2 or 3 discs a night would leave me hanging for a long time, and I've only got 450 CDs. Imagine the people with 1500.

With Audiograbber and a good CD-ROM drive (Plextor UltraMax being the best drive on the planet, bar none) you can rip an entire CD in a couple of minute. Yes, literally a "couple" = 2. :)

You set it to save tag info into the ripped WAV and do NOT do any encoding to MP3. Rip as many discs as you can stand to do and then batch encode them when you're not going to use your computer. When ripping to WAV, you shouldn't be doing anything else that is going to degrade the performance of your system or disks. When encoding, it doesn't matter what you're doing - except that good encoders suck up a lot of CPU time.

Audiograbber uses FreeDB for its track info. You may have to edit a bit to correct some mistakes or add things like the YEAR and GENRE which a lot of people haven't originally submit.

For batch encoding, Audiograbber supports direct use of the LAME dll. You can set parameters within Audiograbber. Note that the dll does not allow all the same properties as the executable. That is not Audiograbber's fault. You can modify the Audiograbber ini to allow for the r3mix VBR setting to be used with the dll option.

Or the best bet is to set Audiograbber up to use an external encoder and then use the LAME exe. Do some reading over in any forum that discusses LAME (and you shouldn't be using any other encoder if you care about quality) for tips on settings. Worth a read is also www.r3mix.net but don't take each and every word as gospel. I use most of his settings, but pass on the normalization and set a VBR quality of 0, fwiw. There are other people with some very good presets that are built into current builds of LAME 3.90. One of them is Dan something or other - can't remember his name. Check the Audiograbber forum for some pointers, as people were just discussint his topic a little while ago.

Starting a batch encode is as easy as just dropping a bunch of WAV files onto the Auidiograbber window. It will pop up a message box asking you to confirm.

BTW, when I batched encoded, I'd do 40GB or so of WAV files at once. This saves huge amounts of time.

Oh, and sorting? I never use GENRE as a sort criteria. Only for creating sort of mood lists. Why? Because genre is meaningless to classify the majority of music out there unless you lump everything into a couple of very different genres. Most of the stuff I listen to falls into multiple genres - and then there's the fact that someone else might not agree with the genre selection. I keep a master list of everything alphabetically by artist. And in each artist folder/list I keep all their albums chronologically. This way I have something very easy to pick from and that anyone else can use. Then I make specialty lists to suit whatever tastes. (Actually this is something I still have to do on the empeg - once I decide what types of lists I want :)

Bruno