"Woody" wrote in message
...
I have decided the time has come to put our CD library - around 400 of
'em - onto HDD.

I need a software package - preferably free or inexpensive - that will rip
the CDs to mp3/wav/ogg/aac, provide a directory system that can be sorted
by track name, artist, or album, and be able to retrieve track information
from the Interweb. Basically I suppose I'm looking for something like
iTunes but I already use that and want to keep this library separate.

Anyone in the know?


I use dbpoweramp to rip CDs. It is not free but you can download a trail
version. It calculates a checksum for each track which it compares to the
totals that have been calculated by other users, thus telling you whether
you have an accurate rip. It is also very good at finding track names from
the Internet. Much better than Windows Media Player. My music is stored in
flac format. dbpoweramp will rip to other formats if you downlaod the
appropriate codec.

I use a file system of type (Pop or Classical) / Artist / Album / Track

This works well for Pop and Jazz music, but is not so good for classical
music where the composer, orchestra, conductor and performing artists all
feature more prominently.

The track names being 01, 02, etc so that they are in the original
sequence.

I store the music on a Mediatomb uPnP server which like other uPnP servers
provides cross indexing. I also keep backups.

Foobar2000 is free and something you might want to try. There are a number
of servers that come to mind such Twonky and Squeezebox/Slimserver.


--
Michael Chare