Getting your CD music to your computer has been made simple in recent years. Simple does not mean good however. Many people open their "i" programs to rip music from CD to their computer but have no control over quality settings. Worse the file format used is only good to the "i"program and nothing else. For an audiophile quality is everything and they would and always do skip the "i" program and the media player included in their operating system and go straight to Exact Audio Copy (EAC).

Using EAC, an audiophile has control of the way the music is ripped from the CD, and can either be stored on their hard drive as a wave file (a virtually exact copy of the music digitally bit for bit) or compressed into a FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) file. To explain the difference between a wave file and a FLAC file in very simple terms is file size. Both file types contain virtually the exact same information but FLAC files are compressed much like ZIP files are compressed. Most computer users have worked with ZIP files and know that the file or files contained in a smaller ZIP file can be larger than the original ZIP file without any information being lost. This also applies to FLAC. No information is lost, it is just shrunk down using the processing power of your computer. Of course this sounds great until you try to play back your FLAC file and find that your included media player software, your "i" program or your "i" device does not support it. Neither does your DVD player or car mp3 player. Being that FLAC is open and free it does not receive the respect it should from your operating system's manufacturer or the "i" company. It is the currently policy (written or unwritten) of many big companies to ignore free and open source software. Without the support from software, other devices will not support FLAC either.

This leaves us with the widely adopted and regulated MP3 file format. MP3 can sound pretty good and even great given the quality of the average home or car stereo. If you know and care about your systems T.H.D or your speaker system's crossover frequency or know their db sensitivity then MP3 probably isn't for you. If you just read that and said "huh?" then MP3 just might be the ticket for you. The media player installed with your operating system or your version of the "i" software may be able to rip your CD's to MP3 but you don't have control over quality settings. In many cases you end up with a small file with only a bit rate of 128kb. Then there is a difference in technology to encode to music to a MP3 file. Some encoders bundled into media software use low quality encoders that distort an already low quality file.

Audiophiles who want to sacrifice the superior quality of FLAC and wave files for a more compatible MP3 file will tend to use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) with the LAME encoder to rip their songs to MP3 files. EAC is not the most easy program to understand and mixed with LAME and the requirement to enter command line codes that resemble UNIX codes scares the majority of average users away.

That is where BonkEnc comes in to play. It combines an easy to use interface with option boxes that automatically insert the right commands into the LAME encoder. Drawbacks include less options to set and a lesser control than EAC. Still for the everyday casual user who would like to store their entire CD collection on their computer in the highest quality MP3 they can get without resorting to command lines, BonkEnc will suit your needs.

Look at the follwing images and use these settings to configure BonkEnc.