I Hate to Admit It

Converting from vinyl obviously has to be done in real time (as opposed to ripping a CD which can be done in 5 minutes). Once its recorded you still have to break down each album side into individual songs (optional, but strongly recommended) and then once you import them into iTunes you still have to type in song titles and artist names (this is done automatically if you rip a commercially available CD). Count on taking around 1 hour for each album.

The following is a link to professionally caliber A/D/A converter with a firewire interface. It's designed to work with laptops:
http://www.mhlabs.com/index2.html

This link is for a pro caliber internal soundcard with very good quality (but not excellent) converters:
http://www.rme-audio.de/english/digi96/digi96pa.htm

The ideal option for airplay or other portable use is to have a dedicated computer and an Apple iPod. You can transfer songs back and forth.
http://www.apple.com/ipod/

Cwlondon, you're right about one thing. Once you have your music on hard disk it will be a breeze to make compilation CDs. It's a simple drag and click operation. iTunes allows you to add a comment to each song. I use the comment field to add a numerical rating for each song which I can then use to sort the entire database (13,000 songs). Approximately 200 songs got the highest rating. As a birthday present I gave a good friend of mine 11 CDRs composed of my fav songs. He absolutely flipped - said it was the best present (other than from his wife) that he had ever gotten. It took me a little more than an hour to do it all.

Converting to hard disk is not a trivial process, but once you do it you will be amazed at how easily you can access all of your music. You'll listen much deeper into your collection than you ever have before.

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.