You want perfect copies of all your originals in case disaster strikes, so stay away from lossy formats like MP3 that can affect the quality of the recordings. Use lossless audio formats when burning your digital music library to CDs. Lossless audio formats encode audio and compress it in a without sacrificing any data, ensuring that your music is perfectly preserved in a high-quality digital form. Common routes to rip audio CDs to FLAC include software media players like Winamp for Windows or dedicated utilities like Max for Mac computers. All major operating systems support FLAC, including Windows 10, macOS High Sierra and above, Android 3.1 and newer, iOS 11 and newer, and most Linux distributions. ALAC isn’t as popular as FLAC, but it could be the better choice if your preferred software media player is iTunes or if you use Apple hardware like iPhone, iPod, or iPad. There’s no loss of quality when you rip CDs with music in the ALAC format, so it’s a good choice when you want to preserve your original audio CDs. If you need to change from ALAC to another format at some point, there’s still no loss of quality. WMA Lossless is probably the least well supported of the formats in this list, but it could still be the one you choose, particularly if you use Windows Media Player and have a hardware device that supports it. Methods used to rip CDs to APE files include downloading the Windows program from the official Monkey’s Audio website or using stand-alone CD-ripping software that outputs to this format. Even though most software media players don’t have out-of-the-box support for playing files in the Monkey’s Audio format, a decent selection of plug-ins is available for Windows Media Player, Foobar2000, Winamp, Media Player Classic, and others. If storage space isn’t an issue, then the WAV format has some clear advantages: It has widespread support with both hardware and software platforms. A lot less CPU processing is needed when converting to other formats because WAV files are already uncompressed, and they don’t need to be uncompressed before conversion. You can also directly manipulate WAV files using audio-editing software without having to wait for decompression and recompression cycles to update your changes.
