hey guys

been out of the loop for a few years here. Was doing some searching for what is recommended these days for what im looking to do, which is:

rip my cd collection, then encode that to flac for my desktop, and gapless AAC for the good old ipod.

My questions are:

1. is EAC still the standard/recommended for error free ripping?
2. once ripped, does foobar using itunes encoder yield the best results for gapless AAC? or should I go with nero?



AAC always sounded better to my ears and am glad to see that more people on here are agreeing with this and is becoming the standard over Lame APS.

thanks!

1. It is still highly recommended as it is free and still offers pretty secure ripping. People who have trouble getting over the interface often turn to dBpowerAMP but it isn't free. I think you will be fine with EAC so long as you have it setup correctly and are comfortable with the interface.
2. Personally, I would just go with the Nero AAC encoder. You will get gapless playback so long as you are using a 5G iPod or higher (I think you need a 3G iPod nano or higher and a 1G or higher iPod touch). You will have to go through foobar2000's more advanced encoder setup settings as it will want to output mp4 files, by default, when using Nero AAC. You will need to output m4a files. I can help guide you through this process if you need more help, it is rather easy. I have not come across any gapless issues with my -q0.50 files that are encoded with the latest version of Nero AAC. You can still use iTunesEncode through foobar2000 if you want but I recommend just using Nero AAC as you can edit the settings right in foobar2000 whereas iTunesEncode requires that you edit the settings through iTunes.