How To Rip CDs To FLAC: Rescuing My Music Collection

We may earn compensation from reviewed products. Learn about our editorial policies.

Several weeks ago, a video by Mary Spender convinced me to hunt down my old music collection and set about buying – and modding – a second-hand iPod.

I didn’t see this coming. And if you’re wondering why I needed to ‘hunt down’ my own music collection – I’ll explain all in just a moment.

This blog post is also a call to arms. I think there are potentially a lot of you out there who are in the same boat as me – even if you don’t know it.

We live in a world fuelled by algorithms, and it has harmed our ability and desire to listen to music like we used to. We’ve also lost control of our music collections, and if you care at all about music, that is something to act on – immediately.

So, how did we get here? And if you’re tempted to rescue your own music collection in 2026, where on earth do you start?

The great MP3 mistake

Remember Winamp? I do. It arrived in 1997, and it was the first software MP3 player which featured a cool, approachable user interface. That prompted people like me to rip their entire CD collection to MP3 and use Winamp to play everything faff-free on a PC.

In 1999, the anti-physical media revolution stepped up a gear with the launch of Napster. This supercharged the adoption of peer-to-peer file sharing (and pirating) and led to Napster acquiring 80 million users by the year 2000.

Two years later, Apple launched an aggressive ad campaign for the iMac, which encouraged users to “rip” their CDs, create playlists in iTunes, and ‘burn’ the results to CD-Rs.

Then came the iPod. Suddenly, we had a device that could store “1,000 songs in your pocket”. This placed even more emphasis on obtaining the smallest MP3 file sizes possible. The principle was simple: the smaller the song in megabytes, the more you could cram onto your iPod or the CD-R for your MP3-ready aftermarket car stereo.

The numbers didn’t lie. Uncompressed WAV or FLAC file rips from CDs resulted in a single song costing as much as 30MB in disk space. A 128kbps MP3? Just 3mb of your hard-earned sectors, please. Even at 320kbps, an MP3 file would only take up 7MB of disk space. This meant you could fit up to 180 songs on a single CD, or 10-12 full albums. On one disk. And an almost limitless number on your PC. Insane, right?

Well, yes, insane. Because 128kbps MP3s sound hideous. If you got sucked into the MP3 revolution back then, you might recall that horribly phased, underwater quality of a low-bitrate MP3 file. At 320kbps, they sound far closer to the original CD version, but there’s still a ton of data lost through compression.

Thus, most of us were unwittingly destroying our own music collections in the early 2000s. Once ripped, the original CDs were cast aside, sold, accidentally left in roof attics during house moves, or stored in damp locations. We didn’t need them anymore, you see.

This is akin to placing tracing paper on original artwork, scribbling out your best interpretation and then chucking the original in the bin. It is absolute insanity, and it’s why so many people don’t have old CD collections gathering dust – they have downgraded digital copies taking up space on old hard drives (which have probably been lost, too).

I did that. I ripped everything to MP3 and lost track of my CD collection.

Until a couple of weeks ago.

Saving my collection

I thought it was in the loft (‘attic’, to my American friends). Alas, a quick scramble and multiple bangs of the old noggin’ on ceiling joists resulted in a fruitless search.

It wasn’t in the garage either, and, after a text to my parents resulted in my dad sending back a photo of just one CD, I realised that the box containing my physical music collection wasn’t at their house, either.

Then, it struck me. When we moved into our current home five years ago, I stored a bunch of stuff at the farm that’s co-owned by my girlfriend’s dad. Cue an early Sunday morning blast across country roads in the Porsche Cayman I was testing to commence the search of a huge, cluttered old barn.

It didn’t take long. We eventually found the box buried under a huge blue tarpaulin that was dripping in moisture.

First bad sign.

The second bad sign was the state of the box itself. The bottom had clearly been sitting in a small puddle of water for lord knows how long and had consequently disintegrated. Upon opening the lid of the box, things looked a little rosier. Immediately, I was greeted with the sight of Pink Floyd’s 1994 live album, Pulse, a bunch of Joe Satriani CDs, and beneath them, what looked like the rest of my CD collection. Everything looked relatively ok.

What followed was a salvage operation. Virtually every CD case in that box had suffered some form of water ingress. Some of the cases didn’t have CDs in them, and there were one or two rogue CDs without cases. Once I’d unearthed them all from the soggy box, I spent the rest of the afternoon washing each disk with warm soapy water, gently wiping away grime, and peeling off the inner sleeve material that had welded itself to the top of some of the CDs.

There were several fatalities. Some of the disks had suffered such extreme neglect while in that box that the actual CD part of the CD had started to wear away, leaving nothing but see-through plastic in its wake. Others were cracked, and some, well, definitely weren’t purchased by me originally.

Those went in the bin, leaving only the disks I thought could be salvaged and used to slowly resurrect my music collection. It was a slow, painful, and rather tragic process, but I only have myself to blame, eh?

It does raise one big question, though.

Why am I doing this?

Mary Spender was right – we’ve become too reliant on algorithms to feed our music listening requirements. For me, this has resulted in hopping between playlists and algorithm-fuelled ‘radio stations’ on platforms like Apple Music, and never really getting attached to anything.

A few weeks ago, I spent an entire blissful train journey listening to A Grand Don’t Come for Free by The Streets. From start to finish, as Mike Skinner intended. The sad truth is that, these days, you’re far more likely to come across Skinner’s seminal concept album in chunks; Fit but You Know It on a ‘2000s singalong anthems’ playlist, Dry Your Eyes on a ‘Break-up essentials’ playlist. Etcetera.

What you’re not going to experience is 50 undisturbed minutes that start with the scene-setting It Was Supposed to Be so Easy and end with the epic Empty Cans with a full-on movie-like narrative in between. Unless you intentionally do so. Which is what I did on that grey afternoon between Leamington Spa and London Marylebone. It reminded me of how I used to listen to music and what I’ve been missing out on. It was moving.

I want to get back to listening to music in that way, regularly. I want to revisit the albums I devoured in my teens and twenties, and I want to discover the gems I should have given time to over the last couple of decades.

I’m bored with the relentlessly perfect, AI-driven world we live in. I want to curate something that takes time to build and which is anything but perfect. That’s exactly what the CD ripping process has felt like so far, and the imperfections in some of the music I’m obtaining are more endearing than they ever have been.

This music collection is also something tangible I can give to my son one day. I’ve maintained a slowly-growing vinyl library for a while now, but adding a fully digitised, bit-perfect music collection to his eventual inheritance feels incredibly special. Even if he probably won’t like half of the music within it.

If I’ve convinced you to head down this path, let me give you a helping hand and reveal how I’ve been ripping my CDs to digital copies.

My 2026 CD ripping process

Ironically, I turned to AI to nail down this process, and it’s one of the few instances where AI has been genuinely helpful. Although – and as has constantly been my experience with the likes of ChatGPT – it did insist on sending me down a myriad of garden paths to solve what turned out to be very simple problems.

I’ve done that hard work for you, though. This is how I rip my CDs to FLAC files from start to finish (on the Mac).

Why FLAC files? I don’t want to be wedded to the Apple ecosystem for my fresh, bit-perfect music collection, so ALAC (Apple’s lossless format) felt like a slightly restrictive choice. FLAC files, by comparison, are just as lossless and play nicely with pretty much any playback system.

I started by doing something I never thought I’d have to do again: I bought a CD drive. Turns out they’re readily available on Amazon and not particularly expensive. I opted for this one, which has done the job brilliantly so far. It’s equipped with a built-in USB-C cable and a carry case, and it has a flower on the top of it (I have no idea why).

It’s important to have somewhere on your Mac into which you can rip your CD collection. I’ve kept this location simple by creating a folder called ‘CD Rips’ and placing it in the default macOS Music folder. The folder structure is simple:

• CD Rips
  • Artist
    • Album
      • Tracks

…although I don’t have to worry about managing that structure. I’ll get to why in a moment.

For the ripping process, I chose XLD, a completely free lossless audio transcoding app for the Mac. There are plenty of other options out there (for both macOS and Windows), but this seemed to be the most recommended in Mac land.

XLD is a bit of a beast in terms of how much you can configure it, but these are the key settings I landed on:

Core Ripping & Integrity Settings

• Output format: FLAC
• Ripper Mode: Set to XLD Secure Ripper for maximum accuracy and error correction.
• AccurateRip: Enabled “Query AccurateRip database” to verify that your rip is bit-for-bit identical to other retail copies worldwide.
• Offset Correction: Enabled “Set automatically if possible” to ensure the rip starts at the exact sample-perfect position for your specific drive.
• Verification: Enabled “Verify suspicious sectors” to catch and fix potential read errors during the extraction process.

Gapless & Live Mix Configuration

• Extraction Mode: Selected “Include pre-gap except for HTOA”. This is the “magic” setting for gapless playback; it appends the transitions to the end of the previous track so live sets flow seamlessly without silence.
• HTOA Handling: By choosing “except for HTOA” (Hidden Track One Audio), you ensure the first track starts immediately with the music rather than several seconds of “hidden” dead air.
• Format Optimisation: For Apple devices (iPod/iPhone), ensure the “Add gapless information for iTunes” option is checked within the AAC or ALAC format settings to help the player bridge tracks smoothly.

Logs & Archiving

• Save Log File: Set to “Always”. This creates a permanent record verifying that your rip had 0 read errors, 0 jitter errors, and achieved high AccurateRip confidence.
• Save Cue Sheet: Configured to save “Only when saving as a single image file” to keep folder clutter to a minimum for standard track-by-track rips.

Thankfully, the above is set-and-forget stuff and has resulted in perfect rips each time, whether the CD is a traditional album, a gapless live album, or a DJ mix. XLD has also managed to chew through some pretty gnarly CDs, even if some have taken a considerable time to get through.

While XLD does a great job of ripping CDs, it’s not the best at getting the metadata right – or the folder organisation spot on. This is why the next stage of my process is to open MusicBrainz Picard (this one is cross-platform and, again, completely free to download), drag my newly ripped FLAC files into it and use the Lookup function to grab the exact metadata and album artwork. Picard also sorts out the folder structure and leaves everything neat and tidy (and, yes, it takes care of those albums where the artists vary and have ‘feat.’ In them – a big headache otherwise).

This process leaves me with playback-ready lossless music on my Mac. From there, I can drag it onto an MP3 player such as the brilliant little Innioasis Y1, chuck it onto a USB stick for use on my AlphaTheta XDJ-AZ DJ system (a handy way of keeping another backup), or move it to a NAS. The latter is my next project; I’ll be setting up a NAS server at home, on which my music collection will live and be backed up, and streamed to multiple devices via Plex.

As noted, I’m also buying a second-hand iPod for modding purposes. But that’s for another day.

Final thought (for now)

Now that I’m fully ensconced in the process of digitising my music collection (again), I’m left with one abiding thought. This is a long, slow, boring, and often frustrating process. You have to commit.

Equally, it’s not cheap. As noted earlier, there were a bunch of CDs I couldn’t salvage from the farm building. They need to be re-purchased, along with new additions to my collection. Vinted, eBay, and my local record shop are helping there, but I’ve spent more on physical media over the last three weeks than I have in the last twenty years.

I’m not turning my back on music streaming, either. Far from it, in fact. Streaming now forms a very important part of the discovery process. I’m using Qobuz for access to lossless music I might want to buy. Combined with a very insightful chat with Gemini (yeah, I know – AI again), I’m delving into a history of music I really should have devoured previously. Qobuz simply acts as the staging platform for stuff I might want to add to my own collection. And I’m loving it.

I’m loving the entire process, in fact, and I’ll continue to share my journey with you – so, stay tuned.

Oh, and if you’re on a similar journey – get involved in the comments below!