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Two weeks ago we bought an Apple TV so now I have to start the work of ripping our entire cd collection. Have spent some time figuring out the best way to do it, which software to use and most important of all, which format to rip to. The Apple Tv is as any product from Apple superb when it comes to iTunes integration. But, and that was a huge but for me, you are then bound to any file format Steve Jobs decides are ok. So to h#$" with iTunes and Apple formats. I went for the lossless format flac, Free Lossless Audio Codec, because then I can do pretty much whatever I want afterwards, keep it and use only flac, or even transcode it all to mp3, mp4 or whatever iTunes support and import it to the iTunes-library.

Anyhow, after doing some heavy Googling for a few days here is my software stack of choice: Using Max to rip the cd's to flac. One thing that I realized was a little drawback of choosing Max is that is uses MusicBraninz to lookup information abut the cd's. Since we have quite a lot of Norwegian music, considered rare when it comes to Musicbrainz I initially had to type in a lot of info. That was pretty annoying when I knew that iTunes could retrieve the info from Gracenote. But then I found this apple script created by the same guy behind Max, which grabs the cd-info from iTunes and updates Max with it...cool stuff, which saves me A LOT of work!! Just not enable Max to automatically encode cd's when inserted, first make sure that all info is present, then encode. Or else you will get a folder structure like this "Unknown artist / Unknown album / 01 Unknown trac.flac" which is kinda messy.

I also bought a 2TB external harddrive, formated it to FAT32, since I did not want to bother to install any NTFS drivers on our MacBook (found a forum post which said it had messed up that guys MacBook). Since I'm not going to save any > 4GB files on the disk, FAT32 is the weapon of choice since it is the file system supported by most operating systems. (Mac OS can only read from NTFS out of the box right now, not write to it, blame Bill Gates for that!!!)