Ripping

Ripping is transferring the content of a CD to a hard disk.

Bit perfect

The true audiophile worries: ‘is the rip bit perfect?’

I have the feeling that the average optical drive of the average PC is more than apt to do a reliable ripping.

An comparison between various rips has been made by Kent Poon.
Comparing rips made on PC and MAC using iTunes, Wavelab and EAC didn't show any difference.

The funny thing is, that the low cost CD723 player is able to read any CD or CD-R that is not severely scratched without any interpolation or hold. You can even put it upside down, there will be zero interpolation /hold.

Uncorrected samples could only be generated by dropping the player (5cm) or by extremely scratched CD's.

Source: http://www.jitter.de

But if you want to be nuke proof, there are two powerful rippers Exact Audio Copy (EAC for short) and dbPoweramp. Both employ all the tricks to get a bit perfect copy.
Both can be combined with AccurateRip to verify the results.

See the software section for more details.

File format

Today a 1 Tb HD sells at € 100,-
You can store approximately 1600 CD’s on it if you choose a uncompressed lossless format like WAV. A format like FLAC does lossless compression up to 50-60%.

As storage is cheap today, I recommend to rip to a lossless format.

Storage

Ripping your CD's to your hard disk requires some space
This table gives you an impression of the number of CD's you can store on a HD given the file format.

Audio Format	Setting	320 GB	500 GB	750 GB	1000 GB
RAW (AIFF/WAVE)	No compression	530	821	1,233	1,644
FLAC	Lossless compression	920	1,448	2,176	2,900
MP3	128kbit/s 160kbit/s 192kbit/s 320kbit/s	5,780 4,620 3,850 2,310	9,048 7,238 6,032 3,619	13,599 10,879 9,066 5,439	18,130 14,500 12,090 7,250

Note: Calculations are based on the data volume of a 60-minute audio CD. The actual CD capacity might vary depending on the length of each CD.
Source: http://www.olive.us/products/storagecalculator.html

Another calculator can be found here: http://www.pinnacleaudio.co.uk/products/storage_calculator.html

Redbook audio (CD) is 16 bits sampled at 44.1 kHz

Store it without compression:

16* 44100=705600 bits/second

2 channels= 1411200 bits/s

1 byte=8 bits= 176400 bytes/s

1 Mb=1024*1024 bytes=0,168228149 Mb/s

1 hour requires 605,6 Mb