Ok, this is the deal. In about 18 months this fearless poster will be in my dream home. The 'plan' is forget about the stereo, and just have a 1TB hard drive and itunes as the player!

So, as I wait for this place to be built the plan is convert the CD collection to .mp3 and sell off / give away my cds.

So is this my best route; while saving HD space : Encode at 192K and use VBR.

Want the best I can get out of .mp3, so is this best plan??

I know uncompressed would be better, just want to balance between quality.. and reasonable amount of storage.

Hate to spend countless hours encoding to only find out that I should have been doing something else!

Thoughts?

I just down rez'd my collection to 192VBR from 226VBR I cannot hear any difference. I started at 320BPS, the great thing is as you get older and your hearing deteriorates you can down rez again.:D

Mole: Curious why you would bother to downrez your collection?? Is there a big size difference between 226 and 192?

I went from being able to get about 7000 songs on my Ipod to 10000. This allowed me to have my entire collection without giving up any perceivable quality loss.

If you're going to get rid of the CD's, I would recommend that you rip to a lossless format like WAV, FLAC or Apple Lossless and then you can encode to MP3 at whatever bitrate you want and always have a lossless copy.

I encoded everything at 128kbps when I had my 15GB iPod so I could have the most music with me at once. When I got my 80GB, I reencoded everything from CD again at VBR preset standard (about 210kbps). If I didn't have the CDs I would have been stuck with 128kbps.

John