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All my music is on cd's and my reading tells me that the cd itself has a limited shelf life and will degrade over time.
Any recommendations about converting my cd's to FLAC or some type of high quality music files. Not looking for
compressed files.
I see products such as the Blue Sound Music Vault and a Sony High Resolution Music Player.
Does anybody have any thoughts about how to accomplish this goal?"
I use dBPoweramp and a plain Jane Windows PC with a CDROM. I rip to FLAC files and store on a hard drive. Works like a champ, and these CDs have never sounded better. I play back through a Bryston BDP-1 and a Bryston DAC.
And BTW, I tried to measure the so called "CD rot" effect and found some evidence using Plextor error detection software on a few very old, first generation (early 80's) Redbook CDs that I had. These CDs are now almost 40 years old, and when scanned using the Plextor utility, found significant BERs (bit error rates). Ironically though, these same CDs, when ripped with dBPoweramp on the same Plextor CDROM, came out "bit perfect" with no indicated errors whatsoever. So from a practical viewpoint, I would not worry too much about degradation in your CDs. In fact, the solid state HD, thumbdrive, or SATA HDD you use to store your ripped music will probably fail before your CDs go bad due to CD rot.
Any recommendations about converting my cd's to FLAC or some type of high quality music files. Not looking for
compressed files.
I see products such as the Blue Sound Music Vault and a Sony High Resolution Music Player.
Does anybody have any thoughts about how to accomplish this goal?"
I use dBPoweramp and a plain Jane Windows PC with a CDROM. I rip to FLAC files and store on a hard drive. Works like a champ, and these CDs have never sounded better. I play back through a Bryston BDP-1 and a Bryston DAC.
And BTW, I tried to measure the so called "CD rot" effect and found some evidence using Plextor error detection software on a few very old, first generation (early 80's) Redbook CDs that I had. These CDs are now almost 40 years old, and when scanned using the Plextor utility, found significant BERs (bit error rates). Ironically though, these same CDs, when ripped with dBPoweramp on the same Plextor CDROM, came out "bit perfect" with no indicated errors whatsoever. So from a practical viewpoint, I would not worry too much about degradation in your CDs. In fact, the solid state HD, thumbdrive, or SATA HDD you use to store your ripped music will probably fail before your CDs go bad due to CD rot.