Waay off topic Q about "music systems"

[bikerz]

The way my office pals and I did it was to buy a device from Sony that holds 200 CDs in a carousel, connects to your PC like an external CD drive (which it is) and rips them automatically onto a disk. It was a little finicky to use, and we had to send it back once to Sony for repair because it was out of alignment. It worked for my whole collection (750+ cds), and saved a ton of time, but it only worked for half of Chip's collection, and JP gave up on it completely and did his manually. The CD carousel is not working again, and I might try to send it back to Sony for repair, but since we split the cost, it wasn't that expensive, and it has pretty much served its purpose already. (But I'm not suggesting you get one - they are not very reliable!)

All you really need to rip CDs is a CD drive connected to a computer. You can do them one at a time, and ripping a CD these days does not take very long. It's best if you can have a PC that is doing nothing but ripping, and you just lean over every 2 minutes a drop another CD in the tray. or you could send them out, if you can be without your CDs for a while. Or hire some neighborhood kid to do the ripping for you.

As for formats, I researched and researched, and decided to rip to a lossless format (e.g. flac, wma lossless) instead of a lossy format (mp3, wma lossy, aac) because I didn't want to touch the CDs again when the next "better than mp3" comes out.

Lossy formats achieve the smaller music file size by removing some of the music data before compressing the file, which ultimately affects the sound quality. The loss of quality is not really noticeable on little iPod speakers or in a car stereo, but I really noticed a difference when listening to MP3s on my stereo. You can also get near-CD quality by using a very high bit rate in MP3, but I decided I didn't want any data removed, thank you very much! Especially since disk storage is so incredibly cheap these days, and only getting cheaper.

Lossless formats do not remove any music data, but achieve a smaller size by just using different types of compression. (I'm sure Pedal Wench can explain all this better than I can!). Music players that can read these formats uncompress and re-compress the file as they play it.

So all my CDs are ripped to flac format, which can be played by the Squeezebox, and by many PC music players, including Windows Media Player (with a plug-in). Then I used a great, cheap program called dbPowerAmp to batch convert all the flac files to mp3 on another external drive one weekend, so I can listen to them in my iPod. Piece of cake!

Tagging files and organizing your digital music library are the next big topics - the Squeezebox site has some great articles on tagging classical music that I followed.

You can do all of this for FREE! (Except $30 or so for dbPowerAmp...)