Help with itunes and ripping CD's

[BOC|Ethan2000]

Ok so the wife has just rang to say my new ipod has turned up (only ordered yesterday evening from JL great service) anyhoo I have only ever had an iriver before and only used drag and drop for putting songs on.

So to my questions are there any recommended ripping settings that fellow AVF ipod owners use, that would give me a nice compromise between battery life, file size and sound quality ?

Also any hints or tips for ripping my cd's to itunes ?

Any help would be great so that I can start my mammoth album ripping when I get home, I think I will do about 10 cd's a day or i may lose the will to live.

P.S I did search google but put more faith in fellow AVF folk.

[BOC|Ethan2000]

Ok I have started ripping cd's to my new shiny ipod and when I click "get album art" nothing happens, any ideas folks ?

[Autopilot]

First off, how many CD's do you have? If you have a lot of CD's, rip to a lossless format like Apple lossless (ALAC). You will then have a base archive you can convert to MP3, AAC etc. Lossless files are bigger, but Itunes will convert ALAC to ACC as it copies your music over.
That might sound like something extra to have to get you head around, but what if you buy another MP3 player in future or play your music on a different device? Do you want to rip every CD again? Ripping to a lossless format will avoid that with virtually no extra effort required now.

Because you are just setting out, i would also recommend you use a better program from ripping your CD's. EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and DBpowerAMP are both free. iTunes is not great at ripping, especially any CD's that are slightly scratched. EAC and DBpowerAMP will give you much better results.

As for album art, iTunes is a bit flaky here too - you might need to get the album art yourself for many CD's from Amazon. Just save the image and use another great free program called MP3tag to embed them (in fact you are better of properly embedding album art, itunes has an odd way off storing art work in another folder).

Basically the moral of the story is, relying on iTunes can just cause you a world of pain in the future. Use better software and just use iTunes to import you music to your iPod.

[BOC|Ethan2000]

Cheers for all your help mate, much appreciated.

I will grab those programs tomorrow as I have a week off from work so i shall be quite busy. I have about 700 cd's so it could be a long week.

one final question (honest) do you know of any good programs to back it all up after, as I don't fancy having to go through it all again if something happens to my pc ?

Cheers again.

Ethan

[JohnG]

You can just copy all the ripped CDs to an external hard drive if you want to back them up, so copy the whole of the iTunes folder to another PC or another hard drive.
If you want to get fancy about it and do incremental backups you can look at some free software from Microsoft called SyncToy which allows you to do more intelligent backups.I always think of my iPod as the backup for my music so I don't bother backing the stuff on my PC up. There are programs which allow you to copy back from the iPod if need be.
It's worth checking before you start that all your CDs will fit on the iPod at the bitrate you've chosen

[Autopilot]

700, ouch. Take your time making sure you get it right. You dont want to have do 700 again, ever.

[BOC|Ethan2000]

Yeah thats what I thought, I want to make this a one time thing, so i'm going to have back ups of my back ups, just to make sure

Cheers for all the help again folk, very very helpful.

Ethan.

[Autopilot]

Yep use EAC and rip to FLAC or ALAC.

[PJTX100]

Originally Posted by BOC|Ethan2000

one final question (honest) do you know of any good programs to back it all up after,

If you are using a PC, look up Microsoft's SyncToy - a free add-on to XP, though unsure of compatability with Vista.

[BOC|Ethan2000]

ok cheers I will have a look.

Ethan

[JohnG]

I assumed you'd already had a look after I recommended it a couple of days ago

[amcluesent]

>one final question (honest) do you know of any good programs to back it all up<

I've found SyncToy silently fails on serious jobs (600Gb and growing library), perhaps 'toy' in the name is the clue.

Allways sync (allwayssync.com) does the business.

[LFC_SL]

I personally have my music backed up on an external HDD and several DVD-R's. Both £ for gb are pretty cheap

[BOC|Ethan2000]

I have finally finished lol.

Now I just have one more question, I do a fair bit of running and the 80gb ipod is just too big and clumsy to run with. So if I buy a 1gb shuffle will I be able to use the same itunes on my computer that I use for the 80gb ?

So they both share the same itunes and songs ?

Not sure how clear iv'e made that, but any help would be great.

Thanks.

[sjw]

I think you would be better creating another library (on a PC, hold shift while opening iTunes.. - intuitive eh.. ) and selecting different songs to sync to it. Obviously you won't be able to sync the same amount of files to a much smaller device...
I think, sadly, even for all the same files, if you want to be able to select different ones for a different iPod you need to create a new library - instead of being able to use the previous one but selecting different songs.. Could be wrong though...