How can I Burn FLAC to CD at best possible quality?

If you're burning audio CD from hi-rez FLAC on the fly, your computer needs to (1) decompress the FLAC, (2) convert bit depth and/or sampling rate, and (3) burn the CD, all at the same time. Maybe your PC is running out of some system resource when you do that. To make a CD like this I use dBpoweramp to convert FLAC to WAV uncompressed with CD options (2 channels, 16 bits, 44.1 kHz) and then burn the CD from the WAV files with Burrrn.

 

You might try CDBurnerXP. I believe it does all that stuff automatically.

 

But does it do the conversion to CD-quality WAV before it starts burning the CD? I'm wondering whether the OP's system is getting hammered by disk I/O or running low on memory because he's using a program that does everything simultaneously, which works fine for modern PCs but maybe not so well for older ones (speaking as someone who has used a few old PCs!)

 

To burn a completely identical copy of an original disc you need to convert to wav (I make a temporary copy which I convert and delete after the burn is complete) and load the cue sheet in EAC once it has been properly configured for the drives being used. This can reproduce the discs 100% identically. (Minus any subchannel data which may be present on disc, or any data sessions - but there are ways to do that too. As far as audio, it's identical)

 

I used to burn needle drops to CD and they didn't sound good to my ears. So I instead burned them to DVD (playing them via the DVD-A spec) and they sounded much better. I used DVD-Audio Solo and I never had any problems. I since got a Squeezebox Touch and now they sound ever better...and I don't have to do any of that crap.

BTW, I have no idea what I did to burn to CD. If I remember, I'll let you know.

 

Why not burn it as wav files? It can also be played on a CD player. Regardless of file format, there will be no loss in SQ if downsampled from "hi res" to 16/44 if done correctly.

 

That's how it has to be done. You can't burn actual flac's to CD, unless the player reads flac's natively. And if that's the case, copying them onto a CD is very straightforward.

 

Burrrn works for me too...simple to use and excellent results every time. I use it on 64 bit Windows 7 and it has native support for .flac, .ape and numerous other formats.