As in my original post, I am trying to accomplish several things:
1) Ripping my CD collection to my PC in lossless (would have prefferred FLAC, but decided to use APE becasue that is what Media Center uses).
2) Ripping my DTS CD as well as DVD music to my PC.
3) Ripping my DD DVD-V music to my PC.
4) Making CD-R and particularly DVD-R samplers of my library ripped to the HD with Media center for use with my car DVD/CD player which is very high end as stated above... please see above. I'm assuming I can use DVD-R for increased storage space over CD-R. I have a Plextor DVD-R/W drive in the mail on the way to me...
I am not using my PC as a HTPC because I don't have the time/money to convert to HTPC and will stay with my DVD player/equipment for the time being.
What I don't understand are playlists and the instistance of media center to always want to keep the playlist of the CD just ripped from the CD-R drive and not the hard drive. The playlist from the recently ripped CD has all the tag info... when I go to play the media center file that was ripped to the HD, there is no tag info except the song title. Sure I use APE compression and secure mode, but should not all the tag info be included on the ripped verion on the HD? As I said before, only the title of the song is present... I was hoping all the tag file info would be present on the ripped songs on the HD... am i doing something wrong?
Let me put it this way... when I ripped 3 CDs (my first 3 CD's using media center beta 10, I noticed all the cool info (tag info?) that shows up on the main screen playlist... Artist, album, rating, genre, etc.... well I then hit the rip CD buttin in media center and it shows the same playlist with all the tag detail there: track number, Artist, album, rating, genre, etc... Then I go and delete the songs I do not want to rip out of the rip playlist... I then proceed to rip them... When I go back to play the ripped version, they do not have all that detailed info anymore, they simply have only the name of the song, but not the artist, album, rating, or genre... am I doing something wrong?? Or am I supposed to lose this information after ripping? I'm confused... Do I have to do something different and go back and re-rep those 3 CD's to somehow transferr all that info onto the ripped tracks? They are in media center file format... so I would think they would still have all that info? Why wouldn't it also rip the rating I gave it, i.e, preserve all the info in the rip playlist?
Also, I would appreciate how to best make custom playlists: playlists for different types of parties/music, etc...