hi, i've been reading these forums for quite some time now and i'm hoping that someone will be able to advise the best way to go with a new setup for my small office (yes, music is our product). i'm in a good position because nothing is entirely set up yet -- the current setup is just a bunch of WAV files stored on an attached IDE HDD shared over the network to a few clients. with some changes taking place, i'm looking at setting up a more expandable option.

the plan/background: we have a fairly strong system set up to run as a fileserver with 3 120GB IDE's (one of which is the current drive with the WAVs) and a 20GB IDE (for the OS). so far i've installed mandrake linux 9.1 and have set up proper file sharing to our WinXP clients with SMB. i'd like to convert all our WAVs to MP3s and share those over the network for listening and burning to CD on the client machines (and eventually to be made available over ftp/web). however, i'd also like to keep the WAV files for backup purposes.

my questions to the forum:

- first off, i'm going to have to batch-encode all of our existing WAVs (2100+ songs) into MP3s while keeping the same directory structure. is the best way to do this through running LAME in a shell overnight?

- for most songs that we'll receive in the future, we'll be ripping from CD. is it best to do this on the server computer itself, or is it possible to rip/encode via a client computer that places the files on the server when it's done?

- i'd also like to create a database of all of our songs -- i understand that Grip/DigitalDJ can create a SQL database for all the ripped songs (which works perfectly for my situation), but is there any way to add the existing songs into that database short of re-ripping the CDs or manually adding to the databse?

...i appreciate any advice or insight -- i really want to take advantage of the fact that we're at a point to create a new system like this. FWIW, my current thoughts are to use Grip/DigitalDJ to rip/encode all of our future songs through the server itself, which should create an appropriate SQL database. the clients use EAC/LAME to rip/encode, and will have to copy the songs over manually once they've been ripped. that's my biggest concern, as some clients won't have explicit knowledge of the directory structure. i'm thinking of writing a PHP script to query the SQL database (both over the LAN and internet) that may add functionality of uploading songs.

as you can tell, i'm still kinda floundering trying to figure it all out, so any thoughts would be GREAT!