So after two weeks I am about 95% done with ripping all my CD's in to my external HD; Right now its up to 7,672 songs. Whew.

So in appreciation I would like to thank:

-FT for the inspiration

-Haq for the tech support

-Sen. Loogar and Rick Derris for the use of their extensive catalogues

-and all of you, just cuz I had to have something to do in between switching CD's

That's nice work, boys. I think I'm at the 50% mark in my collection. Should make that a January project or something.

And here I thought I only inspired apathy.

Way to go, CK!

Bloor did you use EAC-LAME to rip. I was going really well and then I got allowed into Ubernet. NOw the allure of downloading like 50 albums in a night is slowing me down.

Speak English please. No hablas computerspeak

I just basically made my external HD the destination folder in itunes and ripped 'em in at either 128kbps or 192kbps.

Yeah, its fucking tedious. Luckily things have been slow and I can monitor my business from the home office while I endlessly rip stack after stack.....

Colol someone hooked me in to this ultra nerdy site where you can basically get full albums of all guaranteed awesome "qual"

http://www.ubernet.org

Check it out!

I bought the external hard dirve as well 100gb. i got it 1/5th full but with the next two days off it is nothing but porn, music, movies, and obner.

thats a good chunk of space my brother; by default i now have about 100 albums that i just got or forgot about......lotta shit.

i'll be getting a 160 gig hard drive for xmas and plan to make it a nice week of doing nothing but ripping cd's.
by the way, for you itunes users, anyone have a preference in terms of how you encode stuff?
i had checked a few diff't sources, all of which said that aac at 160 is just as good as mp3 at 192. i did a few comparisons and i have to say, it really is hard to tell any difference, but at 160, it certainly saves space when you plan on dumping loads of shit onto the drive.
my only complaint about digital music at this point is that i really feel like they havent gotten it to a point where the cymbals dont sound washy to me, even if everything else sounds pretty damn good.
anybody else feel that way?

you're right - cymbals are definitely the place where sampling rate matters the most, and it drives me crazy when i hear really poorly sampled cymbals in the mix. jazz music is often hardest hit by this fact.

Yes.

I do AAC at 192 and it sounds pretty good, I did do some stuff AAC at 128 and there is not a big difference. Depends on the music and how good the CD was in the first place. I can hear it more when I switch from My Computer to The Air Tunes Base Station on Itunes and play it through my home stereo.

Edit: The above is the nerdiest thing i have ever typed.

Is that ubernet group as picky as they seem? I have been ripping my collection using EAC and lame, but I don't bother saving log files, and I don't like the way they say to set up ID3 tags. I know my rips have all been perfect, but I don't feel like doing them all over just to fit their standard.

They are really finicky but it is worth it to get guaranteed quality for free. (I know that is totally unethical, but fuck it I buy more CDs than 99% of this country). If you don't want to deal with the bs then just keep ripping.

BTW what the hell is clever cactus.

Yes, they are that picky, and I'd say it's for good reason. With standards that strict, one can almost guarantee that the file quality of anything that's shared. I didn't have to re-rip a whole lot when I started apply for uber-net, though. You only need 25 rips to get on the network. From there, you can just keep ripping in your own spare time

Glad to see that Pagoda's onboard. My home PC in the UK should be on Ubernet now if you care to queue anything up.

Yail: Here is another ripping guide from the Ubernet guy. When you have some time, try it out with one of your favorite records and compare it to your AACs.

Dude I am still in the Training Hub. I need to start working on getting promoted. Will they promote me if I am behind a firewall.

If you can make an active connection, yes. I'm not sure what other effect the firewall would have. AFAIK, getting promoted just deals with things like number of rips, how rare some of the rips are and standard checks (having a multi-disc album, having an OST, etc).

Can someone explain to me what the hell these external hard drives are? Do you need a computer to rip your cds to it?

They are hard drives that are separate from the main desktop/laptop unit. Yes, you need a computer to rip music to said hard drive and usually connect it via USB or Firewire.

I don't see what requiring no leading zeros in the tag has to do with quality. It's just anal bullshit. My rips are perfect, and I like the way I have them organized. I should start a new group for people who seek quality music, but can't be bothered with fascist systems like Ubernet.

The tag point is taken, though one could argue your resistance to changing your tags is just as anal. That aside, you can't prove the perfection of your rips to anybody else without logs.

yeah, ive always thought ubernet was picky. i really dont see the point of using exact audio copy. 99% of cd rippers will do a fine job with no noticeable quality difference between them and eac. i do like that they mandate lame though, since for me lame ripped at anything above 160 cbr is pretty good, although i prefer to rip on alt preset standard.

Ubernet's policy also closes the door on non-Windows users. That's a shame.

Agreed.

Personal experience has shown EAC works a LOT better with scratched discs, but I'm not sure if there are any objective tests to prove its advantages.

Isn't EAC supposed to so some sort of rescanning process to ensure that no errors have occured in copying the tracks due to dust, smudges, or scratches?

But yeah, I can't tell the difference (on unscratched discs that is). Neither can they. They just like to know their music is as perfect as it can be.

I'll admit I'm anal, but I wouldn't expect anyone else to change their tags to suit my preference.

I agree with you about log files. I got rid of them because I never thought I'd need to prove to anyone else that my files were legit.

Well, upon looking at ubernet, now I know what I will do for the rest of my break! Very cool, just got myself hooked up and ripping my first CD! Well, my first CD using EAC and LAME!