Archiving My Music

[iamjero]

Here is the situation...

I have around 1000 cds I want to archive on a 500Gb external hard drive I just purchased. I would like to maintain as much of the cd quality as possible and Im willing to purchase another 500Gb HD if necessary.

I have an 8Gb nano that I will be transferring the music to and from as I want to listen to it.

Any suggestions on the format, bit rate, software I should use would be greatly appreciated.

 

[EricB]

encode at 320 kbps. if you want higher than that use nero.

AAC (mp4, m4a) sound the best of the lossy compression techniques.
mp3 is the most compatible
WMA sucks

you can do flac lossless. it the best of the lossless techniques (better than apple and wma loseless ). it's not that compatible with much stuff

you don't lose anything in a wav rip. however they are huge (1 song 50mb instead 1 song 5mb if you compress). but 95 percent of the world can't tell the difference between AAc and wav