If you are using high-quality speakers / headphones, a lossless ripping might be more important. If this is something for backgrond sound / ambiance, the quality might not be important. If you rip using MP3, which is perhaps the most popular format for music players, including iPods, you can still choose a higher sampling rate. But there is still some loss of quality from the original CD. One thing you may be looking for is something that can rip in batch, where you only insert the CD and let it run. I am not sure this exists, but given you are surely busy, what may also matter much is an auto-detection of your discs for the album and track titles. Even with the best services, you still should manually check that the ritgh one was found on services like CDDB. I ripped hundreds of CDs over the years, and usually, CDDB was doing a right job, or the CD was just unknown. I did not have too many duplicate titles to choose from. You should look for something that rips at a high sampling rate, like 320 for the MP3s. I think the one I was using last time was RippperX. But I may be wrond on this. I was using those software to correct previously ripped tracks to fix the filenames or ID tags. JF --- Open Source is open minded. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [OCLUG-Tech] how to start ripping all my music CDs? From: "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday [ at ] crashcourse [ dot ] ca> Date: Mon, March 25, 2013 11:16 am To: linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca something i've been wanting to get started on for a while, and hoping for some advice. i'd like to start the process of ripping all my music CDs without yet knowing how i'm going to treat them down the road. all i want to do is pop out, buy a honking big external hard drive and start transferring, but i want to do it in such a way that i don't regret how i did it in a few months and realize i should have done it differently. given lots of disk space, my initial idea is to rip everything to FLAC format, which is of course the least efficient but is lossless. for now, i won't care about space efficiency, i can always convert to a different format later once i decide how to set up my in-house media centre. thoughts? all i want is the recipe for how i can start loading up that new hard drive with my tunes, and not have to facepalm myself a few months from now, muttering, "crap, i forget to do X so i have to start all over." rday _______________________________________________ Linux mailing list Linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux