Tutorial: Rip CD-quality digital audio

Step 7: You'll see that the album image, artist details and track listing have now appeared. Select the source format for your audio. At the bottom left you can choose Flac as the output format from the drop-down menu. Once the Flac option is applied, you'll see that the Flac logo appears in the lower pane.

Step 8: We're finally ready to rip our CD and save it as uncompressed audio. Hit Rip to initiate the process. Close down all other programs; we've found that incoming emails and other interruptions can cause audio distortions. As you'll see from the screenshot, it results in some rather large files.

Step 9: Your portable music players may not support Flac. However, other types of lossless audio codec exist. The best known are AIFF, Ogg Vorbis and AAC Lossless. iTunes users can instead get lossless audio by going to Edit, Preferences, Import Preferences and choosing a lossless option.

Step 10: To convert Flac tracks to a format compatible with Windows Media Player, go to Start, dBpoweramp, dBpoweramp Music Converter. Highlight the tracks you want to convert, then press Open. Select a format from the list - the software should prompt you to download the codecs for any greyed-out options.