I have been downloading a lot of music in the last few weeks, most of which has been in Flac, which i then burned to disc.
Some of the Flac files i had on my hard drive have been deleted.
If i rip the cd's to my hard drive, will i lose any sound quality?
Sorry if this seems an easy answer to you guys, but i am just beginning to get my head around all this downloading lark.
Thanks in advance.

You can rip CDS to hard drive in FLAC format if you have the software.


But you can also do it in AAC and other formats if you chose the highest bitrate.

I' not sure of AAC's highest bitrate is lossless or not. I know FLAC is AND OGG(or is it OOG?) are.

TheVoid said:

There's a few different Apple formats, and similar. AAC goes up to 320k and is pretty clear. It's better than a 320k MP3. (Example: 320k AAC = 256k MP3). There is an Apple Lossless format that takes up a HUGE amount of space, but is lossless.

MikeyB71 said:

Yes, you can rerip the files from the CDs, and have pretty much the same quality. It's still uncompressed for the most part. IT's when you compress things to mp3 or something that you lose quality which can never be repaired. FLAC is a container format for the most part, like APE or SHN, but a lot of players have built in codecs to play it (like VLC).

ernestsewell said:

Thats the answer i required, thanks....

if you rip back to flac from a cd burned from flac you will have the exact same quality as lot as it was ripped correctly, and on the presumption it was a 16 bit flac file not a 24 bit flac file, but most flacs are 16 bit and you would probably ask how to burn a 24 bit flac to cd if you had one

use EAC (exact audio copy) to rip the files to flac. just google up the download and how to. avoid AAC. if you don't know what it is, how to use it, or ask the question you initially posted, you just don't want to go there

flac is a code not a container btw. it stands for free lossless audio CODEC