Newest of Newbies

[Mazman921]

Apologies for my newness to this endeavor. I have almost a terabyte of music on a hard drive that I have accumulated over the past 25 years, plus about 1,000 CD's my wife wishes were gone from our living room yesterday. I'd really like to rip all 1,000 onto a clean drive and transfer my existing music as well, combining them all onto 1 drive. I was told that I could rip my CD's in both MP3 format (for my car) as well as FLAC (to a second drive) maybe even at the same time? Is that possible?
Can I do anything with your software to cleanup my existing files and can I use the software to somehow combine my hard drive files with the CD's I am ripping now? Thanks for your patience, while I learn.
Maz

[garym]

Yes, it is all possible. Combining old files and new files is easy as copy and paste, assuming you have your files well organized (artist/album folders, etc.; and if you metadata tags are good, even getting things into the right folders and subfolders can be automated). It is all relatively simple once you get a work flow setup. I've ripped over 5,000 CDs. You can rip to FLAC and mp3 at the same time. I don't do this myself. And with illustrate's TuneFusion program, I can easily transfer albums on the fly to a portable drive or my iphone from my FLAC collection and these can be converted to mp3 on the fly. That way I don't need a duplicate mp3/FLAC collection. Depends on what you want to do.

There is a bit of a learning curve to get things started. Good news is that folks on this forum are very helpful.

p.s. when done with all this (and even now), one of the most critical things is that you have a BACKUP of your files. drives do go bad, it is only a matter of when. I have multiple backups, stored in at least 3 locations.