using iTunes to create a digital archive of audio CDs

Have a look in the iTunes prefrences for importing and select apple lossless format. That gives you a like for like copy that will play on your iPod perfectly.

Also make sure your pc is online and it'll download the album art and track names for you

 

Any of the lossless codecs will produce an exact copy of your original CDs. In addition, an lossless archive can be encoded to whatever the popular standard of the day is. For example, you can rip in (for example) Apple Lossless. You can then compress them down to 256 kbps AAC variable bit rate (which is the standard of today) for everyday use. In 10 years if the standard is different, you can go back to your Apple Lossless files and compress them to the new standard.

The benefits of Apple lossless over WAV are that you can add metadata to Apple Lossless which will be carried over to any compressed files. In addition, all the modern lossless codecs (such as Apple Lossless, flac etc) tend to take up ~50% the space of a WAV (depending on track complexity - classical music often gives even better compression.

In addition, I recommend your use an accurate ripper (something like DBPowerAmp in Windows or XLD on Mac) to rip your CDs as this ensures the rip results are compared to an online database to ensure they have ripped correctly.

 

In iTunes 9 there's a checkbox (on the iPod page I believe) that directs iTunes to compress the tracks as they're synced with the iPod. You don't get to choose the compression settings, though, and I've forgotten what they are pre-set to be.

Brian33.

 

No, and I find it strange that in these days the information isn't on audio CDs. However, the track names come from the Gracenotes database:
http://www.gracenote.com/business_solutions/music_id/

There are various ways of getting artwork. I tend to find the CD on Amazon, and copy the artwork from there.

 

Quite a bit of high resolution artwork is at http://www.cdcovers.cc/

 

the best place to get album artwork is at albumartworkexchange.com

it has the highest quality, imo. multiple resolutions for some images too.

 

oops, double post.

 

I recently re-encoded all of the physical albums I have into a separate lossless library. I have my main libraries music encoded in 256 AAC with error correction. Is VBR better? Space doesn't matter to me so I didn't think it did. I guess the entire song is encoded at the same exact rate no matter how complex that part of the song is or isn't where VBR adds or removes bits where appropriate. Does this really make a difference besides space? I am ocd haha and would hate to redo stuff again.

Thanks!

 

I found this tutorial really useful:

http://filesharefreak.com/tutorials/rip-cds-to-flac-with-logcuem3u-on-mac/

Granted, it's only really relevant in this case for extracting .wav files, but what I like about xACT is that it tells you whether there have been any encoding errors when importing from CD.

From there I import the files into iTunes, fill in all the track/artist/album etc. details, and convert to AAC.

However, I haven't been doing this much for songs that I previously had in my iTunes library as .mp3 files. The reason being is that the option in iTunes to replace existing files is much more convenient.