Regarding MP3 support

[Michael A. Peters]

On 01/29/2005 02:51:08 AM, Brian Mury wrote:

> 
> I am in the process of ripping my entire CD collection. I am  
> currently
> up to about 10 GB. I like the idea of being able to carry my entire  
> CD
> collection in my pocket, and not have to decide before hand which 6
> albums I want to have available. Especially when the military sends  
> me
> somewhere for 6 months!

Do yourself a favor - go buy a hard drive or three, and rip to flac  
lossless. Flac supports tags, so once you fix the messed up CDDB  
entries, you are gold from then on. Then you can go from flac to  
whatever (mp3, aac, ogg) and it is just like (quality wise) ripping  
from the original media, as flac is lossless, but it is MUCH faster  
because you can fit a large number of flac files on a single hard drive  
and don't have to swap CD's etc.

In say five years, when ogg, mp3, aac are obsoleted by something with  
transparent quality at half the filesize of current typical lossy (I  
use -preset standard, ~ 196 VBR) - you can move to it without having to  
re-rip everything again.

You don't have to keep the drive mounted, I attach mine only when /home  
is starting to get full and I need to move recently ripped flacs off of / 
home and onto the drive (or when I want to transcode to a different  
lossy format - or use a newer/better version of lame to re-encode  
everything, etc.)