I have a million CD's I want to load on my PC. I know how to transfer them (CD's) into windows media center, I have Vista Home OS. Now the question. After doing this thing will the music sound better being played by the PC? Or will the sound be the same being played on my Oppo DVD/CD player? My PC is connected to the AVR via USB.

Robert, depending on how you transfer the CD's to your PC the music may sound the same as or worse than, but not better than the original CD recording. Your best case is using flac or another lossless codec to store the CD with no loss of 'musical bits' of data. Using MP3 or other formats will result in compression or loss some of the data and therefore, in theory at least, the copied version will not sound as good as the original. All of this also assumes that your PC can pass the audio stream just as well as your Oppo can.

You have a longterm project ahead of you! If I could make a suggestion... don't wait until later to embed album covers in your mp3/flac files (assuming you will wish to at some point) - it may take some extra time, but at least what you've already ripped won't remain in limbo as a 'work in progress' that isn't suitable for permanent backup in a fireproof safe. If you rip and embed all at once, at least you can feel secure that these are finished products that you can do permanent backups of periodically... and believe me, with ALL the work that's involved, you will NOT want to have to do it all over again!!!

You know how you can walk up to your cd collection not knowing what you wanna listen to, see an album cover and think, "ya, that's the one"? Well, that's the benefit of embedding jpg album covers into your mp3/flac files... and you can scroll through your albums visually. It's well worth the trouble!

Generally... if you want to use these on iPods and have the most flexibility in terms of players etc, mp3 is a solid bet. Might as well rip at the best mp3 bitrate of 320kb/s at 'constant' (not variable) bitrate. For most of the public, that is more than sufficient. If you really want the best, even though audibly it's hard to detect much of a difference, than of course rip in flac (or ape, perhaps). But Windows Media Player and others will/may not be able to play these... you'd need a less mainstream player. And it'll take longer to rip flac, because the file sizes are much greater.

There is absolutly no difference between MP3 and Flac files when played. The difference is so subtle for the pain and size it take to store flac. 320kb is more than you need.
Buy a good dac and you will be more than satisfied.

that would be at the high bit rate of 320.

What pain? And storage is cheap. There is something to be said for having a copy of the original which a flac file is. You can use EAC to rip or any number of other flac friendly programs such as Media Monkey or Winamp.

Robert, as Dan pointed out, if you transfer them properly, the sound can be audibly identical to that you now have playing the CDs on your player. One of the outputs(computer compared to player)may be slightly different, and if the sound level of one is slightly higher, you could get the misimpression that it's better rather than just being a little louder, which is corrected with a slight volume increase on the receiver.

To clarify a point, if your receiver presently has an input for the output from the USB, then it has a DAC for converting that output, and of course you don't have to buy one.

Hard drive space is cheap these days. convert to flac with autoflac if you have a receiver or other device that can play flac format (ps3, xbox360 won't do it)

If i could just chime in with another 'collection' tidbit... you're about to undertake a major 'librarian' chore on. I'd suggest thinking about a naming convention template to apply to your entire collection. Now's the time, before you get you've gone too far and have to go back to change things. Two good free-ware programs that can help with mass renaming of tag info are FileRenamer and TagScanner. I think you can find both at Download.com. Personally, I like my artists displayed alphabetically, but my albums displayed chronologically... so i'd always name my albums in the following format: "(1992) Unplugged", which allowed me to easily organize and display the progression of albums by a particular artist. I also created a vast subdirectory system to help organize each genre/artist/album... and for those that I only ripped/kept a few songs of (far cry from a whole album), I'd name the 'album' tag on those songs as "Various" so that I could just play all the 'various' songs together, which made for a nice hodgepodge listening experience. Anyways... just something to think about before you get too deep into this project of yours. Be prepared to spend 100s of hours ripping, tagging, and embedding album covers to get a kickass digital collection that friends will be envious of.

Cheers!

Thanks for the input guys. I use my PC for checking e-mail and surfing the web. I'm no GEEK!! First of all I had to look up what FLAC is. Second I had to look up what Winamp and Foobar is. I have my starting point with this project. My PC does have a built in DAC. (No issue there, only took me an hour to find out.) My USB connection to AVR works. I can play youtube songs through my AVR.
Now to stop my head from spinning from all this.

These are all good points mentioned above. A few extra comments from my experience:

1 - To Phillipe's point on MP3 vs FLAC - while from an audible perspective Phillipe is correct - it would be exceedingly difficult to tell flac apart from 320kbps mp3 - a flac or other audio lossless codec will give you a bit for bit identical backup of the original CD, mp3 will not give you that. Then, if you need mp3 or other format in the future you can always convert from the source flac files to whatever format you need. This is a good future proofing solution. Up to you if bit for bit identical back up is important to you or not, but as Jason pointed out, hard disk space is cheap these days and only getting cheaper.

2 - Research and make a plan as has already been suggested. Getting the files and tags and album art all done at once and in a standard way will keep you happier and save you a lot of headaches in the future.

3 - Backup! Even before your done the whole conversion, make regular backups. Hard disks fail for no good reason and you do not want to lose dozens of hours of work!

If you need pointers keep coming back as many of us have digitized our collections and we will all have some advice or different points of view to share.

I personally use EAC to rip my CD's to FLAC, then use MP3 Tag to make sure all of the album art, artist and track tags are the way I like. EAC gets it all mostly right, but I find the fine tuning with MP3 Tag helps. Although the name is misleading, MP3 tag fully supports flac file tagging, along with many other formats.

There are many ways to skin this cat, so research and pick what works for you. Good luck!

Again, thanks for all the great advise. I'm starting this project tomorrow morning with a full pot of strong coffee. I'll have the M22's and M3's (with my two subs) on high volume for sure. Me and computers are like oil and water. We don't mix very well but I'm sure it will turn out fine. I'm sure I'll hit some snags so please be on the forum speed dial. Beer me!!

I still like Easy CD-DA Extractor for my initial ripping and metadata, but it's not free like EAC. However, I personally found it more intuitive, so it was worth it to me. For any converting needs, I think you'll find dBpoweramp to be the overwhelming recommendation, and I agree. Much faster than the others I tried.

If it makes you feel any better, I've been doing the computer stuff for years, but I'm new to the stereo game. I feel like a complete idiot when it comes to amps/tubes/DACs/speakers. We're all here to help each other.

Some thoughts:

1. The FLAC vs. MP3 debate: the sound difference between FLAC and bigger MP3s is not very significant. However, if you want to get rid of your CD collection, FLAC is a great. Also, you can get smaller files from FLAC, but from MP3 you can never get bigger. If you want to convert to a smaller MP3 file (e.g. for a portable player), it's better to go from FLAC than from a bigger MP3. I won't explain why; trust me, you don't want me to get into this.

2. If you are using a portable player (e.g., iPod, smartphone), you ARE space-limited, so MP3 is better, and you may even want a lower bitrate (smaller but less accurate files). None of these devices have as much disk space as a typical laptop or desktop computer.

3. As a result, what you may want to do is rip (pull the music off of the CD) into FLAC, and then convert into MP3. Regardless, the advantages of FLAC outweigh the problems; I'm about to redo this (I have most of my music in MP3), and I'm going to use FLAC and convert from there. Think of it this way: FLAC is an audiophile thing, whereas MP3 is sort of for the masses. I bought my M3s because the sound on whatever from Best Buy is not to my taste. It's not a perfect comparison, but it should explain why very few programs/players support FLAC, while everything supports MP3.

4. You are about to start a big task, and it makes sense to get the right tools, even if they cost a few bucks. For example, check out this: http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

I don't even think you would need to buy it; you can get it for free for 21 days (should be plenty of time). I haven't used this program personally, but I hear it's pretty awesome for both ripping and converting, and I know it can convert your whole library in batch (all at once). Also, it uses multiple CPUs and cores, which means it's probably faster (if your computer says "Core"-anything, like "Core 2 Duo" or "Core i5"). If your computer came with Vista, you almost certainly have this feature, and it will save time.

5. If you aren't going to use a portable player, I don't see why you wouldn't use FLAC if you have the disk space. Each CD is 600-700MB of data, which means 60-70GB per 100 CDs (1GB is about 1,000 x a MB). Count your CDs, do the math, and that will tell you how much disk space you need, and your computer can tell you how much disk space you need. If you don't have enough disk space, you'll need to get an external hard drive (and you may want to do this anyway).

This might sound scary, but these things are inexpensive (figure $100-200 for a large and good drive), can be bought at Target, Walmart, Costco, Best Buy, etc., and just need to be plugged in to your computer (and power outlet). If you can connect your computer to your DAC via USB, you can install an external hard drive. I typically buy Western Digital in both personal and professional situations (and I've probably bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth hard drives professionally).

6. You will need a second hard drive for backup. If you have a fireproof safe, I would store it there; it's a full and complete backup of all of your CDs, and therefore is worth thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of dollars. Don't worry about this, though, until you have at least made some progress.

To sum up, unless you are using a portable player, it makes sense to just use FLAC. Read the manual for whatever ripping software you use, and be patient with yourself.

If you are using a portable player, post back here with what kind and how much space you have, and (if you can) a rough number of how many CDs you have, and I'll try to check back regardless. Also, please post what your computer is (brand, model, whatever info you have), because there's one more consideration with hard drives (USB2 v. 3), but it'll just be easier to give you a recommendation than to explain.

-Joshua

I have Winamp downloaded. I have a CD in the tray. Now what do I do?

I have figured it out. Ripping has begun. Beer me again!!

Excellent! What are we drinking?

Coors!!!! The M22v3 and M3ti's never sounded so good. Beam me up Scottie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Coors? I thought you said beer

I'm excited; I'm killing time, waiting for my M3s.

Hey, wow, I just re-read my post, and it sounds incredibly condescending. My apologies.

I thought your "Coors?...." was on par with the rest of the stuff we say aroound here, which shouldn't need an apology, you fit right in.

Joshua, welcome(I gave you one before as Yoshio, but you're now entitled to another). Excellent post above on the ripping procedures.

If your "apologies" relate to the Coors comment, you can't imagine what Tom Tuttle would have to say about Coors if he sees this thread.

I just bought Coors along with a bunch of Chinese stuff at WalMart.

Tom's ears just pricked up.....

Good one, Mark; but you're the one who once had those ears that might have "pricked" up.

I thought Coors was the stuff they cleaned aspiring red-necks out with.

Coors is the MP3 of beers.

Guinness is lossless.

Cary

I like that.

But I don't LIKE Guinness or Coors.

I guess Belgians are the AAC of beers.

If it ain't Mexican or German, it isn't beer.

Then you ain't living.

If it ain't Mexican or German, it ain't cerveza or Bier.