Downloaded 3000 CD's To External Hard Drive

Larry....points well taken. I will want to do a lot of editing, but I can do some of that while it's being ripped. Sub-genres will be helpful and I'll want to use "release date" instead of just the "year". Feeding my neurosis comes with a heavy price sometimes.... I have three monitors, so I can actually do some work at the same time. I can sit in my office and watch The Masters while I'm doing this.

I have to agree with Larryi; plan on MONTHS if you properly rip them and edit. It took me 6 months to rip 500 albums, granted it took me a bit longer because I was also up-sampling each song to 24/96 with Triumph's iZotope program. Nevertheless, not a weekend project.

Take your time! Start with 10 or so cds.

Rip in dbpoweramp as FLAC. FLAC by far is the easiest to tag. FLAC is identical (bit perfect) to WAV. dB will bring in metadata/cover art.

Cover art will show in the music directory as folder.jpg. Every album folder will have folder.jpg.

Missing cover art can be found at albumart.org

In JRiver you can click on tags. You will see how db tagged the music by default. Get a decent idea of what the major fields mean.

Take your time and have fun. I ripped 2000 cds in a relative short period of time.

I agree 100% with Larry WAV sounds much better on my Mac
My question is how to do metadata with WAV Ive been doing 2 rips per cd 1 in aiff the other in WAV eating space and taking twice the time
Thanks

There is a really good overview of cd ripping strategy on the Computer Audiophile site. It's a good read and includes ideas like keeping an archive copy and a playback copy. It also includes recommended software and settings. I think it's really well thought out.

Search for the computer audiophile site and look under the "CA Academy" section.

Good luck!