hey besides exact audio copy...what about burning

Hard Drive is the solution of the future. I see all of this stuff converging
at some point. Music, home theatre, computer, wi-fi. In fact, it has already begun to converge. It is taking some time to get it right, but we
are quantum leaps closer than just a few years ago.

thank you ketchup :) :) maybe i'll grab some freebies programs/trials and have a listen off.

mp3's while yeah i know it's just athat i won a plyer very cheaply on ebay. and since my portable cd player died figured i'd try...

i have some prog on comp called/listed 'flac front end' but i haven't really tried it. i just needed it to decode a file.i haven't tried any encoding.nor tested with any wave vs. comparsion myself.but all i've read about it has been glowing and you agree it's good so maybe flac is another bandwagon i should get on. :)

feurio. ah, those germans. :)

'mp3's they sound terrible even on a crappy car radio' let's but that the box of the next round of dvd's,portable etc. ha ha. :)

mp3's if the person encoded with lame of that fraunhofer(sp?) codec ther's a chance you may get something good/decent but aside from that...well most people don't care how something sounds.just as long as htere's sound..

i've used feurio(1.66) and it soooo much better sounding than nero(5.whatever that's also still on my comp) so i guess evry burn engine has something ah 'diffrent' up it's sleeve.so....

thanks for your words/kindness ketchup.thank you... :)

rsbeck.wi-fi darn i'm behind. yeah i've heard that term but i'm broke so i never read the articles. yikes. ha.....

yep hard drives. :) and i need a new one too.

thanks for your reply rsbeck! :)

You're welcome. Also, since Hard Drives are being made with higher capacities, there's no reason to rip CD's to your Hard Drive using a
compression or data reduction codec. Rip them to your hard drive uncompressed -- you can get an external hard drive, load your entire CD collection on it, uncompressed, and play it with your computer. Wi-fi just means "WIRELESS." You can put all your music on one computer, form a wireless network with other computers in the house and share the music, play it through your stereo, transfer it to a hand held device like an i-pod, plug the i-pod into your car stereo, etc. I find that a hard drive makes an excellent transport and if you rip a cd uncompressed it sounds awfully good on playback. Having said all that, if you simply have to compress your music, then use the highest sample size available, like 320 kbps. The less compression the better. The highest quality is no
compression, which is what I recommend.

Until I can find a nice, quiet, NAS RAID 10 or 0+1 set up with 1TB (guess I need 4 500MB drives) of storage for a decent price, I'm stuck with mp3s instead of wavs and a backing up my files on a separate hard drive. Because my mp3 "server" is on all the time, backing up is critical. It took me over a year to rip about 1K CDs, and I really don't want to do it again... I've already had one external backup drive die a nasty death. So, I'd urge you to think a bit about the back up costs relative to your time investment.

I'd also disagree on just using the highest sample rate. I use variable bit rate coding with the "-alt preset extreme" setting. I get about 10:1 compression and it sounds, to my ear, better than the results with constant bit rate encoding with files of the same size.

While I love Wi-Fi, make sure you go 802.11a or 11g and see how it performs in your house--from what I gather, 802.11b data rates in the real world (the one with walls and floors) may not support transfer of wav files on a real time basis.