Getting the best CD-ripping and -burning quality with Windows Media Player

Question

I rip and burn classical music CDs now and then with Windows Media Player 11, on Windows XP Pro, SP2. I use the "WMA Lossless" setting for ripping, and "Slow" for burning, figuring these settings will probably give me the best quality for ripping and burning. Here are my questions:

1. Are those settings the right ones to use in order to get the best possible ripping and burning quality with WMP?

2. What other CD rippers and burners--whether free or commercial--are there out there that may deliver even better quality than WMP?

Many thanks for answering my questions,

NT

Solution

The quality is limited by the source (CD). Thus you won't ever be able to get higher than CD quality even if you upscale. Losless means that there is no information lost due to compression, you may lose some quality during the sampling (must be resampled to be encoded into any file).

As far as the burn speed goes you haven't mentioned what you are burning to disk. Are you burning the losless WMA files, or an audio disk? If it's the files then the burn speed doesn't matter it's digital and will either work 100% or not.

If the end result is another audio disk then you might be best off just using a product like Nero or any other somewhat advanced CD burning software. They usually have a copy feature which I would imagine would have the best results (as it doesn't have to go through multiple steps, I assume it is an exact copy).

I hope this answers your question satisfactorily.