Are you checking the quality of the RIP with something like WinAmp? I would suggest a little caution until you know how well your RIPper does it's work.

The reason I say this is that I also leapt in head first and ripped my entire collection in a couple of weekends, got the empeg, downloaded continuously -

- then discovered to my disgust that there were clicks and pops in the RIPped tracks, and that some tracks had obvious commpression artefacts through being RIPped at a fixed bitrate that was too low for the quality of reproduction I wanted on high-frequency content tracks. I had to go back and eventually ended up doing the whole lot from scratch, including all the effort of having to re-edit all the CDDB ID3 tag faults in emplode before downloading (this is the biggest effort of the whole thing, as is testified by many on this board - any backup utility should, in my book, save just the playlist structure and the tags).

This meant I had to go back and learn how to use the RIPper properly (Audio Catalyst), and learn what settings to use to make sure I got good ratios of compression and good quality without using up too much disk space. I have now got a "policy" whereby I choose what bitrate is appropriate according to the album.

I know you said you weren't too worried about sound (open top and all that) but you will notice it, it will become annoying, and if your sound source is already distorted before you crank up the volume to impress the women on the cruise, then you are not going to score on the sound quality/volume stakes...