In your article, you discuss the tips and tricks to make an old music collection sound great. While many of the tips are very helpful, there are a few things that I would add.

First, most people don’t realize that it is possible to record direct from a vinyl record to a computer. There are many programs that allow you to do this and even improve the sound quality of the recording. This can be especially useful for those rare albums that were never released in digital format.

Second, there is a software program called “Tag and Rename” which will allow you to quickly change all of your music file names form something like “track01” to “Artist – Title”. This can also be combined with other software (the program I use is called “Music Brainz Picard”) which will change all of your file names and fix any incorrect information automatically by looking up the info online.

Thirdly, if you have lost the covers to your albums you can usually find them online by searching Google Images or Amazon, saving them and then printing them out on card stock paper at Staples or Kinkos. You can also easily make your own custom covers with a program like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.

Finally, I highly recommend getting an external hard drive for

I had a chance to check out the article you wrote about getting the most out of your music acquisition. As someone who works in the audio business, I have to say that you did an amazing job at explaining this complicated process in a simple, informative and accessible manner.

I think it is great that you shared your knowledge about music because there are so many people out there who don’t know what’s good for them when it comes to purchasing new music. I also like how you covered the technical aspects of music as well as the artistic aspects.

If I had one suggestion for improvement, it would be to add some more information about social networking as a way to promote your music online. This could be a whole other article, but there is some great information out there on how to take advantage of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, which can really help get the word out about your music and find new fans.

The iPod is wonderful because it’s so simple to use. I wish that everything in my life was as easy to use as the iPod. Unfortunately, the iPod is actually a little harder to use than it looks.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can easily turn your entire music collection into a mess of confusing file types, duplicate songs, and missing album art. I’m going to explain exactly how to avoid this. The goal here is not just to get your old music onto an iPod (though we’ll do that), but to get all your old music into a form where it’s easy for you to listen to it on an iPod and also easy for you to change iPods, or change from an iPod to something else.

I’ve bought several iPods and use iTunes to play my music, so I’m afraid I can’t be of much help.

If you want to do something weird like play your songs on a Commodore 64, or if you have some other non-standard setup, the best thing to do is find someone who already has and ask them how they did it. If it’s some kind of weird proprietary file format, there’s probably a group of people on the internet who have already figured out how to convert it.

My first suggestion would be to look at Apple’s FAQs and technical support forums. If that doesn’t help, try Google. I may be a pioneer in my own field, but when it comes to computers in general I’m as clueless as anyone else.

As someone who used to buy CDs and now buys mainly mp3s, I think the sound quality debate is overblown. MP3s are fine for what they are: portable and space-efficient. If you listen to music while commuting or exercising, portability is important. If you have a huge music collection, space is important.

But if you’re listening to music while sitting in your living room, why not use the best possible format? Just because something is good enough doesn’t make it best. And I’m not talking about buying “lossless” audio files. You don’t need to go that far. All you need is to rip your CDs as uncompressed WAV files and burn them back to CD using a program like cdrdao. The result will be indistinguishable from what you hear on the original CD–and it will still be in a standard audio format so it will play on anything from an iPod to a car stereo without a hitch.

This is not just a matter of principle. It’s practical too–or at least I’ve found it so. I’ve been using my iPod for over three years now, and in that time I’ve come to appreciate uncompressed audio more than most people probably do: I can hear the difference between

I recently wrote an article on music fidelity and the iPod. One commenter suggested that I was being too hard on the iPod, suggesting that I should have used an even worse source to demonstrate my point. He had a good point, so I decided to test it.

I took a song from my CD collection – The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” – and copied it onto my computer in three different formats: MP3 (at 128 Kbps), AAC (at 256 Kbps), and Apple Lossless, which is similar to FLAC. Then I copied the same song from iTunes onto my iPod Shuffle in each of those formats as well.

I used my best headphones for this test – Etymotic ER4S – as well as Grado SR60s, which are much cheaper (about $70) and perhaps more representative of what most people use for their portable music players. I also listened to each song on two high-end speakers: B&W 801s driven by a Mark Levinson No. 383 integrated amp, and Yamaha NS10s driven by a vintage Pioneer receiver.

The results were surprising. On the Grado headphones, there was no appreciable difference between any of the tracks. The differences didn’t appear until I listened

The article you recommended is probably OK for the average person, but I have trouble accepting advice for someone who has a music collection of over 10,000 songs. The problem with articles like this is that they are too general.

My music collection is organized so that there are no spaces in any directory names or file names. I can’t imagine what problems could arise from having spaces in the names, but it’s better to avoid them.

I have a program called foobar2000, which allows me to select the most important information from each MP3 file and copy it to the file name. For example: