In the learning path for the population of my media collection as it transitions from disc based media to a disk drive, I have discovered a few truths that I will share.
There are some useful tools to “rip” your media. These are the essential first step in the process, to get your media from the source into a format that can be worked with.
The next topic is what sort of transcoding you want to do. Here is where some of my early choices in media ripping have come back to haunt me. In prior efforts, I was merely attempting to get media in a format that looked good when loaded onto my iPad. That meant that there was a pretty aggressive compression applied to the files, making them both storage thrifty, and acceptable quality for playback. (more…)