Back to basics please

[Goldminer]

Hi,
I've purchased a Squeezebox duet to stream music from my new PC to my home stereo and after going on their forum, recommendations have brought me to dbPoweramp. Hello!
I've a couple of questions and as will probably be fairly obvious i'm not hugely tech savvy so any extra advice/pitfalls to watch out for are always appreciated...
If I purchase the Reference can I use it fully on my laptop as well as my home PC without multiple licenses?
Does it matter that one machine is Vista while the laptop runs XP?
I'm about to burn a 950+ CD collection and would like to take a couple of hundred CDs away to work with me for 2 weeks at a time while my wife gets on with downloading the rest -Will it be easy enough transferring them all back onto 1 machine?
I'm probably going to rip in FLAC, is this OK/the best choice?
Thanks in advance for any help guys, hopefully once i'm a liitle more proficient i can contribute.
Cheers
Charlie

[Porcus]

Re: Back to basics please

I won't answer the license stuff.

I'm about to burn a 950+ CD collection and would like to take a couple of hundred CDs away to work with me for 2 weeks at a time while my wife gets on with downloading the rest -Will it be easy enough transferring them all back onto 1 machine?

Do you mean "burn" or "rip"? And, are you asking whether it is possible to copy the laptop music files over to your server? If that is the case, the answer is "yes".

I'm probably going to rip in FLAC, is this OK/the best choice?

FLAC is my choice. It is bit-perfect at the expense of space (but hey, 950 CDs will fit nicely on a 500 GB drive, maybe even a 320 GB drive, so why bother?), has great tagging support and it is optimized for decoding speed, meaning that playing isn't too CPU-intensive.

[sjmac]

Re: Back to basics please

WMA Lossless is my choice if you are mainly playing these files in Windows.

It has all the advantages described above, works a bit more smoothly in Windows Media Player, and if you want to convert the files to FLAC in the future you can do that easilly using dbPowerAmp with no loss of quality.

[Thg6276]

Re: Back to basics please

Hi, I am using also a Squeezebox Duet and I have all ripped in flac which is the native format of this system, contrary to WMA which is decoded.

[LtData]

Re: Back to basics please

If I purchase the Reference can I use it fully on my laptop as well as my home PC without multiple licenses?
Does it matter that one machine is Vista while the laptop runs XP?

I believe the policy is: as long as it is only being used on one computer at a time, you should be fine. HOWEVER, you need a PerfectMeta license for EACH computer. One is included with the purchase, so you would have to purchase an additional one-year PerfectMeta license for the other computer. This is due to licensing restrictions by the providers.