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I want to backup my CD's in the highest quality fashon. I have some very rare CD's (example some 10 year old Swinging Pig bootlegs) that I am worrying about degrading or getting stolen someday.

Should I even bother to burn them to an audio CD-R, or should I store them as data on a CD-RW?

Is there any advantage to "Fast Copy(On the fly)" (where the CD and CD-R are both running during a burn) in terms of audio quality in the conversion to CD-R?

What is the highest quality way to store music as data? Windows Media Audio Lossless?

What is a higher quality way to burn .. using Nero 5.5 or Windows Media player9? (or other)

Forgive me as I am new to the scene and thanks for any help.

Matt_Eb wrote:Should I even bother to burn them to an audio CD-R, or should I store them as data on a CD-RW?

For longevity, CD-R is the way to go. By the way, you don't need to burn them specifically to "audio" CD-R. Regular data CD-R work just fine in a computer burner, whether you are burning data or audio.

Matt_Eb wrote:Is there any advantage to "Fast Copy(On the fly)" (where the CD and CD-R are both running during a burn) in terms of audio quality in the conversion to CD-R?

It is likely to give worse quality, if there is any difference, since when copying on the fly there is no chance to go back and re-read a sector if an error is encountered while reading it the first time.

Matt_Eb wrote:What is the highest quality way to store music as data? Windows Media Audio Lossless?

Any truly lossless storage should work. Storing as .wav is lossless and highly compatible, but it offers no compression.

Matt_Eb wrote:What is a higher quality way to burn .. using Nero 5.5 or Windows Media player9? (or other)

Burn quality is more influenced by drive and media. Unless there is a bug in the burning program, they should all give the same results. Having said that though, don't use WMP buring plug-ins. They cause too many problems. Stick with Nero.

Matt_Eb wrote:Forgive me as I am new to the scene and thanks for any help.

Tonearm has been pursuing the same grail you are. I suggest you find all his posts and read through them:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/search.php ... or=Tonearm

cfitz

I would highly recommend ripping the songs to your hard drive first and then burning both an audio CD and a data CD of the tracks if these old CD's mean a lot to you. I would avoid on the fly copying because it can produce more errors than burning from your hard drive after your audio tracks have first been ripped. You also need some very good media like TY to help preserve the quality of your audio CD's. Also no need to buy those audio CD-R's as they are not better than regular CD-R's unless your using a standalone CD-RW drive.

Use Nero or CDex for ripping
http://www.cdex.n3.net/
Use Nero for burning.

Anyways, I already see that cfitz has posted an answer to your question as I finished typing this. That cfitz guy is good and fast!

Don't need any special program to do a disc-disc copy. As cfitz mentioned, don't use "On the Fly" and reduce your burn speed to about 4X-8X.

Regarding file formats...

WMA = T3h S00k!

You have a couple options... WAV takes up too much freaking space on a per song basis.

These aren't supported by most players, can be used for archival quality rips and are lossless formats. There are plugins to get them to work with WinAmp and a couple others.

Monkey's Audio .ape
MusePack .mpc
Ogg .ogg

The files can then be converted into an MP3 with no loss in audio quality if you wanted to move them to a portable player.

If you want to rip directly into MP3, best choice is Exact Audio Copy with LAME, --alt-preset extreme.

Somebody stealing one's bootlegs is a kind of poetic justice, is it not?

Slim

CowboySlim wrote:Somebody stealing one's bootlegs is a kind of poetic justice, is it not?

Slim

That makes zero sense.

Matt_Eb was worried that someone might steal his bootlegs (which of course are already "stolen"):

Matt_Eb wrote:I have some very rare CD's (example some 10 year old Swinging Pig bootlegs) that I am worrying about degrading or getting stolen someday.

I hadn't really paid attention earlier, but Slim is right that there is some irony there.

cfitz

My bad, it must be the crack... or lack of caffeine.

cfitz: Very perceptive, that was my implication exactly.

tazdevl: You have my understanding.

CowboySlim wrote:cfitz: Very perceptive, that was my implication exactly.

tazdevl: You have my understanding.

ROFLMAO