I Hate to Admit It

if you want decent sound from your computer, but nothing else most commercial systems will not suit your needs well. Talk to one of the smaller companies like micron or abs and spec out a computer with 2 hard drives in as big of a tower as you have space for for future additions, you do not need anything fancy just lots of space, a celeron or duron system should work, and get a good cd burner as this will have fast audio extraction and you can make compilations. use EAC to rip onto the hard drive as wavefiles and buy a soundcard with a digital output because an audio dac will sound much better than anything in a computer.

I had similar bad experiences with MP3s, but now am a quasi-convert. I use them in my iPod, and its OK for commuting purposes. Since I had the MP3s on my computer, I also hooked the computer to my stereo (Quicksilver monos/ProAc RS2s) in my study, and the jukebox software is OK for that kind of thing--its easy and gives good b/ground music. For serious 2CH, its still upstairs to the real rig.

My frustrations with ripping CDs was driven by the lousy software out there. I used a lot of commercial ripping software (all mentioned above) and never got good results, even for WAVs. Then someone turned me on to Exact Audio Copy. Stunning advance in ripping (tongue in cheek)--it actually reads the blocks more than once and does a compare! You would have thought *someone* might have made that conceptual leap somewhere along the way in the commercial world. Anyway, its $20 from somewhere on the web--just run a search on google. No more skips/nasties on WAVs. Much better than anything else I tried. User interface is kind of awful, but the end product is worth it.

If you ever want to try MP3s again, use a free program called LAME, which can be called by EAC. There are some command line presets that work well--I use "--alt preset extreme" for my iPod, but there is also an "--alt preset insane" for really HQ MP3s.

Try SoundForge for sound extraction/editing. Granted, it may be a little "excessive'" - the program is actually meant for much more complex tasks, but it has a built-in ripping facility, and tons of features, if you ever want to try and improve the sound of some recordings. But if you want the best, this may be it. Proffessional quality and reliability to boot, and great flexibility.

Thank you everyone, I have found this thread very useful and expect to convert for jukebox and background applications.

Further to Ipods, I have two questions:

1) Can I buy an ipod for windows software and later convert to the Apple interface if I decide to buy a Mac? (I would rather not spend the money on a Mac, but everyone says it works much better.)

2) Am I being too anally retentive audiophilish in my desire to bypass the internal amplifier and volume controls in computer and Ipod applications?

It seems that my external Grado headphone amp should sound much better, but it has been a pain to find line level outputs on mobile devices.

The computer salesmen look at me like I have 5 heads every time I ask for a line level output or for a battery powered, high quality external DAC. Maybe the internal electronics on the Ipod arent so bad?

Any other advice on audiophile quality, mobile audio, that can run on batteries for long flights would be greatly appreciated.

I think I saw a thread on A'gon a little while ago about external DACs for computers--hmm... try this:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1035756620&read&3&4&

I think the Mac and Windows iPods are pretty different. Google iPod and windows conversion or somesuch. There were some sites with info about hacking the Mac version for a windows environment--if you are ultimately going Mac, you might buy a Mac iPod and see if you can temporarily do the Windows mods.

The internals of the iPod aren't bad, given that its a tiny box. I (temporarily) used a pair of etymotics earbuds and was rather impressed by the sound quality, but had to abandon them (in-ear 'phones were giving me motion sickness on the metro).

If you are trying to squeeze better sound out of the iPod, check into Headroom--they make external amps/processors for the iPod that are well reviewed.