but have spent so much time on cleaning virii and spyware, troubleshooting network connectivity,
get a mac
Itunes is evil.
Foobar2000 is the superior music player, though it is not easy to use, free, it has awesome format support, GAPLESS PLAYBACK (which that abomination of a program Itunes, for no good reason, does not have) built in encoders and taggers, and more plugins than you can shake a stick at. Winamp is also an acceptable program IMO.
Itunes, mp3s and Napster are not a revolution, but a step backwards in most audiophile's opinions. I would highly suggest you use a (free) program called EAC to rip truly bit-perfect copies of your CDs. Ripping CDs takes a long time to do, and you don't want to do it more than once. You can set up EAC to automatically encode your music files to the compressed format of your choice. Again I highly suggest you store your music as lossless compressed files such as FLAC or ALAC files. If you store your music lossless you can transcode to whatever format or bitrate your heart desires later. And you won't have to rerip you CDs.
Regardless of what you hear from anyone, mp3s and other lossy formats are NOT CD QUALITY. I have an ABX double blind comparator plug in for Foobar that allows me to blindly compare two tracks. I can distinguish 128kbps itunes mp3s from the CD 100% of the time. At higher bitrates such as 256kbps LAME (variable bit rate)encoded mp3s it gets much harder. However there are passages of music that refuse to be transparently encoded even at 320kbps (the beginning of the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips comes to mind). With such, admittedly minor, but nevertheless present artifacting, and HDD storage space being so cheap, I would reccommend eshewing lossy compression altogether for home listening. Don't throw the music away.
Then there is the hardware aspect. Many people choose a nice sound card with a line out, then hook that up to their home audio amps. Others don't think the inside of a PC is a suitable environment for a DAC and run USB or optical line out to an external DAC. This the way I do it. I don't think the PC should be responsible for actually processing the analog signal at all.
more questions just ask.
This is what I'm looking for.
Playback can probably be achieved well with iTunes, WMP, Winamp, RealPlayer, or any of the readily available players. (BIG thanks for the suggestions, guys!)
I want to rip these CD's ONCE. Even if it takes 2 weeks to finish, at that point, we can do file management/manipulation to put together mix CD's or genre folders or whatever, then at that point if we need to burn a copy to RealPlayer format or whatever is expedient.
As you mention, zahc, I don't want to lose sound quality, since the CD's themselves will become archives at best, or sold on eBay once I'm confident in the stability of the platform to which I've saved them.
I'll do a search for EAC and give it a test drive.
Thanks!
Fig
Of course that would mean going out to my truck where some CASSETTE tapes are.
Cassettes for me are more Robust than CDs. My '93 truck came with Cassette player.
Man, I thought I was the only one who still had a cassette player in their car. They may be robust in other parts of the country, but I have many cassettes that were turned into globs of molten plastic, courtesy of the Texas sun and my old 'yota. Hell, the relic Alpine system I had in there kicked it over a year ago and I still have melted cassettes floating around the car. I never played a CD in that vehicle, but it melted a few just transporting them. I like the idea of a non-melty music format. Maybe I'll have to spend a little on some cheap in-dash mp3 player/receiver. Or maybe I'll just mount a little handheld transistor radio to my dashboard.