hey fellas,
I know you guys must have heard this before but oh well...here goes..
I have a 100+ audio cd collection and after upgrading my HD I though it would be a good idea to backup my cds on my HD. I used to use an mp3 convertor on windows but while looking around heard a lot about...ogg and other file formats. so my question to you is...which is the best format? All I want is to keep the quality, be able to easily burn them into audio cds and should be playable on a windows based pc (I know I know..but my brother needs games and has to have windows...(we are planning to have a common storage drive for both pcs).

So which file format do you suggest? and which is the best app for it?

thank you guys... appretiate the help.

Personally, just go with mp3. It's the most popular and probably the best supported format. And in Linux converting existing ones is very easy if and when that time comes if you so desire to do so.

grip is probably one of the best ripper programs, easily finds and names your tracks how you want, etc.

grip is probably one of the best ripper programs, easily finds and names your tracks how you want, etc.
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OK. but which encoder do i use? lame?

Lame would be used if you wanted to encode to mp3.

oh man....doesnt seem to work....here are my settings ...is there anything i should change?

here are my options..please tell me of i should change em:
Rip>Ripper:
Ripper : grip (cd paranoia?)
Selected: Disable paranoia
Selectedisable extra paranoia
Disabled scratch
gain adjustment: not selected
rip file format:~/mp3/%A/%d/%n.wav (shouldnt it be mp3?)
Generic SCSI device: empty
rip nice value = 0

ENCODE:
Encoder: lame?
Encoder command-line:-h -v -V 0 %w %m
Encoder file extension:mp3
Encoder file format: ~/mp3/%A/%d/%n.%x

Options:
selected: delete .wav after encoding
selected: create .m3u files
selected: use relative paths in .m3u files
M3u file format: ~/mp3/%A-%d.m3u

Encoding bit rate: 128 (can i change this to 256?)
no of cpus to use 1
nice value:0
enter filer command : empty?


can someone please help me here.... sorry for being so rudementary in my questions.

nobody? isnt there a way at all?

hi,

yes, Grip is very good so go with that.

as for difficulties.. First, double check that you've got Lame installed. Then on the Grip encode settings tab, you need to specify the full path to the Lame executable, which will be /usr/bin/lame. Grip seems to be fussy about providing full paths. Then you should be good to go.

I noticed that you've got paranoia disabled, which isn't a bad idea given the quantity of CDs you've got to rip - it improves speed quite a lot. You could also try cdda2wav (you'll need to install it separately, but it is available as an option in Grip) - on my machine it seems faster still than CDParanoia w/ paranoia disabled.

Finally, regarding formats... Yes, I know everybody uses MP3, but... I think Ogg Vorbis is much better than mp3 - for similar encoding bitrates, it really does seem to sound far nicer. A quick Google shows Winamp support for Vorbis is available; I'm sure MS Media Player support should be there, too. Worth looking into anyway.

Finally, for burning MP3 / Ogg files back to CD Audio, it's fairly easy - try using K3B, and you can just drag & drop; or if you want the low down on the command line, have a look at -

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-CD-Burning/audio.html

these are my favourites:

mp3
+: widely used, good compatibility with car radios, mobile devices etc
+: high compression ratio (up to 80%)
-: old technology, bad quality
-: not freedom-free (patented), very bad

ogg
+: widely used (but less than mp3)
+: high compression ratio (up to 80%)
+: freedom-free
0: better quality than mp3, but still lossy
-: incompatible with most mobile devices

FLAC
+: lossless, same quality as CD
+: freedom-free
-: incompatible with most mobile devices (yet?)
-: lower compression ratio (30-50%)

MPC looks like a good alternative to ogg (better quality?) but I never used it.
my recommendation: depending on the size of your new HD, if you can afford the disk space, use FLAC. you can still convert your files to mp3 or ogg later if you want to. You will have no problems playing all mentioned formats on a windows pc.
oh, and please don't use ASF/WMA.
stimpy