SteveC;162374 Wrote: > What would you do to minimise the pain, have good tagging, and allow > mixing in with the existing library of mp3?
First of all, having a library composed of a mix of file types is no problem at all. Take a look at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?BeginnersGuideToRipping for links to a variety of rippers. EAC is considered by many to be the gold standard in terms of quality. Installation isn't that straightforward, but there's a good guide at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?EACBeginners - if you can follow along step-by-step, install will be as painless as the rest but take a little longer. I've personally used dBpowerAMP as well when I need an easy and quick install, say on the PCs of friends or family. On undamaged discs it performs as well as EAC, in fact as any ripper would - damaged discs are where EAC excels. With AccurateRip installed with dBpowerAMP you will at least get an indication when a rip is not bit-perfect. Both these programs lookup tag information on online databases. The quality of this user-contributed data varies. Both allow you to change tags before ripping so you generally don't have to retag. However a good tagging program like 'Mp3tag' (http://www.mp3tag.de/en) comes in handy. > Since iTunes does not see FLAC files, are there any drawbacks to using > the lossless format that it will see - Apple Lossless Encoding (ALE)? > Maybe this would be a good bet for me - I can change tags in iTunes > like I do now, they will play on an iPod, and I still have some > compression. Any gotchas with ALE either? Lossless is lossless, so quality will be the same. However SlimServer will transcode the stream. Usually this works well but it's another step that can have issues. It uses a bit of your CPU as well. You can't fast-forward or rewind within transcoded streams in SlimServer. Long-term, you're dependent on Apple for support of a proprietary, closed-source format like Apple Lossless. If future iPod versions won't support Apple Lossless and Apple stops providing tools to convert Apple Lossless to this theoretical new format, you're SOL. This is all quite unlikely, but it's more or less impossible with an open-source format like FLAC...which the iPod doesn't support and likely never will. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=30611 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
