I ended up switching to Exact Audio Copy, because it turned out to be easier to get it to neatly integrate FLAC encoding for fire-and-forget ripping and encoding. Also, it gives more information on potential timing problems during the rip (though it's always been a false alarm when I did a test rip and CRC checksum comparison ( Read more... )

My desktop appears to dislike connecting the external drive through a front USB port; I got a BSOD. I suspect that it might be a port power issue or resource conflict. Another ongoing issue is that the boot cycle stalls at the "searching for USB mass storage devices" stage unless the all-in-one unit (a Canon MP830) is turned off during the boot. On ( Read more... )

So far, I've gotten a hundred-odd (with or without hyphen) CDs backed up in lossless format; I've paused to back them up to the new external hard drive (about a half hour, but can be done in the background).

I've also unearthed the batch of jumbo CD albums with the bulk of my filk and folk collections.

Inspired by a fortuitous find (a 500 GB external HD on sale for $85), I've finally gotten around to getting the various piles of CDs ripped. The plan of attack is to rip them with Audiograbber, convert them to FLAC (a lossless compressed format) to reduce the space needed for the master archive, and to convert files to MP3s as needed (or as Round ( Read more... )

After downloading and installlng a batch of IrfanView plugins, my desktop decided that it was no longer on speaking terms with the Internet. Fortunately, the wireless laptop connection through the router still gets online, and I was able to re-establish contact between the desktop and laptop by assigning a static IP to the desktop's Local Area ( ( Read more... )