I noticed the CD ripper I use (CD-EX) has option to rip at up to 96000 Hz. I can hear for myself if you rip at 8 Hz it sounds like a transatlantic telephone call, but does ripping at more than 41000 improve the sound in any way or make subsequent editing less lossy/prone to artefacts (I know if course it will increase the file size)
the native sample rate of audio CDs is 44.1kHZ, so thats what it should be ripped at, for normal usage. You can, if you want, rip it at 48k or 96k, which will upconvert the samplerate. Your filezise will be enormous, and not all players can play those rates. If you're just ripping to mp3, than the quality will be slightly less than CD anyways, so there's no point in upconverting. Upconverting is usually used for advanced editing and processing of sound in order to maintain the highest quality possible, so it then can be exported to higher audio formats like SACD or DVD-A.
thanks for answer. I do a lot of editing before conversion to flac (lossless) so I think you are saying (as long as the editor can handle it, mine can certainly handle 48000 Hz and large filesizes) there may be a marginal benefit to 48000 Hz as you say in maintaining quality? And sacd format is just used for burning to sacd's I take it, it is not any sort of standalone format?
SACD's format is proprietary, you can't export directly to SACD. The samplerate for SACD is 1.44 million samples per second. You're not really going to notice much of a difference ripping at 48K. Unless the project you are working on requires a higher samplerate, like if its for a DVD, than use 48k. But just encoding to flac there prob won't be much difference. But I've never used flac, so hey, give it a shot. I wanted to try out flac, but its not compatible with winamp. Most people in the pro audio industry just use it to upconvert if they are using modulation and frequency plugins. I use Pro Tools, and my 002 can support 96K, so all my projects are done at that quality. So if I need to import a song from CD, than it has to be upconverted. Thats pretty much the main reason to use higher samplerate. Also, just as a suggestion, to get the highest quality possible of your songs, try using EAC instead of CDex. EAC is free also. CDex is good, but EAC is the only ripper than does an exact bit-for-bit rip of the audio cd, so you get a 100% rip of the CD. There's a guide in the guides section on how to set it up.
Thanks again for further reply. I made a mistake , I actually use CD WAV to rip (one reason being that I often rip works that are divided into tracks or movements but are meant to be played sequentially as a complete work). CD WAV is the only ripper I found that does not split all the tracks up and rip each to separate files. But I'll try EAC for sure. Have you tried Foobar 2000 to play FLAC in. It's a very bare bones GUI but has a nice equaliser and some other tools built in (freeware). I think I had to get a plug in so it played FLAC Cheers
