Before October, I never ripped a CD. In October, I bought an iPod nano. I ripped a few dozen CDs to get me started. But, the questions immediately began. What encoder should I use - AAC or MP3? What bit rate should I encode at? I started with MP3 192 just because it seemed like a decent compromise between size and quality. In November, I got the SqueezeBox 3, my first Slim device. The encoding questions came at me again. Would MP3 192 sound ok on my home stereo? Did I want to spend the time to do A/B comparisons? What if I chose one bit rate, but changed my mind later?
In the end, I decided to rip all my CDs to FLAC using dBpowerAMP. I use these lossless files with SlimServer, so there's no question about quality when listening to the Squeezebox connected to my home stereo (conveniently with a spare optical cable I had lying around). For the iPod. I used dBpowerAMP's batch file converter to convert the FLAC files to an compressed lossy format. I decided to use AAC at 128Kbps. Each night I ripped a few dozen CDs with FLAC and had dBpowerAMP place the FLAC files in a "staging" directory. Before going to bed, I started a batch job to convert the FLAC files to AAC. In the morning, I moved the AAC files from the staging directory into the iTunes directory and then manually told iTunes to search for the new files. I then moved the FLAC files from the staging directory to my SlimServer directory. I then told SlimServer to search for new files. It never takes more than a few minutes for SlimServer to find the new songs even though I have nearly 6000 songs in my SlimServer collection. So, I am confused by the discussion that it takes a long time for SlimServer to discover the new songs. BTW, I have WinXP Pro, 2.8GHz Pentium 4, 1GB RAM. My iTunes files are kept in the default iTunes directory in My Music on drive C (Western Digital Caviar, 7200 RPM, 160GB). My SlimServer files are kept on drive M (Seagate Barracuda 7200.8, 250GB) which contains the staging directory and the SlimServer directory. Anyhow, I like the two step process because the first step (ripping) is done only once! No more do I have to rip all those CDs. The second step (batch convert) allows me to change compression or bit rate without having to rerip everything. Now that I have all those songs ready to listen to, I am just starting to create playlists. Last night I tried MediaMonkey and it seemed easy to use. However, I am open for suggestions for other easy to use, GUI-based drag and drop, playlist editors. -- slimCL CL SqueezeBox 3 (black) * 5700+ songs encoded to FLAC 4 with dBpowerAMP * 430+ albums * 875+ artists * 140GB iPod nano (4GB white) * FLAC collection => AAC 128, using dBpowerAMP and iTunes * 21GB (hmmm, that would fit on a video iPod) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ slimCL's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2257 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18291 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
