[Brucemck]

Is there a service that would rip 200 to 300 CDs in a high quality way, where I'd end up with song titles, etc., in a catalog?

If so, your Off Ramp would be perfect for me.

[Brad]

SlimDevices offers a ripping service

http://www.slimdevices.com/pi_ripping.html

[brb9]

I checked a few of the websites and picked out a couple:

for cheapest FLAC rips:

www.musicshifter.com

for fanciest (includes disc repair and data cleaning):

www.awaken.com

The rest seem to come in with fewer services or more expense...

Musicshifter offers a free 25 disc trial.  If it were me, I would send my pristine discs which are easy to catalog to musicshifter (along with some harder to catalog discs just to see how they handled them), and I would send my damaged discs and trickier ones to awaken . . .

Try them out and let me know...

[Brucemck]

Ok, now have two great referrals to places that can do high quality ripping and organize my music onto a hard drive for me ...

Now onto two user interface vs. sound quality tradeoff questions ...

I and the rest of my family use iTunes regularly, so it's an easy transition. I could rip everything losslessly right into iTunes and move on from there.  Another advantage is the "smart playlists", which I use frequently.

Alternative would be to go to something like Foobar2000.  Have heard it's better sound quality, particularly if you use up/re sampling on playback.  If browsing and playlists (even better "smart playlists") are easy in Foobar2000 then I'm not adverse to this.  

(1) How much better is the sound quality over a very high end system?  A marginal difference or pretty substantial?

What would be really nice would be to have another copy of iTunes with a lower bit rate copy that could be for my iPod.  I'd have a lossless something (iTunes or Foobar) on one computer, and a lossy iTunes on another computer that I'd sync my iPod to.

(2) What's best/easiest way to do this?  Would I be better off with iTunes lossless or Foobar2000 as the starting point, and then "convert" or import lossy to my iPod unit from there, or should I just pay for two conversions of my CDs, one lossless and another lossy?

Thanks.