Mac Laptop & Sound Cards

If you are using a Mac (which you are) the best quality and the most flexible format is Apple Lossless. Apple Lossless offers an additional advantage, it deals with metadata very well - the various bits of information about each song.

I think your notes must be a bit scrambled because WAV and AIFF are uncompressed audio - they are as good as Lossless but take more space and do not handle metadata as well. AIFF is the file type you pull off a CD...

Here is the way that most people here do the math. Depending exactly on what you get, a very large drive is under $150. A backup is another $150. Here is an example

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136025

Now let's calculate the value of a 1,000 CDs and add to that the time it is going to take you to rip them. Suddenly the cost of the hard drive is not a significant part of the equation - which makes the difference between Apple Lossless and AAC moot.

Dbphd, in my dedicated audio room, i use all Classe gear with totem mani 2 speakers. i have my den setup using totem speakers, dk design amp, sony dvp9000es cd/sacd player, and the airport express hooked up thru my wireless network. a mac mini is my music server using itunes. i also have another system in my living room that has a multi source multi output receiver with an airport express that allows me to get my itunes music to my living room and to the outside speakers. my macbook can control the itunes on my mac mini from any location in the house.
future plans are purchasing an external dac for my den that the sony cd player and the airport express will plug into.
IMO, if you are looking at purchasing external hard drives for your pc, you need to get a couple or buy a RAID setup so you will have no single point of failure. i have a friend that lost his disk drive and his purchased itunes (worth $3600) was wiped out. if you need 500gb now, buy a terabyte drive, you will use it faster than you think. right now, i have multiple 500gb drives and each 500gb drive is backed up to another 500gb drive daily. leopard comes with time machine that automatically backs up your data. i'm in the process of purchasing a multi-terabyte RAID disk subsystem that will allow me to get rid of a few 500gb drives and have 1 disk subsystem that is fault tolerant using RAID 5 technology.

Rbstehno -

Impressive and thorough approach.

Could you please tell us how many unique CD titles you have, and in how many formats. Would be helpful to give people some perspective on how you ended up with this much data.

Also could you explain where the Mini and RAID 5 rig is located in your home, how much space it takes and if its Firewire or SATA.

It's important that newbies (especially the many who are trying computer playback for the first time) are not scared off by the kind of complexity you are wrestling with, so any context you could provide would be invaluable.

Ckorody - Thanks for expressing my condition! I'm actually starting to get a handle on a lot of this but am grateful for Audiogon members as the guys and girls at the Apple Store don't seem to understand what I'm getting at - i.e., highest quality musical downloads.

Thanks again, everyone. All info is helpful to me, and I'm sure, others.

By the way, yesterday I ordered a 500gb hard drive. Will probably get another 500 for back up but at this time will have 820gb by next week.

Ckorody - i have approx 1500 cd's, 20 sacd's, and hundreds of albums. i use the mini for my browsing the net, for work, and it is also used as a music and file server for the other macs in the house. all the macs backup there disks to the multiple 500gb drives attached to the mini.
i work out of my home so i have a decent audio setup in my den: dk design, sony dvp9000es, nikko fm tuner, an adcom gda-700 dac (just purchased tonight), totem speakers, definitive technology sub, and an airport express which is hooked up to the adcom dac. the sony is also hooked up to the dac.
i have a dedicated audio room that has all classe gear with totem mani 2 speakers.

the 500gb drives are hooked up by firewire. i have been looking to purchase a NAS multi-terabyte storage system that will allow me to use raid 10 or raid 5. there was a unit on ebay that just went for $600 for a 2 terabyte unit. if i buy this NAS unit, i can hook this up in a closet with a network connection and i can get rid of all the 500gb drives i have on my desk.
btw: the adcom dac really cleaned up the sound that was coming out of the airport express. smooth, and had to turn the subwoofer down a bit, the bass was more there.