So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC? (1 Viewer)

[Greg_R]

I am in the process of re-ripping my 1800 CD collection. Why am I re-ripping? Because my 1st pass through I did everything in 198kbps mp3 and I wanted a lossless format. Trust me... the cost of a few extra MB of storage is nothing compared to 3+ months of your time re-ripping everything! Drive health utilities will monitor your HD and are highly recommended (Raid 5 systems offer some additional protection).

I used to use REACT (EAC + shell) to rip to multiple formats at once. However, the problem with that is when you try to start adding album art or making corrections to the tags (you need to edit both files!). My current recommended method is to rip to 1 lossless format and get everything clean (tags, art, etc.). Then use foobar2000 to convert your entire lossless library to the compressed format of your choice (it will retain the art, lyrics, and tag info). For ripping, I've been using dbPowerAmp because it supports auto-loaders (in beta). Accurip and ReplayGain (applied per album) are additional critical elements to include in your ripping process. EAC is the alternative but it's a little less user friendly in terms of getting post-processing filters working (along with encoding to multiple formats). These are by far the best rippers if accurate rips are a concern for you.

 

[nolesrule]

Exactly Greg.

I use EAC with FLAC for my rip and encoding (using Accurip), and dbPowerAmp for making the mp3 copies. The main reason I use EAC is because I can always run the latest version of FLAC immediately, whereas I've found that db's modular system doesn't upgrade as fast.

I love using dbPowerAmp for converting because it supports multi processors and can transcode a file for every processor core on the system.

 

[Ray Chuang]

If I had a big enough hard drive, I would have ripped my entire CD collection into iTunes in 256 kbps VBR MP3 (High Quality) encoding. That way, not only will it work with my 3G iPod nano but I can copy it to other portable media players if needed.

 

[JohnRice]

I have my entire library (roughly 1,000 CDs) loaded on my main Mac and network it around the house. I'm amazed it only takes 70GB of space at 256-320 Kb. I used LAME to convert most of it. Some day I may wish I had used lossless.

 

[nolesrule]

mp3 is good enough for portable players with those headphones, but if I couldn't have CD quality on my primary listening system, I wouldn't use a ripped format.

Think of it this way....lossless vs lossy is like film vs DVD. Sure, the DVD looks great, but there's some detail missing. Anytime you use compression, something will be thrown out.