I'm going to rip my whole CD collection.

[adamburgess]

Friend of mine started doing this, before a sudden sad departure from this earth a few months ago.

He got a rackmounted PC preloaded with Vortexbox software on it, among some other stuff. He started saving everything as FLAC, I believe. It's integrated into a lovely Bryston and JBL rig. Everything appears from the server PC on Roon, played thru a Bryston DAC.

His wife is carrying on ripping everything. It's a whole room full, and she doesn't fancy carrying them all around when she inevitably downsizes homes.

She pops a CD into the 'toaster', and two mins later all is good - the PC runs totally headless and goes to an external SSD for a backup.

All the album art and sleeve notes etc. work brilliantly.

[Sam Spoons]

FLAC here. No regrets. I can always convert them back to WAV, should the need arise and then to another format. I see no downside to FLAC at all.

Had FLAC been supported by 'the fruit' I wouldn't have needed to post on here but it's unlikely I'll leave the Apple ecosystem anytime soon (or, probably, ever) so I've just nipped back to Jan 2014 for a few hours to rip into iTunes as Apple lossless (ALAC?) files.

[The Elf]

I play all my FLAC media on my iPad and iPhone no problem. Then again I don't use Apple's player.

I left iTunes behind years ago and never looked back. Now I can use any player *I* choose and store my audio where *I* like.

[adamburgess]

Admittedly a Mac fanboy for ever. But, yes, iTunes has always been absolute garbage.

[Hugh Robjohns]

I left iTunes behind years ago and never looked back. Now I can use any player *I* choose and store my audio where *I* like.

To be fair, you can do that and still use iTunes if you want to.

I do! I store my music archive on NAS drives, copying what I want to other drives as required, as well as to iPods, and I play it using SONOS, Foobar, and the iPods in the cars, as well as the occasional outing on iTunes (although I find the latter incredibly slow to load in Win10, it's still handy for ALAC metadata editing).

[The Elf]

I'm sure things have changed, but I'm not going back - Apple had their chance with me and blew it.

FLAC is supported across all platforms and I only have to store my music on one drive for it to be playable absolutely anywhere - car included.

[Martin Walker]

I'm also a totally FLAC man on my PC for general music storage, but although my car accepts USB sticks, it only recognises MP3 files.

Doubt whether I'd hear the difference in the car anyway

Martin

[DGL.]

I'm a bit of an outlier in the fact I use WMA lossless as it's an all Windows ecosystem here and I can't be bothered to change.

As for ripping I still use WMP as it's what I know and if necessary I can use multiple CD drives at once if I have a lot of CD's to do.

All gets stored on a mixture of a NAS and my laptop, as I need the music on the move/at work so it's only being in the NAS is not workable.

[The Elf]

All gets stored on a mixture of a NAS and my laptop, as I need the music on the move/at work so it's only being in the NAS is not workable.

That's the very reason I put mine on my NAS - so I have constant access to it anywhere on the move, from any device, with no need to store anything locally. I most often tap into my NAS from CloudBeats (or other streaming cloud players, such as EverMusic) on my iPhone. CloudBeats also shows up in Apple CarPlay, making it easy and safe to play music in the car.

Of course, your NAS has to permit external access to allow this, but I think most do.

[DGL.]

All gets stored on a mixture of a NAS and my laptop, as I need the music on the move/at work so it's only being in the NAS is not workable.

That's the very reason I put mine on my NAS - so I have constant access to it anywhere on the move, from any device, with no need to store anything locally. I most often tap into my NAS from CloudBeats (or other streaming cloud players, such as EverMusic) on my iPhone. CloudBeats also shows up in Apple CarPlay, making it easy and safe to play music in the car.

Of course, your NAS has to permit external access to allow this, but I think most do.

Mine does but you have to take into account upload speeds and the fact that I might not be connected when I want access to the music, esp. now I have a new laptop and the battery life is no longer measured in minutes! (or messages popping up telling you the battery is knackered!). Plus I have a cheapo mobile contact and as such only get 1.5GB of data per month, luckily my aging Windows phone takes microSD cards and as such it has a 512GB one fitted so I can store all the music I need on it with no issues.
It's also nice having the extra backup as the NAS and it's HDD's are no spring chicken! (over 10yrs old now I believe)

[The Elf]

Both CloudBeats and EverMusic will let me download to iPad/Phone, so I get the best of both worlds - streaming when connected, but a few favourites to hand when I'm not. Later I can release the ones downloaded and replace with others.

I actually have two NAS's - one backing up the other, then a cloud service backing up the backup!

[Jorge]

Does the industry have a mid-long-term plan for file format(s) that is most likely to remain easily accessible for playback in 20 years? I have lots of LPs from the 60s and 70s that I still listen to on a turntable, and I intend to listen to most of my CD collection for the foreseeable future. Ripping CDs does take time and effort and I really don't relish the thought of 15 years from now having to do massive amounts of file conversion (if that is even possible) of FLAC, ALAC, mp3 or even WAV file collections from old CDs.