Posted by seani on 11/15/70 11:29

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 01:21:43 -0700, Drrouter wrote:

> Hi -
>
>
> I have resisted the plunge into MP3 players because I wanted the market
>
> to sift itself out....but I need to go ahead and buy one. My question
> is this, I buy CD's, having about 500 now, and am looking for the best
> combination of player and software to manage my music. I hear the iPOD
>
> is proprietary, you cannot get music from Walmart, Yahoo, etc. and use
> it on the iPOD (may be wrong here). I only want to convert my CD
> collection one time...so recommendations are welcome

You can do a lot in advance of your hardware purchase:

1) Buy a large hard disk or disks.

2) Use the free software at www.dbpoweramp.com to rip your collection
entirely to FLAC which is lossless, thus creating a copy of your
collection which is of perfect quality. After this you need never
physically touh one of your CDs again.

3) When you've done this, you can use the same software to transcode the
music from FLAC into MP3/WMA/OGG/AAC or whatever at whatever quality you
feel is acceptable. If you change your mind later, it's as easy as setting
off a job overnight and waiting for the results; no feeding in CDs etc.

This will be enormously advantageous in terms of quality and convenience
whatever player you buy.

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