Matt,
I was going to post a ton of what I've learned over the past several weeks of ripping my own ~200-CD collection, but I simply don't have time. I'll hit upon what I think are particularly valuable tips.
* Use a lossless format if at all possible. Monkey's Audio is what I use and recommend. Really, really think hard before going with a lossy format like WMA (ugh!), MP3, or OGG. I don't care what any self-proclaimed MP3 guru says; MPEG Layer III doesn't hold a candle to Monkey's Audio where quality is concerned. Blah, blah, blather on about how "no one can possibly tell the difference from the original if a 256-kbps or 320-kbps bitrate is used"; those of use who have "been there, done that", and converted, decompressed, tweaked, and adjusted,
KNOW that "there ain't no thing like the original"! (There, I said it!)
* Think about organization before you start ripping. Including the year for CDs is a minor inconvenience, but will you want to sort by that field later on? You get the idea.
* Don't explicitly trust the CD info you get from FreeDB or CDDB. I always verify it; almost always (yes,
always), I have corrections to make. (It's totally amazing to me how people can't seem to read a CD label and type it in correctly.)
* The flip side of this coin is that you should think about how YOU want to organize your collection. For example, I postpend the word "The" on artist names (e.g. "Cranberries, The", rather than "The Cranberries"), but nowhere else. This is a personal choice.
* Similarly, you will want to think about what genre information (if any) you want to include. I use only a very few of them (I don't have too many "musical moods"). This is because I know that six months from now, I won't have any clue what I meant by "Progressive Rock" versus "Alternative". (Call me simple minded, I don't care!
)
* Whatever file name format you use, stick with it. This is
much easier said than done. My greatest annoyance is with excessive use of the hyphen ("-") character. You see, when or if I re-tag based on file names, I tell Media Jukebox that my file name format is "ARTIST-ALBUM-TRACK#-TITLE". Well, if files have imbedded hyphens, the tags for those files will be screwed up, for obvious reasons. I came up with what I think will be an elegant solution to this: Wherever an imbedded hyphen occurs, use a "soft hyphen" in its place. This is done by typing Alt|PLS|0173 over the existing hyphen. I suspect (though I have NOT verified) that renaming/retagging utilities will ignore the soft hyphen, thus allowing for correct processing. I could be wrong, but I hope not (how do you like THAT statement?).
* Clean your CDs carefully of dust and fingerprints prior to ripping. This is an obvious tip, I know, but I think it really does make a difference. I use non-linting CD wipes and compressed air together for this task (hey, so I'm anal, what of it?).
* Use a good ripping utility, such as Exact Audio Copy (EAC). On almost every (yes,
every) CD, reads will not be 100% accurate or reliable on the first run. Good ripping utilities do multiple reads to establish a level of confidence that the read data is accurate, or at least the best obtainable from the medium.
* If you use EAC, and you're also encoding to Monkey's Audio (APE) format, use the Monkey's Audio DLL (preferably version 3.97), rather than the EXE. The EXE will result in a WAV file being written, then that WAV file is in turn encoded to APE format. Lots of extraneous disk I/O. The DLL encodes directly to APE format, and is faster.
* If you use MP3 format, use the latest stable version of LAME, and think long and hard what parameters you want to use (easier said than done!).
* My preference was to close all unneccesary processes on my system every time I ran EAC. I also ran only a single instance of EAC at a time.
* If you use EAC, enable the "show dialog when finished" option. Make sure it says
"No errors occured". If there are errors, try a slower extraction speed, and/or a different CD drive, if possible.
* Again, if you use EAC, disable the three options at the top of the "ID3 Tag" tab of the "Compression options" dialog. Monkey's Audio does not support IDv2 tags.
* If you need a good renaming utility, I recommend
Andy, http://www.realm-online.com/. You can also use Media Jukebox's limited renaming functionality, if that's good enough for you.
* Backup, backup,
BACKUP (I like
SmartSync Pro, http://www.smsync.com/).