Saving Music CDs to Hard Drive

If all you care about is being able to play music on your computer, you should use a lossless format like FLAC or Ogg Vorbis.

Leo you mentioned that you won't be using an iPod anytime soon but I would recommend iTunes. It's very easy to use, it recognizes CD titles so you don't have to input everything manually, and organizes everything for you (wow, that sounded like a product shill...). I taught my Dad how to use the whole program in ten minutes. As for ripping music from CD's I really don't think you need to worry about recording with "lossless formats."  The information that is taken away to keep the file size managable, for the most part, cannot be heard by the human ear anyway.  You won't notice the loss in sound quality unless you have a pair of very high end monitors and subwoofer hooked up to your computer.  I believe the best format for you in this situation would be 192kbps MP3 or ACC (the format used automatically by iTunes). Hope this helps. Aaron

I use the Real Player as well, and(in my version at least) you can decide the format of the songs before you rip them. Mine always defaults to real player audio, but I immediately change them to mp3. You can also decide the level of quality(and therefore HD space) the songs are ripped at as well. It's funny, if you rip it at a slightly lower quality it sounds exactly the same but takes up much less space.

I prefer high quality mp3s ripped by the ubernet standard.

Choosing mp3 will give you more options if you should want to change your player later. Next to all players can play mp3s. I've alternated between iTunes, Windows Media Player and WinAmp but haven't found happiness yet. A small clarification. Ogg Vorbis is not lossless. It is however a free format and takes a different approach to compression. This is said to result in smaller files than mp3 for equal quality. Perhaps it depends on what metric you use for quality. I used it for my Ericson P800 phone as memory was in short supply and could not tell the difference. Things might be different using a high-end stereo. B