Transferring CDs to digital medium

'best' way

[Tastatura]

I got tons of CDs and am finally thinking of getting them transfered to digital format
- what's the 'best' format to use for sound quality, support by most devices, etc.
- is there a better/more efficient way to accomplish transfer then using CD/DVD player on my computer and software then came with it
- and sw recommendations?

Thanks

[phranque]

all of my cd's are digital.
i do have some verbatims that are made to look like 45 rpm vinyl...

[Tastatura]

all of my cd's are digital.

well fine then :)

I know that SEs have references to a lot of info about transferring CDs to a computer, however I was just looking for first hand/recent info...

[lawman]

Most media players can rip a CD to your hard drive.

[phranque]

you better think first about scale and make sure you keep the original source material when you are finished.

typical mp3 size is >1MB per minute.
that's easily 60-80M per cd.
if you are ripping at 10X speed, that's 6 or 7 minutes per plus handling and other overhead.
that means if you are really cranking you can do 100 cd's in 10-12 hours and it will take maybe 8G of disk space.
how many cd's do you have?
it would take me every waking hour for a week or two and a new external drive!
and that's not including analog source...

[ringsoft]

To some extent it depends on what the quality of the playback kit you intend to use will be. (Damn, that's and ugly sentence)

MP3 is a lossy format, but should be fine for playback through cheap PC speakers.

If you plan to listen though higher quality hifi, it might be better to use FLAC, which is a lossless format.

I use a piece of s/w called CDex for ripping, which I think was free but is doubtless out of date now. I'm sure there will be something better.

[Lipik]

and double your storage.. if you want a backup!

[thecoalman]

MP3 has the most support, to play MP3 CD's in a standalone CD player it will have to be MP3 compatible