I'm going away to Uni in September and don't plan to take all my CDs with me, so was planning to rip them to my external hard drive and take them with me.

I've got around 200-odd CDs, and about 5000 songs already on the hard drive

I'm currently using MediaMonkey 3 (free version) with the LAME 3.97 encoder. I'm on Windows XP (though will be moving to a Vista laptop) and want to use MP3 as it's more compatible with my portable media players

1) It seems to take a lot longer to rip using mediamonkey than with WMP11, at the same quality (192kbps MP3), is there an advantage to doing it using mediamonkey?

2) Is mediamonkey the best program to use to manage that number of files?

3) Any other tips?

Thanks for all your help

1) wmp nor mediamonkey are the best choice for rippping
use eac instead ( secure mode)

2) no, foobar is the best ( mediamonkey is slow)

There are advantages to using VBR rather than a constant bitrate. Suggested settings for LAME, depending on what purpose the encoding are for are given here:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME

And is VBR pretty futureproof?

I want to encode in a format that I can transfer to an MP3 player easily and that won't become out of date

I currently use a Sony NWZ A818

Well, VBR is part of MP3 standard, and I am not aware of any modern player (software or hardware) that has any problems playing VBR streams.

I've picked up dirt cheap mp3 players from discount bins - all play vbr. If vbr allergic device exists, Ring the manufacturer and give them a mouthfull like " CBR ? wakeup this isn' t 1998 !.."

Yeah, as the other poster says any modern player will be fine. It's rather the other way round: that if you have a really old player it might have problems with VBR.

But going forwards VBR is better, since it gives you more bang for your buck -- which is to say better sound quality for the filesize. Amazon is, apparently, using it for some of its DRM-free downloads, which is a pretty good indication that almost no one is going to have problems playing the files back:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=62092

Thanks a lot, I'm now using foobar, although it's a bit daunting to start using!

I've managed to get it to a stage I like though, although any tips would be appreciated!

Or dbpoweramp r12 or r13.



Disagree on both statement.

I use MM on 1+ tb of mixed flac/mp3 and it works fine.

Don't get me wrong, I like and use foobar for some things, but 'best' is definately in the eyes of the user and the situation. And I'm not saying MM is perfect either.

Well, it depends of how large your music collection is. I just assume Melomane is right about foobar2000 being faster than Mediamonkey... now if you only got a few hundred or thousand files, then it might not be a problem. But when your collection goes into 10,000s it's when many music managers miserably fail. foobar2000 however has no problems with a very large database, something I actually do know for sure.

These are not a few hundred or thousand files. It's more.

I prefer MediaMonkey to foobar.

I would also suggest dBpoweramp (go to the beta section and get R13)