A bit of background. I had been intending to buy a Sony NW-A45 for over a year. I have quite a few iPods and Sony MP3 players but, now that memory cards are so cheap want to be able to put all of my CDs on one without resorting to compression. When the 40th anniversary Walkman was announced I held off buying this, thinking it might be more tempting but after watching Techmoan's rather unenthusiastic review went back to plan A. The same day that Techmoan's review was published I did a search on Ebay and found an NW-A45, described as "only used once before going back to my iPod for £80 Buy it Now. The seller had mislaid the proprietary USB cable hence the low price, but I had already one that came with one of my other Sonys. The player turned up in the condition described complete with the Sony instructions. I haven't done much with it yet just adding songs I bought on Amazon, mainly because I have a question about software. At present nearly all my CDs are ripped to a Windows 7 PC running Windows Media Center. What would be the best software to convert them to FLAC while maintaining the track listing, cover pictures etc ? I am thinking of something like dbPoweramp. I wouldn't mind paying for that IF it does an excellent job at doing what I want. Has anyone else used it ? p.s. don't suggest streaming instead. I prefer to own my music even if it just on an SD card. Time for larger memory card ?
I used dBpoweramp for many years, but last year finally paid for the full version. It preserves all tags/metadata during conversion, no worries there... but it really shines during CD ripping: it checks rips against online data to make sure that your rips are bit-perfect. It adjusts CD rip speed according to CD quality, gives you quite a few options on how to deal with errors. During rip you can choose which online database to use for your tags. dBpoweramp cannot convert SACD files, I use JRiver Media Center for those. JRiver Media Center can be used for any format conversion, unlike dBpoweramp it provides the option of all and any unthinkable tags for "classical music". This year I switched from iTunes to JRiver as my main music database software, it crashed frequently but they had finally fixed it.
Thanks Jorge I will have a go with dBpoweramp to see what it can do. I would like to avoid any more ripping. Quite a few years ago I (with alot of help from my girlfriend) ripped my entire CD collection to .wav files using Windows Media Center, which impressed me at the time. I chose .wav as I believe that is closest to what is actually recorded on a CD.
Flac, wav and AppleLossless are all, well, lossless. A few years ago one of Stereophile contributors converted a file through these formats and then back to wav and the final re-re-convertet file was bit-perfectly the same as the original. I checked a few of my albums as Flac or AppleLossless vs wav and to my ears wav sounded slightly better. The only explanation I managed to find is that unlike Flac/Apple, wav is not compressed and is easier on the DAC to “unfold”.
