If you are like me and still have a large vinyl and cd collection you may sometimes want to stream them. A lot of my older stuff is not on the major streaming services. So you will want to rip those CD’s to a hard drive so you can still stream around your home or to what ever device you want. Welcome to the world of music formats or shall we say containers.
![](https://brown-family.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/img_2085-1024x693.jpg)
Now the majority of music is all encoded to PCM 16-bit/44.1kHz audio. While there is a growing library of high resolution music, few music services offer it or broadcast/stream it.
So for the majority of listeners things like 24-bit/192kHz, MQA, DSD can all be safely ignored.
Lets get back onto the subject; you have a CD, your a Mac user with iTunes or Music as its now called and you want to simply rip it but preserve the quality.
![](https://i2.wp.com/brown-family.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Screenshot-2020-06-01-at-08.34.12.png?fit=525%2C449)
In Music, select file, preferences and then Files, and Import Settings. From the drop down list select Apple Lossless Encoder. Its a compressed format, lossless, and can easily be converted to other open standards if necessary but just about all hardware supports apple lossless.
You might want to copy those rips to a spare hard drive, Apple products can occasionally do odd things, like delete your music files and then stream lossy versions from the cloud.