MP3 files to Apple lossless

It's probably easier to sort out if you think about only those CDs you really listen to a lot and that you know are well recorded. Do a few of those and don't worry too much about the whole 11,000 tunes for now.

Re-Rip!!! If you care about sound, Re-Rip. Sometimes when you AB a MP3 vs a lossless file the differences can seem minimal, but there is something about MP3s that kills the desire to listen. Hard to describe but definitely not my imagination.

I agree with Ejlif- re-rip. MP3s always sound clunky and mechanical. I can tell from the next room.

I can understand your hesitation to re-rip but having just finished ripping 2600 CD's to FLAC I am finally happy. With drive space so cheap I think it's worth going to lossless now more than ever. Once your collection is in a lossless format you can pretty much convert to any future format without loosing any audio information. I haven’t pulled a CD out in weeks.

I was originally at all 320kbps MP3 and was pretty happy but I have to admit some of the stuff is considerable better ripped to FLAC.

I would re-rip the entire collection and be done with it ... I also put together an Excel spreadsheet while I was ripping to inventory all my CDs. It seemed at first like a long and daunting task but it was kinda fun. I pulled out stuff I hadn’t heard in a while and drank a few beers while listening to music and swapping CD’s. It was kind of a “Friday Night” activity for a while. One thing to watch is errors on the disc. I am now using DB Poweramp which is really good with error recovery. I noticed the first time I ripped to MP3 – even though the program said the disc ripped fine … I had a few errors. I’m not sure what Apple has for ripping programs but I would dig deep in the settings and see if there is a “secure mode” while ripping the CDs. It generally takes longer to rip but you don’t want to have to go back and do it twice. Lastly – Spend the $100/200 and get a second (or third and fourth) USB/Firewire external drive for backup. I have 2 Terabytes of drive space that sit unplugged on a shelf, with the whole collection backed up just in case.

As per Sfar I will start re-ripping the ones that I like the most, and then eventually as horseface did, little by little re-rip my whole CD collection.
Good advice guys. Thanks a lot.

Tony