NVM. It has been so long since I ripped my CDs, I forgot that I switched to Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to get the FLAC files. Should be free also.
Anyone use (using) EAC?
Still to get to MP3…
For CD ripping, is anyone (still) using Audiograbber? Free Windows software.
Any issues with it?
We all pretty much use dBPoweramp. It is automated and ideal.
Just a reminder that storage is low costs these days. Have music in wav makes the dac have an easier ride likely providing less jitter.
I’m not saying that Flac sounds bad, just that wav will always be on top of the PCM game sound quality vise and that the result with Flac and other compressions could decrease sound quality in a minor way, depending on your equipment
Bits are bits, but what will the receiving end and decoding part have to do to get the bits back to the perfect A/D output?
So 99 percent of you out there, don’t bother about my comment. But if you are a purist and perfectionist or if you know your equipment have got some weaknesses in its decding Flac process, the re-clocking is not optimal etc… they just keep the wav.
Jitter is the enemy and why have an extra step that needs to be calculated….?
I always have to yell at the neighbor to shut off their leaf blower so I can more clearly hear my DAC expand the FLAC files
With my old streamer I thought I heard a difference so I ripped everything into AIFF. With my current streamer I don’t know. They all sound good.
Yeah I’m still using EAC. It suits my needs. 
BTW, EAC doesn’t have it’s own, built-in FLAC encoder. It actually calls an ‘external’ program (the path to which you can configure). By default, the Xiph.org version of flac.exe comes with the installation. It’s easy to keep the flac.exe EAC uses up to date. You just need to get the latest version from FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec and unzip into the path you’ve configured in EAC. Of course you don’t need EAC to convert your files to FLAC. You can just use the standalone flac.exe (command-line) program. I presume it’s not as convenient as using dBpoweramp but, hey, I’m an old DOS-prompt guy.
Indeed so but, for the DSDAC at least, if I correctly recall the way Ted Smith described what it does, no matter what format you feed it, the processing demand is unchanged. Something to do with the type of processor in the DSDAC. Apparently, it’s not your normal type of single-stream processing. There are multiple input streams running in parallel and Ted’s programming just selects the most ‘sensible’ looking stream and hugely upsamples it anyway. At least, that’s the way I remember it. 
Remember that you can rip FLAC files without any compression. That’s what I do. It seems like the best of both worlds: no overhead when decompressing (which may not be an issue with the DS DAC anyway) and metadata handling which is much superior to what you can get with WAV.
“DOS-prompt guy”?
When “cd” had a whole other meaning!
I’m waiting for them to bring back Win 3.11.
How about the GEM operating system? I still have some programs that run under GEM but no way to use them 
Ah - Atari ST 
The original GUI circa 1985 or so.
I love that it uses all three colors!
I did my first race car front and rear suspension geometries and motion path analysis using a package called MEW for that operating system. Probably on an 8086 processor.
It was way better than tracing out paths on scale paper drawings as I had done up until that time.
So…watching this thread I started…I don’t know what, but I suddenly wondered what would happen if I took a SACD and tried to rip it.
I own the BIS label of Osmo Vanska’s Beethoven Symphony cycle. It is SACD/CD layers.
Now, mind you, I don’t have a SACD player. I just bought this collection because I read it was a good set of Beethoven symphonies.
So…I put it in my computer drive (I admit, not sure if it is Blu-Ray or not) and fired up dbPowerAmp and sure enough…it read the DSD layer and gave me the choices to rip it to DSD64-512.
I selected one track choosing only DSD64 as a test. And sure enough, dbPowerAmp says I now have a .dsf file of that movement.
I still have to try it on my DMP-A6 but…heck…that is a very cool development in my journey!!
Is anyone else on this thread ripping SACDs?
-Gil
dBPoweramp can rip the DSD layer of an SACD? That is news to me! If it is true it will put @paul172 out of work doing that for me. I have a Blu-ray drive in my computer, and many SACDs. I’ll hold my breath and give it a try!
Hope Hope Hope!!!
From the dbPoweramp site:
https://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central-dsd-dff-dsf-sacd.htm
" Requirements
Windows XP or newer, dBpoweramp R12 or newer required."
If you got to pick what sample rate to rip to, then it very probably wasn’t a DSD rip. There would be only one correct answer for SACDs (DSD64.) Most CD/DVD drives can’t read the decoding key off of the SACD so you probably were upsampling the 16 bit 44.1k CD layer.
