Creating CD Quality MP3s on your PC

Archiving your CD content to your PC is a rewarding experience using the uncompressed WAV format when ripping CDs. Some of the of the best ripping application you can download online like Goldwave, Nero and Exact Audio are quite competent in ripping CDs. Your only concern is having sufficient disk space. You see, CD content can eat up about half a gigabyte of storage space. That means a 500 GB hard disk dedicated to CD archiving can take in a thousand CD titles. For many audiophiles, this is enough. But unless you are starting out with just a few titles to archive, depending on how fast you rip CDs, you will soon run out of space.

One great option is to rip your CDs using compressed file formats. FLAC is an excellent choice as it is lossless compression while effectively halving the disk space requirements for each CD. But the most popular compression format is MP3, allowing you to easily download the files to directly populate or update your MP3 player or smartphone.

Most MP3 files use a bitrate of 128kbps to 192kbps for portable listening which can be good enough. Each music file can eat up only 3-4MB. But if you want near CD quality sonics, it is strongly recommended to use the highest bitrate of 320 kbps when transcribing. This brings the file to take up twice as much space, but at this bitrate, the sonic quality is almost indistinguishable from CD quality when listening to your portable earphones and even with casual non-critical listening through high fidelity speakers. This is already a significant improvement in disk space utilization. A 65 Mb WAV file goes down to about 7Mb or about 10% but the diminution in quality is negligible.

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