While I agree with everything people have said in this thread about the benefits of FLAC ... WMA definitely wins in terms of ease of use and accuracy of tags, which is why I switched to it after ripping about 200 CDs as FLAC using Easy CD Creator.
I've ripped almost 800 CDs with Windows Media Player, and have found it to be about 90% accurate in terms of retrieving tags and album art (meaning, 90% of my albums retrieved accurate tags and art). It requires much less manual intervention in terms of retrieving album art, and since it supports both auto-eject (when a rip is finished) and auto-rip (when a CD is inserted), the ripping process is mostly a no-brainer. While the Squeezebox does decode FLAC in hardware, I have streamed WMA lossless to four different squeezeboxes and haven't run into any network or CPU overhead issues, running on an average CPU (AMD Sempron 3100+). And an "average" length CD rips in less than three minutes (at least on my average-powered PC; and I've had similar results ripping FLAC with Easy CD Creator). If your #1 priority is a guaranteed accurate rip, then EAC is absolutely the way to go. In my case, my #1 priority was to get through my stack of CDs quickly (which means fast ripping with minimal intervention, and accurate tags) which is why I chose the WMA route. So far, I haven't encountered any accuracy issues with my WMA rips (at least that I can hear, and admittedly I am not an audiophile) with the exception of one very badly scratched CD ... and I figure I can use EAC or Easy CD Creator to deal with those CDs. -- Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jon's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2848 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21940 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
