At one point Robert Heron on dl.tv mentioned he was converting his entire CD collection to the FLAC audio format. This is important because FLAC means lossless audio compression and it’s an excellent format for archiving. Once the CDs have been ripped to FLAC you can lose the CD, give it as a chew toy to the dog, or whatever because the FLAC file is a perfect copy of the disk itself. From FLAC you can convert it to mp3 and use the lossy compressed version anywhere but always keep the perfect version in a safe place.

Actually, my CD collection is quite small and I’m almost done after only a couple days work. Not including any of my parents disks which I’ll probably rip at the same time. The primary reason why I can get the ripping done so quickly is due to excellent software. abcde (A better CD Encoder) makes everything happen automagically. “abcde -o flac” causes it to be encoded to FLAC but otherwise I let the defaults do as they wish. All of the FLAC specific options are way over my head. It’s not like mp3 where different people have a favorite bit rate they like. Once I get everything ripped I’ll burn it all to dvd and keep another copy on the Simpleshare NAS.