Which format?

You will get lots of conflicting advice, but to start the ball rolling here are my opinions:

1) the Unitiserve rips to WAV straight out of the box and I guess the HDX does too.  You can change that if you want.

2) as I use a Unitiserve I use WAV because the Unitiserve mostly handles the metadata on rips fine and so I just didn't change the default setting.  I have seen hardly anyone prefer the sound of a FLAC.  Most say that WAV is better or that they sound almost the same.  Some people use FLAC primarily for its smaller space and better metadata handling and some of those transcode to WAV on playback so the the streamer doesn't have to do the transcoding. You need a lot of albums for disc space to be a problem though as I have found a CD rip takes about 1GB in WAV.

3) I will leave someone else to answer this and I think the ease of overcoming depends on your upnp software.  There is not much of an issue at all with the U.S. Or HDX.

4) see above.  Probably most people would agree that WAV sounds best is everything else is equal.

5) No

6) my advice would be to not over-think this.  Try it out and see what you think.  But make sure you have really made your mind up before you have a massive ripping session which leaves you with a time investment in one format which may turn out not to be your choice!

And enjoy.  It's a very convenient way to access your music.

best

David

Your  assumption that WAV is a replica of CD is wrong.

WAV does not have metadata issues,  FLAC however does make editing easier

1) HDX & US rip WAV by default  - but be careful as it doesn't carry the same metadata format as a regular WAV download or a CD rip using another ripping program such as dBpoweramp or similar.  The CD rip will play perfectly on HDX & US,  but if you copy to NAS & play on a regular streamer, it will play, but stuff is missing.

2) WAV - Naim said its the best for their streamers - I believe them & after comparing WAV v FLAC v ALAC, I believe it sounds marginally better & I have no need to mess with storing in FLAC & then transcode to WAV - thats something I have never understood. But hey ho a lot do it so it can't be that bad.

3) I have no issues editing WAV metadata

4) See (2)

5) Its up to you, nothing is that different or better/worse.  Its what you get used to

Barry,

For me the primary issue is sound quality.

In my previous system I heard no difference between FLAC and WAV, and so I used FLAC in order to leverage the meta-data. When I changed to the NS01 WAV was better in my system, so I backed up my FLAC files and then converted them.

My advice would be it make a selection of files in any format you are thinking about and then listen to them in your system.

Remember that file formats can have additional factors that might effect SQ - such as FLAC and the level of compression.

M

I have chosen to store my rips in flac, for ease of metadata handling.  I let my server transcode them to wav, such that my NDS and Qute play wav.  I am happy with this result.

My UnitiServe ripped a lot of my cd's to wav, so I let it convert the existing wav to flac.  New rips go right to flac.  And everything I put in the Downloads folder is flac.

Barry,

The posts by Bart and Chris highlight another subtlety - how you consume the rips.

In their cases they are consuming them as a stream, and so the server can manipulate the file as it is fed; In my case I use my NS01 to grab the file from a share on my NAS, this is then processed and fed from the NS01 spdif into my Bel Canto 3.5vb - and so I cannot make use of transcoding.

How will you process the files you rip?

M

1) Wave but it can be set to FLAC

2) Flac - metadata much more easy to manage

3) I didn't push that far but already a soft to tag wave properly is not easy to find. Difficult to include the image in the file and all other issues ...

4) Naim developped their product to be best with wave - can be eared sometimes

5) FLAC is the format most common actually i think

6) I left HDX for a QNAP NAS. And yes, there is an advice. Now with the software "Asset", you can on the fly convert on the NAS all your FLAC files properly tag to WAVE (even in 24 bit!!!) and serve them to the streamer of your choice. Simply brilliant, stable and more efficient The right way to go minimserver can do it too but i stayed on Asset for the quality of the support.

It's simple - get it on flac, which is easier. And convert on the fly on your music server into wav for the best sound quality.

The only person who can give an accurate answer is the OP. Formats are easy to convert between and they all tag well if you have good enough software to do it. Rip a small number of favourite albums and listen to each format played back in the target system. Try to cover all the bases, like on the fly transcoding and go with the version which sounds best. If nothing stands out as preferable then please yourself. This is too critical and area to go with a consensus or somebody else's ears. Flipping between formats and transcoding is easy and tagging only takes a basic understanding and a good tagger. By the time you've fiddled about with three albums you'll know 95% of what you'll need to know about formats and tags.

Thank you all so much for your replies.  Both interesting AND helpful!

What I draw from these replies is: -

1. It's not a life or death decision between WAV and FLAC - either will do the job.
2. I hadn’t heard before about ripping to FLAC and converting to WAV 'on the fly' before playback.  Sounds interesting.
3. The choice of software is likely to be important for a relatively trouble free experience.
4. I need to dip my toe in the water and see what works for me.

Which leads me to one final question.  (Well, until the NEXT final question!)  Which software should I go for.  The choice at the moment seems to me to be between JRiver and dbPoweramp.  Unless you tell me otherwise........  What would you go for?  And why?

Again, many thanks for all your help.

A big +1 for ripping to flac and transcoding to wav if you feel you need to and can hear a difference.  Other software worth a look at includes Exact Audio Copy (eac) which is very good for ripping and Tag Scanner, which is great for tagging files that have already been ripped or where the tagging is not correct.  Bother of these are free and both work very well indeed.

No question - dBpoweramp.

Its widely recognised as the best & as its been around for a long time with Windows PC, its a very mature & vertually bomb proof program - Apple/Mac is now released & I understand is as good as the Win-PC version.

Once bought you get a few other add on programs with it,  ongoing updates for free, customer support & also keep in mind the UPnP server software Asset is part of the same parent company.  

dBpoweramp has a number of ripping options & DSP packages & options to make the ripping process best for you & added flexibility.  It has AccurateRip,  this compares your CD with numbers of other AccurateRip files of the same CD on www & verifies its an exact copy of that & as such is error free. It includes a format converter so you can easily convert & copy to whatever your preference is - FLAC, WAV etc.....  And finally once the rip is done & its missing something, or not right for you personally,  it gives easy & simple tag editing

It is a program I have total confidence in.  

And final finally - I read all the discussions,  but do not understand why peeps want to store flac & transcode to wav.   I have been all wav since day one, its does everything & it does it simply & no complications. I've tried flac,  no problems,  but I don't understand why  ????  Storage is cheap & dBpoweramp does all the tag editing you need, including batch conversions.  

I imagine you can get hold of an evaluation version of any software you wish to try so like most other things, you don’t have to take anybody else’s word for it. My vote goes to dBpoweramp because it is flexible and effective. It will rip and tag, edit tags, strip tags, convert formats and they make Asset which is an excellent uPnP server.

I use both dbPoweramp and JRiver. imo, dbPoweramp is by far the better ripper - it retrieves more useful tags and is generally much faster, and has the bonus of Accuraterip verification.  But JRiver is much better for editing tags, and of course it is an absolutely superb music player. 

I use MediaMonkey for ripping, tagging and library management, but I plan to give Illustrate's PerfectTUNES a try after it is ported to MacOS. If I switch, dbpoweramp will become my new rip engine.

My CDs are ripped as FLAC, but Asset UPnP (running on a QNAP NAS) converts them to WAV on the fly. This works very well, allowing me to stream to an older Denon AVR which does not support FLAC.

For travel, I carry a Mac Air and a small 2TB drive. I use dbpoweramp for batch conversion, creating a copy of my library in ALAC. I use standard iTunes to play music (through a USB connected Centrance DACPort and headphones). Have a very long flight out on Friday morning, and just bought a pair of Bose QC25's. They are decent mid-fi cans, but their noise cancellation is superb!

ATB.

Hook