What would you recommend, I have most of my music collection ripped at 192 Kbps wma

[G+_Reed Hanson]

What would you recommend, I have most of my music collection ripped at 192 Kbps wma. Should I re-rip them to 320 Kbps Mp3s, or go for the whole sh-bang, and go wav loss less?

[G+_Steven Atkinson]

MP3 will give you the most flexibility as to what device to play on. But if you want to give lossless a try you could use FLAC but it isn't supported quite as widely.

[G+_Taylor Graham]

I'd rip them in FLAC, then convert down to 320kbps mp3 with foobar and keep both copies (if you have the storage). That way you always have the lossless if you need it.

[G+_Reed Hanson]

I was going to buy a new hard drive for more space, so this is a great time to re-rip then, thanks for the responses.

[G+_Ronald Richard]

My current strategy is to use EAC to rip to FLAC. Price of storage is always coming down, so that's not really a concern anymore. There's support for playback on Android and PC, so listening is covered.  Next I'm going to try uploading my FLAC files to Google Music and see if they play back at 320 kbps or full on FLAC goodness.

 

When I listen through my Fiio E7, I can tell the difference between my hi-fidelity MP3 rips and FLAC.

[G+_Ben Tyger]

I agree with Taylor Graham and Ronald Richard. Rip in with FLAC. Then let your media server transcode on the fly depending the capabilities of the client. Plex and Ampache and other media servers have this capability.

 

The other big thing is getting good quality rips. You want to use a secure ripping program. In windows I use EAC. In Linux I use rubyripper. That will ensure that you have a good rips or warn that you during the rip. Better to find out then there is a scratch bad enough to cause mis-reads now than after you've ripped, tagged, and buried the original CD.

 

Then you want to make sure the tags and cover art are correct. The media server rely heavily on them. Always embed the cover art in file too. I use musicbrainz picard. It is a great cross platform tagger.

[G+_Paul Simard]

The stock answer is: It depends. :) If you have the storage to rip them in a lossless format. Do that, and as Ben Tyger said transcode on the fly. Same with videos/movies. Sample them in different resolutions, then at the highest resolution you can't tell the difference between the two, pick the lower to save space (may increase resource needs in transcoding), or pick the higher to groom your appreciation of the higher resolution and maybe reduce resource requirements during transcoding.