FLAC

The MP3 was adopted as a standard in 1991. Mp3 is a lossy codec and hence looses quality.

The codec (for COder/DECoder) was around earlier than that. MP3 usually are about a 1/10 of the original music source.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Very similar to MP3 but there is no loss in the compression so lossless, meaning that audio is compressed without any loss in quality. FLAC decoding is pretty fast among lossless codecs and it has one the fastest encoding mode.

When you play an audio CD the audio data are read at a rate of approx 1400 kilobits per second.

How to convert a CD to FLAC files.

The app I use is "Exact Audio Copy"

EAC can be downloaded here

There is a great tutorial on how to extract to FLAC files via this link:

http://filesharefreak.com/tutorials/properly-ripping-to-flac-with-eac-099