world who has ripped that CD.
Of course you should use the EAC offset test CD and the AccurateRip offset validation options and find out exactly whether your drive is capable of doing C2 error detection (which to find out requires a scratched CD). You shouldn’t use anything above 4x read speed for ripping and set EAC to high quality error recovery. You can also configure EAC to rip every song twice. It will automatically tag a song a broken unless both rips are absolutely identical bit by bit which provides another level of security.
Ripping a whole CD at these settings takes at least 1 hour, but that’s a price I’m happily paying. In the end, you’ll only rip a CD once and listen to it many times!
Archiving Songs
To archive my music I use lossless compression. Storing plain WAVE (.wav) files would serve this purpose, but using a lossless compression format does save some disk space, adds checksums to the files, allows me to tag my music and provide replay gain per song and album. Replay gain calculates the overall loudness of an album, if your player supports it all albums will have the same average volume and you don’t need to adjust the volume when listening to different CDs.
There are various lossless formats available. Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio has a lossless compression variant and then there are many Open Source codecs, the most popular ones being Flac and WavPack. I chose Flac because has the best support (WinAmp has a built-in Flac decoder as do many other players, even some car stereos and mobile players support Flac).
As before, I don’t see any sense in going for anything but the best possible compression achievable, so if there’s an option in Flac that promises a 0.001% gain in compression ratio but makes the encoding take twice as long, of course I enable it :). So if you’re looking for the most insane combination of command line arguments for Flac, take this:
--verify --replay-gain --blocksize=4096 --mid-side --exhaustive-model-search --max-lpc-order=12 --qlp-coeff-precision-search --rice-partition-order=0,8 --apodization="bartlett" --apodization="bartlett_hann" --apodization="blackman" --apodization="blackman_harris_4term_92db" --apodization="connes" --apodization="flattop" --apodization="gauss(STDDEV)" --apodization="hamming" --apodization="hann" --apodization="kaiser_bessel" --apodization="nuttall" --apodization="rectangle" --apodization="triangle" --apodization="tukey(P)" --apodization="welch"
Always rip a whole CD first and then specify all the extracted .wav files at once so Flac knows which songs belong to an album. This allows Flac to calculate the overall album gain in addition to the replay gain per track.
Compressing a complete CD takes between 1 and 2 hours with these settings, but since this is something you only do once, well, why not!
Listening
Of course, after all this effort, you don’t want to listen to your music using your on-board sound card or other cheap listening equipment.
To my knowledge, the highest playback quality at the time can be achieved with Creative Labs’ X-Fi sound cards. You might want to try the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude, it uses the X-Fi chipset, but extends on the original design specifications and uses better parts to exceed the already great quality. Auzentech had previously created the Auzentech X-Meridian on its own, a now no longer produced audiophile quality sound card.
Regarding headphones, I can wholeheartedly recommend either the Grado RS1 (price tag about $700) or the Sennheiser HD650 (price tag about $500). Both are very comfortable, offer excellent production quality and, of course, deliver crystal clear sound on an audiophile level.
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