This entirely depends on your usage requirements, and the quality of your listening equipment. Generally if you want to listen to the music on a standard car stereo, or whilst out jogging for example, then MP3 is usually sufficient. We always encode these files at 320kbps, unless you request us to do them at a lower resolution. This is the maximum quality for standard MP3. 

For the best quality however, and for archival purposes we recommend encoding to FLAC files – these are ideal for most home use, including network streamers such as those manufactured by NAIM, Linn, Moon etc. 

However, you do not have to choose one or another exclusively, we can convert your CDs into many different file formats, simultaneously, and we can supply multiple formats at a nominal extra cost.

Lossless Compression takes your data stream from the CD and compresses it by approximately 40-50%, this will give an identical experience to if you played it from your CD player directly

Types of Lossless files include:

• FLAC
• Apple Lossless (ALAC)
• WMA Lossless
• Monkey Audio (APE)
• WAV *

Lossy music files utilise more comprehensive compression techniques to Lossless file formats, but there are compromises in musical quality. This is particularly noticeable on high-end home music systems. Generally Lossy files are around 10% of the size of the original source, meaning a typical 74 minute CD would take around 74GB of file space.

Typical file formats include:

• MP3
• AAC
• WMA
• Ogg Vorbis

Metadata is the “extras” that come in a music file, and can include a whole host of information about the music contained, including –

• CD Cover Art
• Artist
• Track Title
• Album Title
• Album Artist
• Track Number
• Lyrics
• Year of Release
• Genre

Please note though that not all of this information will be available for all discs, and that errors can occur, as this metadata can be incorrectly supplied by the music companies, or we may find a disc with multiple, contradictory or just plain inaccurate data. 

Classical music is particularly difficult to classify as there are so many different schools of thought on how best to categorise these. 

Similarly Home-Made CDrs (Mix-tapes) are virtually impossible.

Each disc we convert will be saved to a folder structure of Artist\Album\Track 01, 02 etc this is the only structure we offer for a simple, speedy service.

We can transfer just a single CD~ to thousands – our current record is 6,535 discs – this did take some time!

~We have a minimum order price of £25.00

Whilst we try our best with home-made CD-rs there are often issues getting them to extract properly, from our experience it’s roughly 50-50 as to whether they are successfully ripped, and the chances definitely reduce with age.

Unfortunately we still have to charge for these, even if we are unsuccessful as they often take longer to extract than a factory produced CD.

Getting your discs to us

Once you have placed an order, we will contact you with the details of where to send your discs.

We strongly recommend sending them by an insured method, for smaller quantities you could use Royal Mail Special Delivery, but this can be expensive due to the weight of CDs. Using a courier service such as Parcel Force or UPS will be cheaper, particularly on orders over 100 discs.

For larger quantities, we also recommend sending just the discs unboxed from their Jewel Cases and placed onto spindles or “cakeboxes” – these are available quite cheaply from Amazon, or we can supply these on request. 

Returning the discs to you

After converting your CDs we will return your digital library on USB memory stick, together with your original CDs.

Typically our turn around time is 1-2 weeks after receipt of your discs, although this does depend heavily on the quantity. We will always do our best to let you know how we are getting on.