A few years back I decided to start ripping all of my CDs onto my hard drive. I have over 3,00 CDs, so this was not to be taken lightly. I wanted to write this post to help anyone who wanted to take this step. First of all, why bother? Well, a few reasons. My entire collection can now be backed up. It can also go with me pon a portable hard drive (you can get one for less than $100 dollars). Every computer on my home network can access my collection and play anything instantly. They even share access to playlists. My Playstation, that is in my living room far from my office, but hooked up to my home theater system can also play my collection and playlists. I can also sync any tracks I want to my phone, which I use to play music in my truck and use head phones at the gym. In fact you can sync up any handheld devices very easily once you get set up. Sound cool? It is.
To get started you need to decide on software and a format you want your collection to be in. The software can be changed later, but the format is a much more important decision. Even though you can change formats, you can't add information that isn't there in the first place. So, I suggest using a lossless format like FLAC and not mp3 or wma. The main reason is portability. You really want a format that you can write tags too and that will hold all of the track information. Yes there are other formats out there that can do this, but trust me, I've done the research. FLAC is the best.
For the software, I use Jriver Media Center. It costs about $50, but is way worth it. The sound quality from it is great and it does everything I want it to, very easily. It functions as a server (sends to the Playstation, Tivo, etc), rips, burns, syncs to multiple devices (remembering there names and what format the music needs to be for that device). Whats more when doing all of this, it automatically converts your music files to the format the device can read.
Watch for further posts about this topic.
To get started you need to decide on software and a format you want your collection to be in. The software can be changed later, but the format is a much more important decision. Even though you can change formats, you can't add information that isn't there in the first place. So, I suggest using a lossless format like FLAC and not mp3 or wma. The main reason is portability. You really want a format that you can write tags too and that will hold all of the track information. Yes there are other formats out there that can do this, but trust me, I've done the research. FLAC is the best.
For the software, I use Jriver Media Center. It costs about $50, but is way worth it. The sound quality from it is great and it does everything I want it to, very easily. It functions as a server (sends to the Playstation, Tivo, etc), rips, burns, syncs to multiple devices (remembering there names and what format the music needs to be for that device). Whats more when doing all of this, it automatically converts your music files to the format the device can read.
Watch for further posts about this topic.
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