[Rick Nebiolo]

[ QUOTE ]
Rick - you really should look into ripping your music in a lossless format like FLAC using a bit perfect ripper like EAC and feeding that to your stereo. It sounds silly, but just the access to your entire library and playlists make it worth it, not to mention better sound (won't get into the vinyl debate - that really does rule but.....) Physical cd's belong in the basement or attic.

[/ QUOTE ]

Years ago I used the EAC/LAME combo to encode most of my CD collection into VBR MP3s for desktop computer speakers and portable use. Agree EAC is a great ripper.

But now iTunes is my music library player and it doesn't work with FLAC encodes. In the meantime I've used iTunes to convert some of the better CDs to Apple Lossless and these seem great so far (including playing the files off my living room DVD player).

Just did a quick Google investigation and found out you can use the EAC ripper to feed into a freeware Apple Lossless encoder. I'll probably use that approach unless people tell me that going directly from CD using iTunes to Apple Lossless is good enough.

Thanks for the link!

~ Rick