So now that I have my Rio Reciever, I have been pondering some deep thoughts about digital music:

Basically, we all take our CD and rip them to some kind of digital format. That digital format, the quality, and the file size depend on a bunch of factors. For example, if you are intending to put the music on a portable mp3 player with limited flash space you might want to use a lower encoding bit rate to conserve space; if you have a specific HD enabled player you might need to encode into a specific format to make the music playable on the player; if you just want to build up a digital PC library, you might simply encode into a lossless format instead of the oh-so-familiar mp3.

Here's the bottom line:
Wouldn't be cool if there was a tool that let you create a 'master' library on disk of your music, and then encoded and downloaded on the fly to all of your portable devices?

Is there any tool out there that does this?

--Yonah

The Rio Central does this to an extent. When you encode a CD on it, you have the option of making two different versions of the same track. You can encode at 320kbps for use on the Central, and also have a 96kbps version at the same time for use when uploading to a portable device. I do believe the bit rates are user defineable.

This is pretty convenient, but I have been looking into making a server with enough disk space to allow me to store my collection in FLAC. Then, whenever I want, I could encode into whatever compression format I want. That way, I would only have to rip my CDs once, then encode to whatever however many times I want without having to screw around with my CDs ever again.

Is there any tool out there that does this?

Yep, Windows Media Player 9, using WMA Pro - their new lossless format, designed specifically for the application you described.

That's probably not the answer you wanted to hear.