In hindsight, I should have chosen the option to ship them a USB hard drive, saving myself the labor of loading all of these damn burned DVDs. The big time savings, at the end of the day, is metadata. The data that comes back from GraceNote or FreeDB is just not good enough and I typically spent significant amounts of time fixing it. At least in theory, MusicShifter claims to do better metadata.

As to the format question, I agonized over that. I would have preferred FLAC, but it doesn't integrate cleanly into iTunes, which is my tool of choice. Apple Lossless, of course, integrates perfectly. I can then let my computer grind away at the conversion to MP3s for the car, the DJing laptop, and so forth.

Also, I've got time constraints. My daughter, now five months old, can't crawl yet, but it's only a matter of time, and I need to get the rickety bookcase full of CDs out of the house and into storage before then. I don't have enough time to do all the unripped CDs before it's too late.