Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
I'm a real buckaroo, I roll my own.
Buy audio CD, rip to WAV files, label by hand, run a FLAC conversion program for all the files from a CD at once. I use Audio-Transcoder ($19.95) for bulk conversions, just drag and drop.
Work? A little, but you do it once per track and you can use it as long as you live. Seems a reasonable trade-off to me. You mileage may vary...
(The CD acts as a tertiary back up, I back up my music files and store off-site. No worries about loss...) However, since you seem to be an Apple fan, (nothing wrong with that), I believe Apple has a lossless compression format. Audio-Transcoder will read/convert back and forth from Apple lossless to FLAC. (I've never done it, I don't know how well it keeps the metadata.)
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I use
ExactAudioCopy to rip CDs to FLAC. EAC is completely free and is generally acknowledged as the most accurate CD ripper available. It can be set up to rip to either FLAC or mp3 format, or both. There's a very good guide to setup and usage at this
EAC Setup Guide page. Properly set up EAC is close to one-click operation and should give you the most accurate rips possible.
For conversion to other formats
dbPoweramp is a very good, and very capable converter. It's not free, but not expensive either and well worth the money for the capabilities and ease of use. (dbPoweramp does have a ripping capability but I'd recommend sticking with EAC for the ripping and just use dbPoweramp for format conversion).
I think the combination of the two is definitely the best, and about the easiest, way of ripping your CDs to quality files in just about any format you could want.
Edit: If you want to edit the tags produced by EAC or dbPoweramp then
Mp3Tag is a very good, free tag editor which can edit FLAC, mp3, Ogg Vorbis, iTunes mp4 and other music file tags. It works well with both of the other programs.