In the 1990’s there was a sudden boost in the popularity of the MP3 files. Everyone was looking for MP3 files and there were only a few rare tools that could produce or convert high quality MP3 audio files. This was because hard disk drives were expensive and the internet bandwidth was very slow compared to modern times. People wanted to store more audio files in a smaller storage space and wanted to download/upload them faster on a slower internet.
But now those constraints no longer exist. Solid state drives and other types of memory devices have become very affordable. For less than $90, you can get 1 TB of SSD on Amazon. And the internet speeds have become fastest in the human history. On 5G networks, it is common to get an average speed of 600-800 Mbps even in remote areas.
Now instead of lossy MP3 file format, we can use lossless audio file formats such as FLAC, TrueAudio, Monkey’s Audio, ALAC, WavPack etc. For this, we an use CUETools which is a number of tools that allow us to rip Audio CD using these lossless audio codecs.
Using CUETools is very easy. We have to launch CUETools, click on the input folder and select a folder that contains the Audio CD files or the Audio CD drive itself for ripping. Next, we have to select an output folder where the ripped audio tracks will be placed. Once that is done, we can choose a template for file renaming.
We have to choose an action such as encoding, verifying, correction of file names, create CUE sheets, etc. We have to choose a mode, embedded, image+CUE, or tracks. We can choose whether the output is going to be lossless, noisy, or none. Finally, we can choose one of the audio codecs and click on the GO button.
All things considered, CUETools is a very good and powerful set of tools for quickly ripping an audio CD into lossless audio file format. It comes with some built in codecs which are more than enough for anyone looking forward to ripping audio CDs these days.
You can download CUETools from http://cue.tools/wiki/CUETools.