I would like some input for organizing my computer music.

[Tiser]

Hello everyone. I have ~200 CDs. It is probably 210 now, ~40 of them are singles, the rest full albums or compilations/soundtracks.

It is about time I rip them all methodically onto my system, I have been planning to do this for some time. Ages ago, perhaps 5 years ago, I had much of my music - probably around 50 of the 100 or so albums - ripped to my system. But they were 160Kbps MP3s, and organized oddly, and I am not too fond of the files, and got rid of them as I was tied for space.

In the present, I want to rip all of my music into FLAC. Now, I know that there are some debates on doing this, but my reasons are pretty solid. Mostly, I have the hard drive space, and I *NEVER* want to rip my music again. With FLAC, I can transcode to FLAC2 or whatever replaces it in the future, without having to lose any quality. It may take up 40+ GB on my system, but I have plenty of space and I am only set to get more.

My problem is that I have an mp3 player that only plays mp3/wma. I use Linux and have for ages, but I want to have an easy way to pop some mp3 albums onto my player from my flac. Transcoding right now means a piping command line, and this is cumbersome. Of course, I could rip everything to a very good mp3, lame --alt preset extreme, and be done with it, but I am pretty firm on wanting FLAC.

I suppose there is a question in there. Does anyone have any suggestions on software arrangements? For everything A-Z. Ripping, tagging, playing. While I wasnt a fan of iTunes at first, after using it on my fathers computer, it really is great. XMMS and GRIP just have a poor interface. Any good replacement, that may transcode to decent mp3s on the fly?

(What a long winded way to ask a simple question.)

[Etarip]

since you mentioned linux, there's the mt-daapd project (http://www.mt-daapd.org/).You can set it up to tanscode flac->mp3 on the fly and then access the library through iTunes on a windows or mac computer. Don't know if you can save them to your mp3 player through itunes though.

[biznatch]

Easy CD DA extractor rips and converts well and easily.

[optik_nerve]

Originally Posted by biznatch

Easy CD DA extractor rips and converts well and easily.

Yea, I used that when I had got my new computer and needed to put all of my CD's on it.

http://www.poikosoft.com/ check it out

[Redjake]

There are tons of free and good programs on download.com that will do what you are talking about. I don't have much room to talk, since I have my 23,000 MP3s "organized" into 2 folders: The Collection Part 1 and The Collection Part 2

[P-Naughty]

If you feel comfortable using Wine for audio ripping, I think dBPowerAMP is the best audio ripper/converter package I've ever used for CDs. It connects to the CDDB to get CD info and plug everything in for you. It comes with an assortment of file extension support, and has plugins for those not included with the standard package.

Also, for sorting, I just have a folder labeled "Music" with folders for genres in it. Each artist/band get their own folder and each of their albums get their own as well. I'm sure you would probably want something to handle all that for you, but just putting in my 2 cents.

Good luck with this. I recently backed up all of my CDs to 320 Kb/s MP3s for regular play. I was plannin on backing them up again in FLAC, ogg, or Monkey's, but that requires effort.