Offline ripping m4a
 

I have a huge collection of CD's and am ripping the collection onto a firewire 100 GB drive during my repeated trips to JFK from Tokyo with in seat power.

The problem is the dreaded "Unknown Artist"...Once a CD is ripped I renamed the album 01_unknown artist. I thought I could fingerprint m4a files once I got online using musicbrainz, Picard (I like the "Make it So" button) but they don't support m4a fingerprinting.

Does anyone have suggestions for offline ripping from CD to lossless format which I can ID later in some sort of batch mode? Did I miss something in my googling for the solution?

I'll send a $50 gift (or cheaper! :) )from Tokyo for right the answer!!

Cheers,

Scott

Try this:
http://users.otenet.gr/~jtcliper/tgf/

Sawg, make him send you some Sapporo Reserve beer! Hard to find here, but rather common in Tokyo. Delicious.

Flac is good. Winamp has a flac plugin that I haven't tried. Flac compresses audio by about 2/3, and it is perfectly lossless. Flac is also very, very easy on CPU in the decode direction. It's fairly hard on CPU in the encode direction.

I use a fedora box with Amarok to play these. I use grip to encode them. Grip will export to amaroks mysql database and store CDDB track information. The track tags in "ogg" flac recordings are undersupported by linux players at this time.

I'm sure windows probably has better support. Jetaudio was mentioned.

The only reason I bother with MP3s is for playing on a Riva I have, which will plug in the car.

I'm really surprised that flac isn't more popular.... I mean hard/flash drives have gotten big enough and cheap enough that 200MB for storing an album isn't out of the question.