Ripping collection in lossless and then putting it on a MP3 player in lossy?

dBPoweramp's CD ripper (with accurate rip) can, when using the multi encoder plugin, be used to rip a cd, encode it to two or more different codecs, and store each in separate locations.

I'm not sure if the Sony shows as drive in Windows, but it works with a Sansa Clip. I rip from CD to FLAC on a Network Shared drive for my Squeezebox Server, and the second (& third if needed) location varies - it goes to Itunes for the Touch and also to the Clip

Its relatively easy to set up.. and then you can just add or remove locations/ codecs as required.

Easier would be rip them as WMA lossless and let WMP convert as needed when you sync the Sony (if WMP can sync to it?)

Craig's right about the power of dBPoweramp. If you cant' afford it, you can get Exact Audio Copy (EAC-bit-perfect) to rip losslessly to .wav or .flac. Then there are programs like Razor Lame frontend that will rip the lossless to any flavor of .mp3 that you like.

And, yes, it's time with our big drives to rip bit-perfect to lossless, because unless the technology changes in some profound way that we can't foresee, you're not going to have to rip the little buggers again.

AFAIK A818 supports ATRAC?
Then you can rip your CDs to lossless ATRAC (with specified "lossy" bitrate") and specify this bitrate in transfer settings for your player; it will "extract" lossy stream on the fly while transferring (lossless atrac, just like wavpack, stores lossy stream plus information required to restore original sound, and the latest will be just ignored when transferring music on the player).

No, the A818 doesn't support ATRAC. It's the drag and drop version of the A808 (which does support ATRAC).

GregBe- I use dBpoweramp to rip CDs to lossless files for archiving, and then I use it to convert those same files to lossy for portable use. Just make sure you have 2 folders for each album, one for lossless and one for lossy, otherwise the lossless files will be overwritten if they go in the same folder. At least, that's what happened to me before

So you can use dBpoweramp to rip everything in lossless to your external hard drive, then convert the files to whichever format you like into your 'lossy' folders on the same drive, or on to the computer that you'll be using with the 818. Then you can just drag and drop the lossy files straight over to the 818.

same here, dbpoweramp. rip cds to two seperate folders, one lossless (flac), one lossy(lame mp3 extreme). flac is for archiving and my fuse, mp3s for everything else. encoding on the fly would be too much of a pain unless your entire library fits on your sony.

Some media player software can automatically transcode to a different format when syncing to a portable. So, for example, you can have your library in FLAC and transcode on the fly to MP3 when syncing to a portable.

I use J. River Media Center. It is able to transcode when syncing a portable. I keep my library in FLAC and sync my iPod using MP3. J. River Media Center keeps a cache of previously converted files so it only needs to transcode a file once. The first time you sync your portable it is going to take a while because every file will need to be transcoded. After your favorite tracks get in the cache the future syncs will go much faster.

There is also a freeware version called J. River Media Jukebox. It has been a while since I've used it and I can't remember all of its limitations. But it will do the basics for what you need. It does cost about $10 if you want to do MP3 (gotta pay the MP3 licensing fee). However it should work fine with WMA lossy out of the box. You could sync your portable using WMA to avoid the MP3 fee.

J. River apps have integrated CD ripping. It can do secure style error corrected rips. It uses its own CD track lookup database (called YADB) rather than relying on services like FreeDB. YADB has fewer albums in its database compared to services like FreeDB. I'm not sure how good its jazz selections are.

I generally use EAC and/or dBpoweramp for ripping rather than the integrated ripper in J. River. That's not because the integrated ripper is bad, it's just that I like the special features in EAC and dBpoweramp.

If you can mount the sony as a drive, you can use dBpoweramp to convert the flacs on the fly to be put on the Sony as AAC or MP3 or whatever your format of choice is.

dbpoweramp doesn't overwrite FLAC for me when I convert to mp3 for my clip. using version 13 I think. i love it because it will covert using all 4 of my cores simultaneously, each getting its own file to work on.

for Gregbe, plug it into your computer via usb and see how it shows up. You don't need it to mount as a drive necessarily, just convert your music to mp3 and sync up however you would normally.

i am using windows 7 and it recognizes my clip through its device manager and i can browse, sync, or even upgrade firmware through it.