Best way to rip and organize my music files?

[slortar]

@Mangetout

Me too; I’ve been (legally) ripping loads of music into the playout system for a radio station; CDex does the lot for me; ripping, CDDB lookup, normalising - the latest version carries the LAME encoder along with it, making installation a breeze.

I’ll third that. Everything else I’ve tried was pretty limp.

And I really, really, really like Ogg Vorbis. Didn’t think I would, but I was wrong. I can compress a 320 kbps ogg file in less space than a 256 kbps mp3, and it’ll sound better.

[Anachronism]

@Athena

Tools-Options, Copy Music tab. Under Copy Settings, set it to MPEG-Layer 3. Voila, mp3 files.

The only option I have on my copy of Windows Media Player is to buy a plug in that allows me to rip in MP3 format.

Thanks to everyone for your input.

I think I am going to use I tunes since it also makes it easy to buy songs. Now I just have to decide what format to use, MP3 seems the most used but I think some of the other formats have better quality.

[Cyros]

@Atrael

Since the OP recieved their answer, I hope they don’t mind if I ask a semi-related question, instead of starting a new thread. I have all of my CD’s ripped to my computer, but after several transfer’s back and forth from there, to my portable mp3 player, to my laptop, and with me ripping some CD’s from my laptop, and at work…they’re all mixed up, and not in any order now. Just 1700 files, in one big folder, and I think some of the data on them has been corrupted, so the album information isn’t displayed correctly. Plus I think I may have a few duplicates, but the file name is different. Is there any program or service that will automatically sort them, and then look up all the data again from the CDDB and make sure the file is labeled correctly?

I love moodlogic. It takes all the music files, anywhere on my computer and organizes them according to genre, mood, artist, etc. based on the companies database. The first time you add a song to moodlogic, it checks it against its database to add the info, also automatically checks id tags and fixes them if necessary.

The great thing is the program can take all the info on file for genre, mood, etc. to create playlists of songs that go well together. It definately takes care of all my song organizing needs.