Well, after talking about it for the last year and a half, I’ve finally gotten everything in place to rip my entire cd collection!

For starters, I had to setup a reliable file server running Gentoo Linux with Samba file sharing services for Windows clients.

Once I set that up, I bought a 300GB western digital harddrive, with removable drive kit. I wanted to be able to remove the drive and keep it in the trunk of my car incase of disaster (fire, etc.) so I won’t loose all my hard work.

The main drive is 250gb maxtor. Using rsnapshot for Linux, I am able to backup the main drive to my removable drive via cronjob on an hourly basis (not to mention all my remotely hosted databases and web sites).

The best CD-ripper, Lame MP3 encoder I’ve found for Windows XP is BonkEnc which supports Variable Bitrate and is Open Source GPL’d (ensuring you never have to pay for anything). I have the setting at VBR-MTRH, which rips the cds extremely fast (under 5 minutes). I set no minimun quality, with a target rate of 192kb, and maximun bitrate at 320kb. This will get the most out of the compression, as the quiet areas of the song are encoded at a lower bitrate, saving valuable harddisk space.

I tested ripping at Quality level 5 (middle) and Quality Level 0 (best), and the size of the album “Paul Simon - Graceland” went from 39MB to 75MB, and when listening, I noticed virtually no difference. So I’ll be keeping it the middle level to save disk space (not to mention more mp3s will fit on my iPod).

I also recently hooked up my 15GB iPod to my car stereo deck, which is an Alpine supporting iPod connections, with 2×10 inch subwoofers in the trunk of my Corolla! The next thing to do is replace the stock corolla speakers with some nice ones.