The Lance J. Technoweb

My cheap-but-effective CD-ROM Unit I decided to re-rip my CD collection in a lossless format. Happily, my new ripping experience was fast and reliable. During my last ripping exercise, I used Linux as my OS of choice, and I ripped to MP3. The experience was mostly excellent. But due to a hard disk failure, I decided to re-rip one more time - this time, to a lossless format. I chose the Apple Lossless format - a well-supported and efficient format. One beauty of a lossless format is that the data can be converted into another lossless format without any loss of quality - just in case audio file formats change in the future. I also considered using FLAC lossless, which I believe would have been another excellent choice. My hardware: I used my Mac Mini, along with four inexpensive CD-ROM drives attached via IDE-to-USB adapters. This allowed me to rip four discs in parallel, greatly increasing my ripping performance. I suppose I could have hooked up more drives, but I only had four ...

If you're like me, you have a large collection of vinyl LP records that rarely get played because CDs and MP3 players are so much more convenient. And if you're like me, you want to move all of your audio assets into a more accessible format - your iPod - so that you can finally put that turntable away. Ripping Vinyl to your iPod The solution, of course, is to rip your LPs and cassettes. This entails playing each recording, digitizing the music as it plays, and then putting the digitized music into a form that any iPod can use. My goal during this project was to develop an easy, repeatable, and very high quality process to digitize LPs. This article explains the process. The Rules of High Quality Vinyl Ripping Accuracy . On your home hifi system, you look to hear the best sound in your ears. The digitization process is fundamentally different. Digitization is all about capturing the source analog signal as accurately as possible. Do you have a fancy $5000 A/V receiver?...

The compact disc era is over. Music CDs have been around for about 20 years, but now that I have an iPod I realize that the CD is dead. I moved my entire CD collection to my iPod and pushed my CDs into storage. There isn't a reason to keep a CD in my living room. Now I can listen to all of my music in the car (thanks to my iTrip). I can listen to my music at home (thanks to the iPod's docking station). And I can listen to my music on the train (thanks to the earbuds). My only wish is for a higher capacity iPod. I bought the 40 GB iPod- but that 40 GB doesn't seem like a lot if you have a large CD collection and you want to play your collection at a high bitrate. But in any case, my several hundred CDs fit on my 40 GB iPod with plenty of room to spare. The cons of the iPod? Even though the iPod is one of the smallest large-capacity players on the market, I wish it was smaller. I would have gone with the iPod Mini, but the 4GB of storage wasn't enough for me. I'm gl...