CD Collection to FLAC

Sunday February 22nd, 2009

I'm considering to rip my CD collection. I've already ripped a few CD's to MP3 format but for some reason I've now considered to use a new format - namely the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) format.

Why so? Hmm, I don't exactly know. Maybe to preserve the collection in a lossless format and in a format that (seemingly) is "free" and more future prone. However I'm not sure that these reasons are good enough. So I'm still considering.

Anyway the FLAC format do have a few quirks when using Windows:

• A sample CD with 14 tunes took up 60 MB in MP3 format and 423 MB in FLAC format.
• The .flac files does not show up in the Windows Explorer (the windows shell) with the proper tags extracted.
• The .flac files does not play (out-of-the-box) with Windows Media Player.
• Ripping to the flac format requires additional software. You cannot do it from inside the Windows Media Player.

Some of these quirks can be overcome by the following. For playback in Windows Media Player (source)

1. Download and install DirectShow Filters for FLAC -
   http://www.xiph.org/dshow
2. Download and install WMP Tag Support Extender
   (makes it possible to see FLAC tags in Media Player9
   http://wmptagext.sourceforge.net

I've also installed the WinAmp player which also includes ripping support to the FLAC format.