I just started re-ripping all my CD’s again, and this time I am trying to do it a little more smartly. This time I am ripping everything to lossless FLAC format. This was I will not have to rip my CD’s again. I will have a high quality archive of all my music, which I can just encode into any lossey format I want or need later.

I like iTunes and now I have a MacBook Pro I was even more complled to use it, but I really dislike how they refuse to support any other music formats. I started to encode in Apple Lossless but then thought better of it. Because it seems like you are at the mercy of Apple if you ever want to re-encode you music in a format other than AAC.

For the ripping I am using Exact Audio Copy to ripping with all error checking on. Then using the external FLAC encoder.

Ofcourse now I am sitting there looking at my high quality FLAC music and I do not want to re-encode it and make a lower quality AAC file for iTunes, and I do not want to make another huge Apple Lossless archive just for iTunes. So I started checking out other music players again.

After checking out a few I finally gave Songbird a try again, and boy has it improved quickly. The last time I tried it was just when it had come out of BETA of it’s 1.0 release. Songbird is now at 1.2 and it is much better. But that’s another post.

So now on my main computer I am playing FLAC files in Songbird, on my laptop I am going to be using AAC in iTunes and use that to sync my iPod. Seems to be my best shot at having the best of both worlds, portability and quality.

I have a few plans for updating my speakers and sound so I will post about that later.