CD ripping

cerrot

Wav or uncompressed flac.

Sorry, but there's no such thing as "uncompressed flac." Flac is compressed, that's why it exists. It's lossless, but compressed.

M4A is lossy compression meaning some information used to create the music is lost in the interest of smaller file size.

These may still sound fine or good enough but for best sound quality possible re-rip is needed to a lossless format.

Compression is fine as long as it is lossless as is typically the case with FLAC format. That is what I use. It provides a lossless format with smaller files that also has good ability to allow files be tagged with other relevant information that can be used to make for a richer user experience (depending on software used to stream and its ability to leverage the tags/metadata). The best of everything in essence.

I rip to flac using dbpoweramp which is a very good tool for assuring best quality results both in terms of sound quality and automatic tagging during the rip process.

WAV format is also lossless and closest to the format used on a CD. Problem is files are bigger and tagging ability limited.

I started with .wav and moved to FLAC. With good quality software used to stream either should sound similarly good in the end.  It did for me.

Good luck.

wav, flac, alac should sound identical, but flac and alac are probably smaller than wav.  With flac  you can trade compression speed for compression levels, to a point, so you can get some control over how much space and how much time you spend ripping.

There is software out there that will let you rip one CD after another, the trouble is the clean up. What do you do if it doesn't find a cover, or song list. That's kind of a PITA, not to mention changing genre's, making sure composers are listed correctly, etc.

On the other hand, if you make a prioritized list,  you could say, re-rip your top 50 or 100 quite soon.

Best,


Erik

A .m4a file can contain either ALAC (lossless compression) or AAC (lossy compression) audio data, among other formats. Many or all versions of iTunes can create .m4a files from imported music in either of those formats. The OP should check the "import settings" that were used in creating the .m4a files, and let us know which one was used.

Regards,
-- Al

Hi @cleeds - I associated the M4a extension with ALAC only. Didn’t realize, as Al points out, that M4A can also be for AAC.  Hence ASSumed you were talking about ALAC.  Still, a general statement that M4a is lossy/ compressed is not 100% accurate given the possible association with ALAC.   No offense intended.