Ripping
I'm doing some maintenance stuff today on my computer - general clean up of my hard disk and now I'm ripping a bunch of CDs. I *really* wish there was a way I could just prove to someone online that these CDs are mine so I could just download the MP3s without having to go through all this effort. Remember MP3.com's thing they had years ago? Idiot RIAA. I have two machines ripping right now and it's still going slowly. My old Dell Latitude can go at about 2.5x and my Toshiba Satelite is around 3x. Neither is particularly fast. I'll be doing this all day and I still won't get through my entire collection (and our CD stash isn't all that big, believe me). If I never buy another CD again in my life I'll be very happy.
I'm using iTunes to rip because it's made it so damn easy to do and the quality is good too: better than Music Match, etc. Real still has the artificial limit of 96kbps which is too bad because I've been using it a lot lately and would've liked to have seen how it did on my CDs, but oh well. Maybe I'll have to pony up some dough for the Pro version at some point. Doing it in iTunes is good as well since I can then transfer the CDs to Ana's iPod Mini instantly as well, which is part of the point.
-Russ