View source for Reasons for keeping full CD rips

[[Category:Music library]]
Maybe you think: I ripped some CDs to my computer and then converted them to lossy 320kbps mp3. If I discover duplicate songs, fine - I go delete the one that is worse. Saves me disk space.

It depends on what you want, but there are [[reasons for keeping lossless audio]] data and resons for keeping full CDs.

==what is a full CD rip==
A full CD rip (also known as a CD image) is an almost complete copy of the CD's digital data which if burned on to a blank CD would creates a clone of the orginal CD. In additions to the track audio of a normal rip ("track rip"), it includes
* any hidden track (reachable on most CD players by stepping back from track 1)
* any inter-track audio (usually but not always silence)
* any text (known as CD-TEXT) such as album and track titles and artists
* any additional non-audio data such as [[ISRC]] and UPC/[[EAN]] (barcode number)
The format of CD image disc file is proprietary to the program that made it, e.g. ''NRG'' for the Nero program. A clone made by burning such an image will differ in small respects, such as in the CD medium manufacturer information.

==why keeping all tracks==
If you deleted the other versions of the song you have no chance to re-check. You also cannot participate very well in discussions of the deleted file with other people.

Additionally you may have problems using cool features, e.g.
* automatic mass [[tagging]] - because the CD in its entirety has gone, the album cannot be recognised by certain software, e.g. those based on TOC keying as used by CDDB/Gracenote and FreeDB. And some tools currently need full CDs to allow mass tagging. Note: the tango.info [[mass tagging]] tool does not need full CDs.
* easily comparing your library list with other people. The comparison and matching could be done by barcode, disc number and tracknumber. See [[TINT]].

==solution==
* maintain a separate archive for your tracks that you think are the best versions of a song
* there may come up tools that can generate best-of-extractions based on the data you have
** e.g. several people gather and create a best-of-text-file. You just get the file, a program looks at what you have, and in the extraction it leaves out duplicates that have a better counterpart.