Thanks for your quick response.

Generally the defaults as CD's don't come in a better quality than that.

Also to be more specific with my question, what would be the best Sample rate and Bits per sample rate?

I know that I want to rip my CDs to Flac format. I will only be playing back through relatively high end audio equipment. And since external hard drive storage is inexpensive, what Format Settings would you recommend? Thank you in Advance. Tony

It rips to wave and then will convert to FLAC. It is my general understanding that almost all rippig programs use this two step approach. The conversion to FLAC with a compression setting of 5 or 6 takes 10 seconds or less on a reasonable fast machine. It's the read and error checking that take the longest. Remember, unlike with a lossy format, the compression setting in FLAC only effects the encoding time and the files size, it has no effect on the quality (all setting will result in a lossless file). At a setting of 5 or 6 vs. the maximum 8, you get 90+% of the compressions benefits without any meaningful time delay. At 5, the FLAC file will be approximately 60% of the size of the wave file.

Will EAC rip only to wav, or also to flac etc?

I'm not sure why you would rip to wave. You can rip to some other lossless format without ANY loss in quality and use about 60% of the space. My personal bias is towards FLAC. I ripped my 800+ CD collection to FLAC and it takes up about 275 GB. Remember, there is absolutely no loss in quality by using FLAC or other lossless formats. Plus, I don't think WAV has as many standard tag fields.

As to using MM, if you create your library/Database in MM, other music players cannot directly read the library/database or playlists. You can export playlists. Having said that, that doesn't mean that other players can't read the tags of the files that are created and updated in MM. They can. Personally, I don't think that you will find a Music Database program better than MM for large libraries. I having been using it for four years and love it.

To your question about error checking, MM doesn't have near the error checking that EAC does. That is not to say that MM's ripping ability is bad, it's just EAC is the best if you want the best possible rip of [b][u]your[/u][/b] CD. I say that bescause certain damage to CDs, even EAC can't recover. See the middle of this post for some thoughts if you are just starting the ripping process. I ripped my collection in EAC and then use MM as my DB/player program. Good luck.

http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=34708#p178197

Because hard drives are now so inexpensive, I have decided to rip all of my CDs in wave format. My collection will fit on a 1TB drive. Now I have to decide what program to use to do the ripping. Windows Media Player is out of the question. The three top contenders are Exact Audio Copy, Easy CD-DA Extractor, and of course Media Monkey. If I go with MM, I'll go Gold.
[list]
[*] If I rip with MM and create a comprehensive library, can other music management programs read the MM database or playlists?
[*] Isn't the M3U playlist able to be imported into other programs, including Windows Media Player?
[*] Does MM have the ability to monitor the read errors when ripping, like EAC does?[/list]