hey besides exact audio copy...what about burning

rsbeck.wi-fi darn i'm behind. yeah i've heard that term but i'm broke so i never read the articles. yikes. ha.....

yep hard drives. :) and i need a new one too.

thanks for your reply rsbeck! :)

You're welcome. Also, since Hard Drives are being made with higher capacities, there's no reason to rip CD's to your Hard Drive using a
compression or data reduction codec. Rip them to your hard drive uncompressed -- you can get an external hard drive, load your entire CD collection on it, uncompressed, and play it with your computer. Wi-fi just means "WIRELESS." You can put all your music on one computer, form a wireless network with other computers in the house and share the music, play it through your stereo, transfer it to a hand held device like an i-pod, plug the i-pod into your car stereo, etc. I find that a hard drive makes an excellent transport and if you rip a cd uncompressed it sounds awfully good on playback. Having said all that, if you simply have to compress your music, then use the highest sample size available, like 320 kbps. The less compression the better. The highest quality is no
compression, which is what I recommend.

Until I can find a nice, quiet, NAS RAID 10 or 0+1 set up with 1TB (guess I need 4 500MB drives) of storage for a decent price, I'm stuck with mp3s instead of wavs and a backing up my files on a separate hard drive. Because my mp3 "server" is on all the time, backing up is critical. It took me over a year to rip about 1K CDs, and I really don't want to do it again... I've already had one external backup drive die a nasty death. So, I'd urge you to think a bit about the back up costs relative to your time investment.

I'd also disagree on just using the highest sample rate. I use variable bit rate coding with the "-alt preset extreme" setting. I get about 10:1 compression and it sounds, to my ear, better than the results with constant bit rate encoding with files of the same size.

While I love Wi-Fi, make sure you go 802.11a or 11g and see how it performs in your house--from what I gather, 802.11b data rates in the real world (the one with walls and floors) may not support transfer of wav files on a real time basis.

I picked up an external USB2.0 200GB hard drive for about $125 (after rebates - hate them) and am in the process of ripping my CD's to it using Windows media player lossless compression. It uses varaible bit rate and shrinks files about 30%; not a lot but I want to get between 600-800 CD's on this drive. I looked into Network Attached Storage (NAS), but unless your willing to spend big bucks, your going to need a driver on your PC to access it. In addition, devices such as audiotron, Integra net-tunes will not be able to access it.

As far as audio quality of lossless compression goes, I did a blind listening test on my computer rig (B&W leisure monitors, B&W sub, Monarchy SM70 class a amp, M-audio revolution SB) and was able to tell the difference 23 out of 24 times. I actually prefered the WMA version because my office is a little "hot" (lots of drywall, Hardwood floors, huge 3' x 8' desk - I like to spread out). The WMA version had a slight softening of the "attack" of notes; kind of a "tube" sound (There I said it - don't burn me at the stake). It's good enough to listen to on the computer rig, and it's soooo convienient to have all those CD's just a click away.

If you want to do WiFi go with 802.11G; the range of "B" with the throughput of "A".

I have to agree that this is the future of audio and video. You will download your movies and music and store it on an HD or in RAM. All your media will sync up using wifi so it will be available in your car, on the portable, as well as throughout the house. BTW, Omnifi.com has a HD that attaches to your cars headunit, like a CD changer, and syncs with your computer using wifi. So as your car is sitting in the garage at night, it's downloading all your music. Cool! Two small problems: 20GB HD and only supports MP3 and WMA up to 320K. When they come out with the a version with at least 100GB and that supports uncompressed and WMA lossless compression I'll be the first to order one.

Why wouldn't an audiotron be able to access an NAS box?