I bought the Listeners Bible, I want to put it on my computer. It's 66 cd's(77 hours), so I want make sure before I spend the time doing this.

What's the best format for doing this? I have been using nero's mp4 encoder for my music cd's lately.

I would welcome any comments or suggestions about this.

I'm not sure if this is important or not.
My soundcard is an x-fi platinum.
I would probably listen to this 90% of the time on my Logitech z5400 speakers, other 10% plantronics headset.

Since you're only using it on your computer, Speex might not be a bad choice, assuming you use a player that can handle it (Foobar2k 0.9.3 can.)

Is it just a single voice speaking? Any introductory or background music? If so, is the music in stereo?

Yes it's a single voice. From what I've listened to so far there's intro music in the background at the beginning of each cd. I think the music is in stereo.

Going with MP3 is always a solid option and gives maximum compatability.

Trusted 'lame 3.97b2 -V 5 --vbr-new' will give you small efficient filesizes and excellent quality. Can't go wrong with using this!

Speex if you are just going to be listening to the recordings on your computer.

For my ears, I go with -V 7 --vbr-new

Here's another vote for Speex, if you care about space.

If you don't like the "voice codec" sound, you might want to tweak Speex's settings or try Vorbis/MP3/M4A/etc instead.

As long as you don't mind that the music will quite possibly sound dreadful.

If you care about size, I would go for AAC. It sounds amazing at bitrates around 32kbps. If size is not so important, then go for mp3.

In such situations I use Speex since I tend to make samll size encodings to use them on my PDA.

I vote for MP3.
This is my preference for speech(radio) encoding.

LAME 3.97b2
-V 8 --vbr-new (50~80kbps) ... very good quality
-V 9 --vbr-new (30~50kbps) ... acceptable quality

I agree here, Nero HE-AACv2 (-q 0.15) appears to offer a nice "sweet spot", I'm also amazed at how well music can sound at this bitrate.

Speex would get you slightly lower bitrates, but has the potential to mangle the small amount of music contained in the recordings.

Lame at -V 8 (~85 kbps) or -V 9 (~65 kbps) will also produce acceptable-to-decent voice/music quality, though at such bitrates the total file size will begin to add up over the course of 77 hours (77 hrs @ 64 kbps = ~2 GB,
77 hrs @ 32 kbps = ~1 GB).

Which audio player do you use for Speex on your PDA? My PDA has become my primary portable player. (Yes, I know the sound quality on most PDA's isn't stellar.)

Thank you for all the suggestions.

Getting the cd's details from freedb is important

Now I need some examples please for how to use speex. Any front end?
input E:\ output D:\Bible\

For Lame is using cdex ok?

And for using Nero HE-AACv2 outside nero?