Recommeded settings to burn commercial CDs?

[cglenn]

Before I start to transfer some of my commercially bought CDs to a computer file format (for personal use only), I thought I'd ask if there are recommended settings for doing so. Also, is there a recommended output format? File size is not important, but I do want to burn all the available information on the CD, so it needs to be lossless. Finally, I'm using ITunes on my Mac to import the CD. Are there any cautions or recommendations for that specific method? Thank-you.

[kozikowski]

iTunes Import settings > WAV, Automatic.

The music quality on an Audio CD is 44100, 16-bit, Stereo and the import should be, too. The file structure inside an Audio CD is a little wacky to make it most efficient, that's why you can't just simple copy files from a CD, but the quality is exactly those numbers.

Koz

[kozikowski]

There is one note that Audio CDs do not carry names or song titles. When you shove a CD into the computer, it goes on-line to GraceNote to look for the song titles. If you do that in your car, you usually get Song1, Song2, Song3 -- unless your car can go on-line.

This process is usually so smooth that people are surprised how it works.

Koz

[cglenn]

I prefer gapless playback of an album, so not having metadata is okay. It worked well, thanks.

An interesting thing did happen. I had previously saved one long track as a .flac. I re-imported into itunes, then into Audacity, then saved as a .wav file. But the .wav file is larger than the .flac file (210.5 to 118.6 MB). Just commenting.

[kozikowski]

FLAC is or can be a compressed format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

Koz