The software choice depends a lot on what OS you're using. If you're on Windows, then I strongly recommend dBpoweramp for ripping your CDs. I'm sure many others on the forum will as well. It uses AccurateRip to confirm that you get an error-free rip, and if the AccurateRip shows discrepancies with others' rips or it's an obscure CD that isn't in the AccurateRip database it will automatically do a "secure" rip by ripping multiple times until it gets two matching results. dBpoweramp also has extremely good metadata/tag handling. You'll save a lot of time typing and editing the tag info.
You can set up dBpoweramp to encode to both FLAC and MP3 at the time of your rip, but I prefer to do them separately. I rip to FLAC, add or clean up tags, and then do a batch transcoding to MP3 (also with dBpoweramp). dBpoweramp isn't free. It costs about US$36, and is well worth it in my opinion. There is a free trial so you can see if it's worth it to you. Hell, you could even rip your 200+ CDs during the trial period, which I think is 30 days. But you're likely to want to pay for it anyway for future use. If your iTunes music isn't DRM'd, you can convert it to FLAC using dBpoweramp. Note that this will not improve the sound quality. They will still be lossy AAC files, except now they'll take up more disk space. But at least you won't degrade the quality by further transcoding. And don't bother to make MP3 copies of the AAC files, as those will sound worse than the original AAC. Finally, if you're on Windows you should get the freeware mp3tag (www.mp3tag.de), which is a powerful tagging program that works on FLAC as well as MP3. You can edit tags with dBpoweramp, but I find mp3tag much better for mass-tagging operations. -- aubuti ------------------------------------------------------------------------ aubuti's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2074 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=88774 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
