A Guide to PC Playback

[PeterSt]

Well, since a manual for this can grow rather large, it's my current idea just to create a topic for it, and start mentioning the most important things.
It can grow by time.

Everybody is free to add his/her subjects in this thread, which I then will try to merge into this first post of it.
I'm not sure yet this is the way to do it, but otherwise there's nothing for a long(er) time, while in the mean time many of you might have the problems.

Even those who think they know are advised to at least briefly skip through the subjects. Many things are not as they seem ...



A Guide to PC Playback


Don't just start ripping your CDs

This is the about most important advise of all;
At this moment, no means is known that guarantees that your rips are perfect or even "good". So yes, this is about computers, but no, ripping CDs is not the same as reading data from a CDRom drive (which would be guaranteed for perfect reading).

When you firstly start ripping, just assume you won't do it right at the first time(s). So there's a moral here : don't rip too many for now;
If you have 500 CDs you will find it takes much time. Also, it is very dumn work, and you really don't want to do it again.

Currently this part of the manual does not contain explanations about how to best rip your CDs (do I know that myself ?). What I can say though, is that XXHighEnd will contain a function to check your rips. In fact it is already finished, and I use it myself already. It will TELL you if your ripping means are good or not. It's that easy.
The function is not obtained in XX yet, just because currently there are some other priorities.

Get decent coverart

This too, can be very time consuming, although it is actually fun to do it;
Note that you can get skilled to get the pictures fast, which mainly comes down to knowing a few places where to get them. For that too, I won't eleborate at this time, if you only know that you don't want to do it again because you got the not-so-good pictures.

Very important is that you really shouldn't try to get the 200x200 pictures anymore. Most often larger pictures exist, and the larger they are, the better the quality is. No matter that they are shown at 200x200 again.
Also, there will come a time that the pictures will show larger in the player. In fact it's an easy job, and it just takes the time to think about it a bit (where, when to resize etc.), but it will be there.
Maybe even more important is the fact that in Vista (itself) those larger pictures will be used in Explorer (and settings accordingly); if you find out later that bigger is better, in Vista it will very much show, because the smaller are not upsised (and jump out as small thingies).

Name all the (jpg) files folder.jpg, and put them in the folder of the album (so, an album is a folder).

Tip : If you have a good scanner, you might be better off in scanning the pictures from the start, instead of trying to find them (never knowing how long it will take, *if* you succeed at all).

Think about the structure of your folders

Think it over very very very carefully. If you don't do this right, chances are that it takes you days and days to correct things.
Of course more structures are possible, but one who works guaranteed is this :

Make one main folder on the particulair disk (you could name it "Music").
In there, create a folder for each individual album.
In the folder of an individual album you put the tracks from that album.
Note that an album consisting of more volumes (CDs) must
OR be per track preceeded by the volume name (like CD1)
OR have a subfolder per volume (like CD1).

Now carefully look how to setup the albumnames and tracknames. Thus, when -in this proposition- there's no artist in the album name, you won't know the artist. Or, when the artist name is in the trackname (too) you'll have redundancy.

Always let the trackname start with a track sequencenumber, or otherwise you will have the tracks in alphabet sequence.

Here too, don't start ripping (where the naming of all takes place !) for ages, to come to the conclusion you really want(ed) it differrent. Instead, setup a few combinations (don't forget the multi volume albums), and see if you like it.

Make a backup

No matter you are not organized properly as of yet, immediately start to make backups of your rips. Remember, the ripping of 10 CDs might take 50 minutes of your time, and getting the pictures for 10 CDs may take an hour sometimes. Of course you *have* a backup ... but do you really want to do it again ?


... to be continued ...