If you’re like most people, you probably have an audio CD in your collection. Whether you listen to it on a daily basis or just occasionally, it’s important to keep your audio CDs in good condition so that they can still play after years of use. One way to keep your audio CDs in good condition is to Rip them to FLAC format. Foobar2000 is a free software program that can help you rip FLAC files. Once Foobar2000 has finished ripping the files, it will create a FLAC file with all of the tracks on the CD intact. To rip a FLAC file, open Foobar2000 and click on the “Rip” button. The “Rip” button will take you to a dialog box where you can choose how many tracks per album to rip and how long the Rip process will take. You can also choose whether or not to save the ripped files as an MP3 file. Once the Rip process is complete, Foobar2000 will give you a report indicating how many tracks were ripped and what format each track was in. If you want to save these files as an MP3 file, click on the “Save As” button and enter a filename for each track.

Note: For this tutorial we’re going to assume this is the first time you’re ripping a disc with Foobar2000. We’re running it on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

Install Foobar2000 and FLAC

First download and install Foobar2000 (link below). The main thing you’ll want to make sure to enable during the install process is Audio CD Support…

And the freedb Tagger which are located under Optional Features, then continue through the rest of the install wizard.

Next you need to install the latest version of the FLAC codec (link below) following the defaults.

Rip Audio CD

To rip a CD, place it in your CDROM drive, launch Foobar2000 and click File \ Open Audio CD.

Select the appropriate CD drive and click the Rip button.

Next you’ll want to lookup the disc information with freedb…or you can manually enter in the track data if it’s a custom disc.

Select the proper tag information in the freedb tagger window, then click Update files.

The data will be entered in, make sure the radio button next to Go to the Converter Setup dialog is selected, and click the Rip button.

In the Converter Setup screen, here you can select the output format, where in our case we’re selecting FLAC.

In this window you can choose several other options like the output path, merging the tracks into one or individual files…etc. When you have those settings completed click OK.

Next you’ll need to find flac.exe which is located wherever you installed it. On our 64-bit Windows 7 system the default path is C:\Program Files (x86)\FLAC

Now wait while your CD is ripped and converted to FLAC.

You’ll get a Converter Status Report…after you’ve checked it over you can close out of it.

If you set the option to show the output files after conversion you can take a look, make sure all tracks were converted, and play them right away if you want. You can play the tracks in Foobar2000 or any player that supports FLAC. If you want to use WMC or WMP see our article on how to play FLAC files in Windows 7 Media Center or Player.

That’s all there is to it! If you’re a fan of Foobar2000 and enjoy your music converted to FLAC format, Foobar2000 does the job quite well. There are a lot of customizations and tools you can use in Foobar2000 that we’ll be taking a look at in future articles. For more information check out our look at this fully customizable music player.

Foobar2000 run on XP, Vista, and Windows 7

Links

Download Foobar2000

Download FLAC