Hi everyone,

I am going to do a lot of encoding and would like to have your opinion first. I have a huge collection of classical music in FLAC format (some 600 gigas) which I encoded in Europe and burnt on 120 DVDs before I moved to the US two weeks ago.
Now I have bought a Powerbook and as part of the purchase I got a 200$ rebate on an iPod. Originally I wanted to buy a RioKarma so that I could play all my FLAC files, but at 69$ only, I decided to go for the iPod. I think that I will use the FLAC files as a backup, and will convert them into a lossy format for daily use, so that I can store them all on an external hardrive, for example. The question is which format to choose. These are my priorities:

1. I would like it to be supported by hardware other than Apple's, unless AAC is really better than other formats.
2. The bitrate could be about 192Kbs, unless 256/320 kbs really improves the results.
3.If possible, converting from FLAC into lossy format should be a direct procedure, without going through WAV files.
4.Some instruments hard to encode (harpsichord, orchestras), should sound as natural as possible, even if this implies extreme bitrates.

Any ideas?

Francisco

Since you need hardware support (other than Apple), LAME --alt preset standard

yep lame preset standard will do the trick. along with all2lame or frontah for the transcoding.

Thanks for your help. What software can I use to encode with LAME? I had Nero in my pc, but I do not whether that exists for Mac OSX.