[peter braun]

Greetings everyone, I have been a long time member but have been out of hifi for a while after having had a busy few years (career, marriage, kids, etc...). As I my traditional stereo setup is being torn down due to limitations in space and an ever growing family, it is time for me update my listening practices if I want to continue to enjoy hi-fidelity audio. I would like to transfer all of my CD collection (approximately 500 discs) to either my laptop or an external hard-drive to start a computer based system. Where do I start? What programs are recommended to accomplish this and that will allow me to catalog my music in a fairly intutive fashion (sort in an iPod sort of way)? I will be using headphones exclusively (Sennheiser HD600s) as I work nights and therefore have kind of an odd schedule. I want full resolution and something reasonably portable (thinking a USB DAC/Amp). Budget is around $300-400 and I already have a laptop with a 500GB harddrive and the headphones. Thank you for educating me on the ways of modern technology and pardon my ignorance. Though I am relatively young, I have been sort of a luddite in terms of my audio preferences (think vintage McIntosh/Marantz and vinyl).   

 

[Ham Sandwich]

For software I'd do J River Media Center.  It costs $50 but is worth it.  It is great for organizing and tagging and searching.  It is built around a database so it is very good at searching and viewing your music in different views.  And it does gapless playback.  It is one of the few media players to do gapless properly (Foobar being the other good one).  Pink Floyd, live classic rock, live Grateful Dead, and classical music need gapless playback.  For proper gapless playback there is really no other reasonable choice other than J River Media Center, J River Media Jukebox or Foobar.
 
For the hardware something like a U-DAC 2 and the Schiit Asgard amp would be a good choice.  The Schiit Asgard does very well with the HD600 especially for a $250 amp.  Puts some kick into the HD600 which helps them do rock style music better.

 

[eric0531]

For ripping your CDs I'd recommend dBpoweramp.  It can rip to a variety of formats, add/edit tags, as well as transcode from one format to another later on should the need arise.  Another good choice for ripping is Exact Audio Copy.
 
The popular choice for lossless format around here is FLAC.  I use Apple Lossless so that I can use the files on my iPod Classic but I know a lot of people don't want to be "locked in" to a proprietary format - the bottom line is that you can easily convert from one lossless format to another without losing any quality.  Your 500 CDs will probably take somewhere in the neighborhood of 200gb to 250gb of your 500gb drive.
 
I personally like to manage my own database with a simple <album artist> - <album name> file structure.
 
foobar is my player of choice, it's skinnable and has a decent number of plugins available for things like syncing iPods, bit-perfect play back, burning CDs, etc.
 
My experience with different DAC/amp combos is pretty limited to so I'll pass on making any suggestions there.
 

 

[kboe]

This is great advice.  The uDAC is a fantastic little DAC, (and I do mean little).  Feed it to the Asgard with good entry level interconnects from DiMarzio and your good to go.  
 
Software wise, I suggest you use Songbird for your player, and EAC to rip your cds.
 
Quote:

For software I'd do J River Media Center.  It costs $50 but is worth it.  It is great for organizing and tagging and searching.  It is built around a database so it is very good at searching and viewing your music in different views.  And it does gapless playback.  It is one of the few media players to do gapless properly (Foobar being the other good one).  Pink Floyd, live classic rock, live Grateful Dead, and classical music need gapless playback.  For proper gapless playback there is really no other reasonable choice other than J River Media Center, J River Media Jukebox or Foobar.
 
For the hardware something like a U-DAC 2 and the Schiit Asgard amp would be a good choice.  The Schiit Asgard does very well with the HD600 especially for a $250 amp.  Puts some kick into the HD600 which helps them do rock style music better.