What is the best way to import music as FLACs from CDs on Mac?

[levmc]

There were a bunch of weird schemes for putting hires music onto a CD--

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Definition_Compatible_Digital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated

as well as things that look like a CD, but aren't

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD

Each of those extensions could theoretically take advantage of the higher bitrate/higher sample rate-- but if your ripping process produces a 16 bit 44.1 Khz stereo waveform, that's what FLAC or ALAC will faithfully reproduce.

Ok so for some CDs that have been specially treated, 24 bit FLAC will sound better? Or ALAC will sound better too?

Someone said ALAC can be made to be 24 bit too, but if I'm importing it through iTunes, would that be a 16 bit process so that it will only produce 16 bit? So for some special CDs, FLAC would be better choice?

 

[jerwin]

https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=List_of_HDCD-encoded_Compact_Discs

presumably you'd process the 16 bit, 44.1 khz wav file with a decoder, get a 44.1 Khz, 24 bit file, and then compress that down to flac or apple lossless. But unless you have one of the cd's on the list, it's not worth bothering with.

As to whether they sound the same-- audacity doesn't have a built in audio diff function. Comparing them with hash functions would probably generate different header information Most of my high res files are chamber music-- not that well suited for dynamic range comparisons.

 

[markwbowen]

Unless you have a collection of SACD’s (which I gather you don’t) I would not worry at all about anything to do with 24Bit audio. I also wouldn’t worry about it for a single second unless you have a very high end audio setup. To be honest, unless you have a good setup of amp, speakers, room etc and the ears to know what you’re listening for in terms of ‘difference in quality’ then none of this ultimately matters one bit at all and I’d just stick to mp3/aac and just enjoy listening.

 

[jerwin]

airplay does not work with hires audio, if you're wondering. Perhaps this has created some confusion, since airplay uses the Apple Lossless format.

 

[canyelles]

Different levels of lossless? Lossless is lossless. Infinity is Infinity, despite Toy Story's "To Infinity and Beyond!". Only conversion might be if you want to convert lossless it to lossy.

While it is true that for ALAC there is only one compression scheme, for FLAC there are many, approx 9 I believe (I never use FLAC).

This is all about how much effort the encoder takes to compress the music. The encoder can either take a lot of time to compress the music into as small a file as possible or take less time and produce a larger file. The default is somewhere in the middle. There is also an option to have no compression whatsoever but to still place the file inside a FLAC container.

Decoding takes pretty much the same amount of time, no matter what encoding option was used.

 

[HDFan]

Ok so for some CDs that have been specially treated, 24 bit FLAC will sound better? Or ALAC will sound better too?

To be honest, unless you have a good setup of amp, speakers, room etc and the ears to know what you’re listening for in terms of ‘difference in quality’ then none of this ultimately matters one bit at all and I’d just stick to mp3/aac and just enjoy listening.

This discussion, although interesting, is useless to you if, as above you don't have the right equipment or if you can't hear it. Why not find a great recording (not that easily, actually), rip it at various compression levels (ALAC, FLAC, lossless, 256 kbs lossy, etc.) and see if you can hear the difference? Theory is nice, but it doesn't mean a #$%$#% thing if you can't hear it.

 

[HDFan]

This is all about how much effort the encoder takes to compress the music. The encoder can either take a lot of time to compress the music into as small a file as possible or take less time and produce a larger file. The default is somewhere in the middle. There is also an option to have no compression whatsoever but to still place the file inside a FLAC container.

So the only difference is the file size? End result regardless of file size is the same - audible lossless? Doesn't this affect the player - smaller file size, more work and therefore more processing time?

 

[canyelles]

So the only difference is the file size? End result regardless of file size is the same - audible lossless? Doesn't this affect the player - smaller file size, more work and therefore more processing time?

There is more processing encoding but that is not done in real time.

Decoding it appears not to matter. See wikipedia (compression levels) below

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

 

[levmc]

https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=List_of_HDCD-encoded_Compact_Discs

presumably you'd process the 16 bit, 44.1 khz wav file with a decoder, get a 44.1 Khz, 24 bit file, and then compress that down to flac or apple lossless. But unless you have one of the cd's on the list, it's not worth bothering with.

As to whether they sound the same-- audacity doesn't have a built in audio diff function. Comparing them with hash functions would probably generate different header information Most of my high res files are chamber music-- not that well suited for dynamic range comparisons.

So, out of all classical CDs, the 9 listed at the bottom of the page in the above link are the only ones?

 

[rhett7660]

So, out of all classical CDs, the 9 listed at the bottom of the page in the above link are the only ones?

I would think these are the only ones so far that have been detected... At the top of the page, it mentions the page is still a work in progress. I would imagine there could be more out there. No one has bothered to look, document, submit, or any combination there of.

I use XLD and have been using FLAC primarely for encoding my CD's. I have also done a few AIFF files, but there seems to be a limit on what players can actually play those type of files.

 

[levmc]

If you want to use Exact Audio Copy, how do you make you CD connect to the Windows in Parallel so that you can rip it from EAC running in Parallels?

 

[HDFan]

how do you make you CD connect to the Windows in Parallel so that you can rip it from EAC running in Parallels?

 

[jerwin]

I would think these are the only ones so far that have been detected... At the top of the page, it mentions the page is still a work in progress. I would imagine there could be more out there. No one has bothered to look, document, submit, or any combination there of.

I use XLD and have been using FLAC primarely for encoding my CD's. I have also done a few AIFF files, but there seems to be a limit on what players can actually play those type of files.

There's also this list.

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/hdcd-list.65414/

 

[gnasher729]

Do you mean that not only 24 wouldn't make it better since the CD is made in 16, it would actually make it worse because of having to convert to 24?

16 to 24 bit is a lossless conversion, so there should be no loss in quality, but 44.1KHz to 96KHz or 192KHz is _not_ a lossless conversion because the sample points are different. 44.1KHz to 88.2KHz would be very tricky.

Even with 16 bit to 24 bit, a compressor converting say 16 bit to AAC knows that anything beyond 16 bit is meaningless and can be ignored, while a compressor converting 24 bit to AAC might assume that the zeroes that were added were actually meaningful (which they are not) and need to be reproduced.
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Ok so for some CDs that have been specially treated, 24 bit FLAC will sound better? Or ALAC will sound better too?

Someone said ALAC can be made to be 24 bit too, but if I'm importing it through iTunes, would that be a 16 bit process so that it will only produce 16 bit? So for some special CDs, FLAC would be better choice?

Both ALAC and FLAC convert whatever they are given. When you put a 16 bit 44.1KHz CD into your CD reader, then they will both create a lossless copy of that, absolutely identical. (Unless one of them is stupid and tries to create 24 bit output).

 

[gnasher729]

So the only difference is the file size? End result regardless of file size is the same - audible lossless? Doesn't this affect the player - smaller file size, more work and therefore more processing time?

Decoding is much, much easier and takes a lot less power than encoding. For example, during encoding the encoder might have ten different choices to encode something, tries out all ten choices, and pick what's best. Ten times more effort. The decoder has no choice. It is told "use method 3" out of ten methods, and that's what it does. Ten times faster. So there might be a _tiny_ difference but not enough to ever matter. And smaller file size is always faster to copy or to read.

 

[Fuchal]

Back in the day, this was a great app on the Mac for ripping CDs. It appears to still be updated (get the unstable release, built March 2020) but YMMV.

Max from sbooth.org

An application for creating high quality audio files

sbooth.org

 

[gnasher729]

This discussion, although interesting, is useless to you if, as above you don't have the right equipment or if you can't hear it. Why not find a great recording (not that easily, actually), rip it at various compression levels (ALAC, FLAC, lossless, 256 kbs lossy, etc.) and see if you can hear the difference? Theory is nice, but it doesn't mean a #$%$#% thing if you can't hear it.

Before I started ripping my CD collection, at a time when hard drive space was expensive, I tried out various compression levels with decent headphones. I thought I could hear a difference between 128 and 160 KBit AAC, I wasn't sure if I could hear a difference between 160 and 192, so I encoded everything with 192KBit AAC (later upgraded to 256 KBit).

But then I read an article in a high-end audio magazine. They got a CD player where you could turn individual bits on or off (why on earth you would do that is beyond me, but some people will think it's a feature). They obviously had to try this. Bit 16 turned off they could hear no difference in blind tests, meaning 15 bits was just as good as 16 to a trained ear with _expensive_ amplifiers in speakers. Bit 15 turned off they heard a difference but couldn't decide which version was better. Bit 14 turned off was definitely worse (but still excellent quality).

 

[levmc]

There is also an option to have no compression whatsoever but to still place the file inside a FLAC container.

If you do no compression, will it sound equal to WAV?

 

[The Man]

If you do no compression, will it sound equal to WAV?

Yeah, same as WAV or AIFF. But really, lossless format like ALAC or FLAC give the same quality sound as uncompressed.

Anyway, if you rip from CD, 16 bit 44 kHz lossless is all that you need. If you have 24 bit source, you do that. Simple. Sounds between 16 kHz and 20 kHz are already rather soft to my ears, so I don't think high sample rate audio would make much of a difference to me. And my headphones and speakers are not that HiFi. I think 24 bit 48 kHz audio is all that most need, but CD quality is good for me.

 

[canyelles]

If you do no compression, will it sound equal to WAV?

Yes it will, but then all the flac files will sound the same, regardless of compression level.

There is also the advantage that a flac file can contain rich metadata whereas a WAV file cannot.

 

[gnasher729]

If you do no compression, will it sound equal to WAV?

It will sound like WAV or AIFF no matter whether you compress it or not, because the process is lossless in every case. Lossless means it sound exactly the same.

 

[yurc]

Even I can’t discerning 320 VBR AAC with lossless one or comparing quality between 16/24/32 bit, I prefer saving in my library in ALAC if I had highest sampling rate as possible lossless sources. It kind like as master files for me whenever I need convert them into lossy format for mobile devices (yes I still copied music manually instead of using trending music streaming services)

Only some old purchase came with 256 kbps from iTunes Stores because they not available or physically hard to get. But they sounds right for me so no problem (sorry I don’t have audiophile grade hearin’)

My tools is XLD for conversion and my hardware is SATA drive Pioneer BD-RW. It much faster ripping my disc compared with stock SuperDrive, about three minutes faster when I manually benchmarking same CD with same ripping settings.

 

[Codestud]

You can use iTunes to rip to ALAC. Then use MediaHuman Audio Converter to convert from ALAC to FLAC.

 

[zigstick99]

Agreed that there is essentially no difference between FLAC vs. ALAC when ripping a CD. A point that I didn't see mentioned ( could've missed it) it that ALAC is a proprietary lossless alternative to FLAC that was designed by Apple. If you're tied to only using ios based devices this may be okay. Most streaming services with Hi-Res music offer you FLAC, not all offer ALAC. For this reason, ripping to FLAC is my choice.

 

[zenodux]

In iTunes, there's option of Apple Losseless, WAV, etc.
What app do you have to use to rip in FLAC?

I've always liked ABCDE (A Better CD Encoder, https://abcde.einval.com/wiki/) and have used it on Linux, NetBSD, & MacOS. ABCDE calls your encoder (the reference FLAC encoder in this case, https://xiph.org/flac/), and also downloads music metadata from the web (CDDB or MusicBrainz) for tagging and naming the output files. On MacOS, ABCDE and its dependencies (like FLAC) are available on the Homebrew package manager (https://brew.sh). Once Homebrew is set up, just type "brew install abcde" in the Terminal app to install. To run, type "abcde". Enjoy!

To fully answer your question, I'd refer you to the CD ripping/burning section here: https://xiph.org/flac/links.html#software