Appreciate that, but I have a pretty good access to media as it is.

On a lighter note, I did check it out. I know a lot, but there's always someone who knows more. What I do know is how to get the best possible lossy audio on my computer. My issue presently with that is, I do not have an optical drive. Both of my computers are too small for them. The solution is a $30 external drive I can hook up to either of them. Though I'm not sure "expert rippers/encoders" would agree with using a cheap drive, they'd probably recommend/require a better one. So my present way around that is to acquire FLAC and run that through my encoder. I use AAC Low Complexity and crank it up all the way. My M4A files are a hair bigger than 320k MP3s and sound better. The only issue I have found with M4A is that Winamp cannot play them. I'm not joking. A media player from the 1990s but people still love it. I found a Mac version called MacAmp, and guess what, it can't play them either. Winamp can play M4A with a plugin, it just doesn't ship with the product. Literally everything else, I'm sure, can play it, due to the licensing for MPEG-4/M4A being much looser than MP3, which basically everyone just pirates and the company doesn't really care because that horse isn't only dead at this point, it's decomposed and its ashes are gone with the wind. There isn't even a dead horse to beat anymore. The issue is effectively moot.

All that being said, I appreciate the link and I'm quite tempted to try it anyway. The worst that can happen is I learn a lot and don't get in. Or I just learn a lot and don't apply.

For what it's worth (if you want to know, I mean) I use fre:ac to encode. There might be better tools, but this one gets me where I want to go. And Mp3Tag to fix the tags (there's always something wrong).

I wonder how my encodes would stack up against theirs. I have high standards, especially with the metadata. I'm also pushing 50 and I have some hearing loss. So there's that working against me.