Well, I recently ripped all my CD's to 16-bit 44.1K lossless(true lossless) .WAV files. No esay feat, over 700 CD's. And now that it's done, I've discovered problems.

Nero 7 Ultra(I stopped there because I can't stand how bad NeroVision is) has in some cases added pumping compression to songs. Not all, but some.

Roxio Easy Media Creator 8 was eaiser to rip and be organized.

I did find some odd things, but they worked in my favor. I converted some cassette only releases that have not been re-released on CD(yet). One of them is a Herb Alpert album: Keep Your Eye On Me. The funny thing is that one showed up on Gracenote, and I've never added that into that database. That happened with a couple of others I did the same thing with and those have never left my house or possession. Very funny.

Anyhow, today I was listening to a playlist in Windows Media Player, and I found problems with a particular track. I re-ripped it, the problem occcured at a different spot. Very odd.

Folks, let me make a few suggestion to save yourself time and not run into problems down the line and discover at a bad point in time:

SLOW IT DOWN!!! Don't go at those maximum speed rips. Seriously. What I suggest is I hope you run INTO a problem right away, that way you can back the speed down a bit to find the fastest speed that STILL gives you flawless rips. In my case, I didn't feel like screwing around and just dropped it form 52X to 8X. I would suspect 24X would be fine. I'm old school, I like those more solid slower speeds. Even so, I think 8X is probably too slow and I bet 16X would be a better option. As drives and configurations vary, what works for me may not work very well for you.

Please, when ripping, please rip to 16-bit WAV fles. If you want to crap it up and go .MP3, at least have good source to start with. Remember to respect your audience and only supply the best of what you've got, which by the way is NEVE an MP3 regardless of what quality setting you go with.

I use dbPowerAmp.....

If you set it up right, it will read each track twice bbefore ripping, to make sure both passes are =. Then after ripping and encoding it verifies the rip. If it detects a problem during the read it will re read the problem area hundreds of times if neccassary until it finds a repeatable pattern. It is very good software, it may not be the fastest when set up to verify everything, but I trust the quality it does. It can also use a plugin (payed subscription) that will verify the rip with other peoples CRC from the internet of the same CD. It also comes with a batch conversion app that you can use to convert files to another format. Tagging is very easy and accurate as well, since it uses CD-Text, freedb, mediabase, GD3, and music brainz.

I rip everything to flac, and then use the batch converter to make mp3 copies for the laptop system. So I end up with both flac, and mp3 copies. The application is also one of the few that is truly multithreaded. It will use one cpu for reading, while another is converting, or when using the batch converter, it will convert each track on it's own core. If you have an i7 it will convert 8 tracks simultaneously.

I use Nero 9. Wav's or FLAC. Or I use a preamp and pump it into my sound card and capture live straight to Wav or FLAC. I find that works the best when I have time as its raw audio and not processed by any programs, just simply the encoder.

If I need to quickly do something for play back/speeches and random things like that, I just use Windows Media and go to 192kb MP3.

Speaking of Nero, have you noticed any improvement of the stability of NeroVision? Man, the ones included with Nero's full package 5-7 were less stable than a paranoid schizophrenic on heroin jonesing for a hit. You basically got ONE chance at it, and if you quit and return, expect problems. I finally got fed up with it and jumped ship and went to Sony Vegas Pro 8(now 9).

I'm going to do some experimentation with Nero and Roxio again since I have those. Nero found gave issue at a certain point, Roxio had issue with a different point. At least I have a test track on a CD I can experiment with. I'm for sure going to see about slowing the optical drive down, as I think that's part of the problem even though it's a high end drive.

In the meantime, two votes for FLAC means I'll go check it out. I have tools I can use to vomitify a file to an MP3.