A comment on ripping to FLAC. All FLAC is the same quality - LOSSLESS. The difference is the amount of compression. I believe the default is 5. The higher the compression the more processor will be required to compress it. On the decoding side I'm under the impression that this is fairly CPU efficient regardless of the compression level specified when ripping. So as far as "quality" goes compression level 0 and compression level 8 will both render the same "quality" which is lossless.
On the transition. You mention that you'll keep the MP3's for your iPods, etc. so based on that you should be keeping a MP3 copy AND a FLAC copy. If you use DBPowerAmp on a PC to do your ripping (DBPowerAmp is probably the BEST ripper out there) you can create both the FLAC and MP3's on the same rip of the CD (more later on why you may want to also create new MP3 of your current library). You can do a phased transition with a approach something like this. On the VB do a directory structure like; SQ/FLAC/<artist>/<album>/<tracks> SQ/MP3/<artist>/<album>/<tracks> MP3/<artist>/<album>/<tracks> On LMS you would set your music folder to "SQ/". Initially you would copy your full library to SQ/MP3/<artist>/<album>/<tracks> and then SQ/FLAC/<artist>/<album>/<tracks> would be empty. As you do your rips you would place the new FLAC rips in the SQ/FLAC/<artist>/<album>/<tracks> directory and move the corresponding SQ/MP3/<artist>/<album>/<tracks> to MP3/<artist>/<album>/<tracks> and then do the scan. This way you won't have duplicate albums showing up in LMS. If you're really using iThings you'll probable do the MP3's on either a MAC or a Win box where you can have iTunes to manage the content of the iDevice. Don't know what quality your current MP3's are so that may be a consideration as you're re-ripping your CD's. Unlike FLAC, the bitrate selected for your MP3's DOES affect quality. The highest bitrate MP3's are generally the best quality. My personal preference is VBR (Variable Bit Rate) using -v0 which is the highest quality. The thing I like about VBR is that things like silence / simple will be compressed to almost nothing as far as required bits to contain the music goes where the most complex parts of the music will use the highest bit rate to store the music. So you get the quality of a CBR 320 using less space where it is appropriate. Have fun over the next few months as you go through the transition and make sure you pay close attention to your tagging! The tags are the most important things in having a well organized library. 2 Duets - 1 for upstairs and 1 for downstairs Rock Solid with LMS 7.7.3 and WHS 2011 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ w3wilkes's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=22973 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=100549 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
