First, I'll engage in a little heresy and say if all your MP3s are > 192Kbps, and you never plan on transcoding (even to lower bitrate MP3) then you'll probably not notice moving to FLAC unless you have a decent stereo and are particularly sensitive to such things. If you have an SB2/SB3 it's simple to rip your favorite album to FLAC and do some A/B comparison (best if you can make it double blind!)
I went with FLAC from the "Rip once, done forever" standpoint. I have almost 1000 CDs taking up about 320GB of drive space. I ripped them on a 266 MHz PowerPC-based Kuro Box (basically a Buffalo LinkStation) and it took about 2 months doing 15 CDs a day. I had automated the entire process so I could just pop the CD in and pop in the next when it ejected without typing and doing anything (caveat--I have several (less than 50) CDs I have to redo because freedb was down or they weren't in Freedb and came up as unknown. I logged enough to be able to figure out where they were, since I store my CDs alphabetically and ripped them in order.) I think you'll find that the server CPU isn't as critical for FLAC as for MP3, and that your limiting factor, as said before, will be the amount of time you can sit around popping CDs in and out of a drive. I tried getting our robotic CD duplicator at work to autorip but the APIs to program it weren't readily available. I blogged about my experiences at http://chairthrower.org/blog/. -- mrfantasy --Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mrfantasy's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1127 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=17998 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
