Raw ISOs, yes, as an idea. I'm not sure how many music clients do well playing from ISO files, but I think it's the best way to turn your physical CDs into data without making any other decisions. I do something similar with my DVDs. The command is "dd" and would be something akin to: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/home/rpjday/Music/My_Music.iso The man page for dd will tell you more. The ISO file is a disc image...a byte-for-byte copy of what's on the physical disc. A number of programs will treat the ISO file exactly as if it was the disc (though I've no idea if RhythymBox is one of them). Calculate that each CD will result in a 700 MB file, and you can plan out how much space you'll need. It's by no means an efficient use of hard drive space...but as you say, storage is cheap, and depending on the size of your CD library, you may have room for both the ISOs *and* the encoded results. It's redeeming quality (in my eyes) is that it becomes a perfect data copy of your physical library, allowing you to postpone all other decisions while still accomplishing the task of converting the physical to the digital. The ISOs would also let you turn the digital BACK into the physical, should that ever be something you'd want to do (unlikely, but it's there). I think going FLAC is probably good, too...certainly a more judicious use of disk space, and would allow you to start "organizing" your library. I thought of ISOs mainly on the strength of your question "what's a safe strategy i can use to start copying them to disk so that, no matter what i choose to do later, i won't have to redo all that work?" Cheers. On 10 March 2011 11:34, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday [ at ] crashcourse [ dot ] ca> wrote: > On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, C.T. Paterson wrote: > >> If my math has not failed me (it's early yet), a 2TB drive will >> store over 2,500 700 MB ISOs...so perhaps you could opt to simply >> take images of the discs to keep a full range of options on the >> table. > > you're suggesting to just store the raw ISO images of each CD? what > command or utility would you use to do that? i always thought you > can't treat a music CD as a raw data stream given that each track is > represented by a separate file. or am i misunderstanding something > here? > > rday > > -- > > ======================================================================== > Robert P. J. Day Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA > http://crashcourse.ca > > Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday > LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday > ======================================================================== > -- "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." -- Thomas Paine