help with audio formats

You did not say how large your total storage space amounts to.

If you're a staunch MAC devotee without any thoughts of jumping the fence, and if space is no issue... secure ripping to AIF would be my suggestion.

I'm sure you can Google for how large a space you'll need for 1500 albums once you see how large some increment of recording/encoding time amounts to. Then simple math skills will reveal how many toes fit in what size shoe.

I suspect using Mac gear to encode with you likely will choose either AIF (Apple's WAV) an uncompressed (reaed largeest)space gobbling format. ALAC or Apple lossless comes in thereafter, using less space and again, a lossless codec.

That's it if you remain Mac-fast, both are native MAC formats, both are lossless, the AIF is entirely uncompressed.

Stick to those that enable media tag & Album art info tracking tags.

I thought I read somewhere that the PS Audio gizmo was eventually going to be a universal streaming device. Accepting all Formats. AIF, WAV, WAV PAC, FLAC, AAC, MP3, WMA, just to name some of the top picks in audio encoding. The initial trio are all uncompressed, yet allow I.D. tags.

Lossless, naturally is the ticket. FLAC is a lossless format which can be compressed, sort of. In all it's compression levels however it boasts No loss of musical content.... as it is being played.

I'm not so sure if that is right personally, as sliding down the compression ladder to less and less levels, I find I like the bottom two rungs where the compacting is almost non existant and have settled for #1 to save some territory that level '0' needs still more.

and my main media plaers seem to like FLAC more so than AIF.

I use PCs... so I use it in it's #1 (next to least compression level) and it eats up some territory... that level is about equivalent to the space WAV & AIF files take up... roughly.

The app (s) MAC users like for ripping CDs escapes me, sorry.

Enjoy

B, thanks for the great info. I had been leanign toward AIF at this point. Hate I can't use james river for media software as it isn't mac compat.

i ripped almost everything to flac for my pwd/bridge including hi res. enjoyed j river myself using a pc but psa's elyric is coming around nicely. still a bug or two but they are close to getting it all sorted out.

many of us are using the "trans-code of the fly" feature elyric has. converts everything to wav before sending it to the bridge. this seems especially useful for hi res as some of us reported drop outs without the feature engaged. looking back...i kinda wish i had ripped everything to uncompressed wav but in the grand scheme of things, i doubt it matters that much. the "on the fly" feature takes some of the workload off the bridge from what i understand.

know there are many mac users on the psa forums. you might want to check in there as well.

good luck