Which format(s) in 2025 should I RIPPED from physical CDs?

Discussion
1

Hi guys, I’m new to DMM industry, (Digital Media Management). :joy:

What do you think which format(s) is best and reasonable choice in 2025 should I RIPPED from my physical CDs?

I have a plan to rip them all again by the barely working BD optical drive, about 300-500 pieces physical plastics. Many years ago when iTunes/Music Match came out I ripped dozens of them in .m4a format. It seemed quite better than traditional 320k .mp3 and also friendly to tag. Should I rip them both to .FLAC and .m4a, since by all means I need to insert them into optical drive and wait for some moments?

Btw, most likely I’ll be using Foobar2000 and MediaMonkey as audio manager on Windows. And my portable device is a medieval Android phone with AirPods and bt headphones.

2

Rip them as FLAC. Don’t worry about ripping a lower quality version, that’s what the automatic transcoding with an app like Symfonium and a media server like Navidrome or lms is for :wink:

Hard drive storage is cheap, and a CD rip is only about 100-200MB or so. “Archive” them in full quality. You can always make a more compressed, lossy version from a FLAC file, but you cannot go the other way and get more quality out of a lossy file without re-ripping the CD from scratch.

1 Like
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Sounds nice bro. So da .FLAC is a solid choice. :grinning_face::+1: