FLAC is one of the best lossless codecs out there today. It has a high compression ratio, and the ability to be tagged as well. The one question everyone asks themselves when backing up their CD collection as audio files is what format should I use? You don’t want to pick one that will need to be updated in 5 years, but there are so many different formats to choose from. But really, who likes feeding 2,000 CDs into a computer one by one to convert them into a newer format? FLAC is the answer to this, and is extremely easy to use as well.

One of the biggest chores when converting music is tagging it. Well iTunes took care of that for us with its automatic CD tagging integration with Gracenote. To make things easier we’ll just stick with iTunes in this tutorial. Other programs will work for tagging, just make sure all the codecs used are lossless to maintain the quality.

How To Do It:

1. Once iTunes is open, make sure that your preferences are set so that CD imports are encoded in their Apple Lossless Encoder. This will make lossless files from the CD while tagging it with id3 info.
2. Insert the CD into iTunes and let it import it if you have it on automatic, or press the import button.
3. Now all the files are in the Apple Lossless Encoder format and can be converted over to FLAC. Now download a program from this site to convert the files. For this tutorial in OSX we used a program called Max to convert the audio files. This program works very well and has support for just about every other codec in existence. We highly recommend it.
4. Now using your conversion program load the files from your iTunes folder into the conversion program. Make sure to save tagging info if there is even an option, otherwise choose your options such as compression levels. The amount of compression will not make a difference in the audio since FLAC is lossless.
5. Start converting the files and then enjoy CD quality FLAC files that have all their tagging info with them.

Screenshots (Click for larger image. Please be patient since the images are large)