Although downloadable music files and streaming music CDs have made them less popular than they once were, they are still around and are an excellent medium for backing up your music collection. If you don’t back up your music, you could lose everything if your hard drive crashes. Even if all of your music is on CDs, you should make copies of them because CDs can get scratched.
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You want perfect copies of all your originals in case disaster strikes, so stay away from lossy formats like MP3 that can compromise the quality of your recordings. Use lossless audio formats when burning your digital music library to CDs.
Lossless audio formats encode and compress audio without losing any data, so your music is perfectly preserved in a high-quality digital form.
The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is the most popular lossless encoding format. It is increasingly supported on hardware devices such as MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, and home entertainment systems. FLAC was created by the non-profit Xiph.Org Foundation and is also open source. Music stored in this format is typically reduced in size by 30 to 50 percent of its original size without loss of quality.
