You'll get quite a few opinions with this. Personally I use a windows program called dbPowerAmp to both rip and encode. It is very good about getting accurate tags and encodes to FLAC on the fly so by the time the CD ejects, the FLACs are encoded already.
Once I've ripped my FLACs, I then use dbPowerAmp's batch encode to create mp3 versions of the files in a separate directly. These I then import into iTunes to use with my iPod. dbPowerAmp, with tagging and mp3 support, does cost money (~$40 maybe? I forget). Free software you can use are a combination of EAC to rip you CDs (and encode to FLAC directly if you like) and foobar2000 to create the mp3 files. This will give you the same results, but may require a little more tweaking to get things going efficiently and you may have to intervene to fix up tags received from freedb. If your existing iTunes files contain DRM, you can't use them with the squeezebox. If they do not, you should be able to play them directly without encoding them to FLAC. There is no advantage to converting a lossy file to FLAC - the file will just be bigger with no improvement in sound quality. -- maggior Rich --------- Setup: 2 SB3s, 4 Booms, 1 Duet, 1 Receiver, 1 Touch, iPeng on iPod Touch. SuSE 11.0 Server running SqueezeBoxServer 7.5.0, MusicIP, and SqueezeSlave. Current library stats: 34,767 songs, 2,776 albums, 505 artists. http://www.last.fm/user/maggior ------------------------------------------------------------------------ maggior's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9080 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=88774 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
