need crash course in using digital music.

FLAC stands for FREE LOOLESS AUDIO CODEC.

It has several encoding bit rates which allow for it to appear compressed, yet it is simply allowed to reamin lossless in variagble file sizes.

Whatever the perfect Wave plaer setup will read, is your way to go.

WAV issues surround imbedded meta data, ie., tags. Track, album artist info, etc. As they will appear fine on one hard drive (media players) data base, transferring them to some other drive or player you will lose the info associated with them and wind up with Track 01, 02, 03, etc. and have to manually fill all that out later on.

WAV is what many media player/CD burning software use to write with, converting into WAV then into CDA. Some don't though.

J River Jukebox has a GUI which looks like an older version of iTunes... so that could help.... it's free, and supports about every format playback wise. FUBAR too supports a bunch of media types. It's interface however isn't very intuitive. Winamp also affords you many playback options given all the plug in's it allows for. Monkey's Audio also is another choice and has a free version.

I feel the media player itself determines which file type it is best suited to play.

EAC is a really good ripper and allows for various formats with it's plug in, but it's not the simplest to setup and use. Setup is the issue there mostly, afterwards, it's not that hard. natively, it will rip to wav or FLAC... and you can save the wAV files too.

Think of WAV files are temporary files. Waiting to be burned, or converted.

I find it a toss up between WAV and FLAC sonically... and it depends on the media player. If all of them are getting ripped to disc in your deal, I'd recommend you stick with the file types which imbed ID Tags permanently. Discs get scratched, lost, etc. hard drives die too so you'll want to have files whose data you won't need to worry about losing, down the road... BTW... I find FLAC having more resolution than apple lossless too... though not tremendously.

Lastly, the notes on uncompressed and compressed are a bit out of wack IMO. The media player, and system in use will be a key more so than the file type. Are they different sounding? Some. Again, not remarkably though. Burned onto disc I'll say there is, but played directly from the hard drive the sound diffs are quite minimal, and most often you can't really tell if you don't know in advance which is being played... AAC, or AL. I can usually tell FLAC & WAV from the previous two however.

Good luck.

Also... if you use EAC... it's default conversion for ripping and burning is the WAV format. you can choose to either have it delete the WAV files after they are reformated into FLAC, or what ever other plug in you use, or keep them in the chosen directory.

AS for how many albums done in FLAC can be placed onto a DVD... that will depend upon the bit rate you pick. More than four or five CD's can be placed onto a DVD if you are controling the FLAC bit rate for the orig encoding. If not you can burn and re-rip them into smaller sizes... it's a lossless codec so it shouldn't account for any actual loss of content.

The software and hardware afixed to the disc reading device is always going to be the decider on what it can and can not read/play. Just as there are DVD players SACD, DVDA, MP3, etc. The maker of these gizmos will tell you what they can and can not read/play...

Mixing files on a disc might amount to nothing more than a short pause in playback, or you may have to stop playback altogether to go to another file type.... check with whomever.

There's another distinct advantage of capturing and playing back directly from the HDD rather than burning things back to disc merely for playing back.

Silver discs limit versatility until their contents are transformed into a softer digital domain.

I'd reccomend using DVDRW, if the machine supports that media.

Good luck.. and remember... BACK UP ALL FILES ONTO AN INDEPENDANT STORAGE DEVICE.