Rip and save music in high-quality formats to listen to on your PC

Most of us have a collection of digital music on our computer, whether downloaded from a music service or copied from CDs, and this collection is usually stored as MP3, WMA or AAC files.

These file formats use technical wizardry to squeeze the musical information into as small a file as possible, but a side effect of this is that the sound quality isn’t as good as the original source.

Years ago, this was accepted as a necessary evil, since hard disks were small and expensive and storing higher-quality music just wasn’t practical.

But the average PC now has a huge amount of storage space, so why do we still use these low-quality, space-saving formats? As we will show in this article, if you value the quality of your music, it’s very easy to store it in a format that keeps the hi-fi sound quality of the CD.

The big squeeze
The ability to carry around several thousand music tracks on a device that fits into your pocket would once have been dismissed as an outrageous fantasy. But with the invention of the MP3 audio file format in the mid-1990s, this fantasy became a reality.

The key to the success of MP3 was that it allowed a complete audio CD, which normally takes up around 600MB of hard disk space, to be squeezed into 50MB or less. Since then, other audio formats have appeared, such as Windows WMA and Apple’s AAC, which work in a similar way.

We’re not particularly concerned with the technical wizardry of how this squeezing, more correctly called compression, works (if you are interested, see the Wikipedia article on MP3), but it uses a type of compression known as ‘lossy’. This means that, to reduce the size of the file, bits of digital information that aren’t deemed necessary are discarded.

How this is determined is clever, but the end result is that the audio quality is degraded from the original. Thanks to the ingenuity of the scientists, it is quite hard for most people to tell the difference between a high-quality MP3 file and a CD track but the more the sound is compressed, the worse the audio quality gets. Listen to an older MP3 file then the CD copy and the difference should be obvious.

What’s even worse is that the bits that are thrown away during the compression process are permanently removed, so the original sound quality can never be recreated. And if you take a compressed MP3 file and try to compress it even more, the sound can get a lot worse.