If you were starting from scratch and did not own ANY DRM-ed AAC audio files what software library player (on the desktop PC) would you use?

I've heard Apple's iTunes is the best music interface (on the computer).
Now first and foremost I am starting my library and down the road will purchase a portable music player.
Okay I am about to start converting my CD library for the very first time.

Hardrives are cheap enough and only getting cheaper.
I don't want to take the time to have to compress/transcode to a lossless format but I'm concerned with a portable player being able to store more songs and not use up the battery playing .WAV files off the harddrive (currently a 160GB or larger portable music player with a HDD not 32GB or less flash storage). I WILL NOT be using Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Apple's Apple Lossless, MPEG-4 ALS, Monkey's Audio, and TTA lossless file formats at all.

I will probably start next year ripping my audio CDs to .WAV and have the Gracenote thing just give me the song titles & album names.
I'm a big picture guy. I will save all my (16-bit/44.1kHz) .WAV files on a HDD forever.
Down the road I will convert from the .WAV files to whatever (MP3, The current version of the MPEG-4 Audio/ISO/IEC 14496-3:2009 AKA MPEG-4 HE-AAC v2). At the moment I have Adobe Audition 2.0 software which I can make MP3s from but not MPEG-4 HE-AAC v2 files.

Also I'm not familiar with what software I can do batch encodes to MPEG-4 HE-AAC v2 from that will keep all the metadata.

I'd rather not get into any of these topics here:
-portable player hardware
-DACs-from-computer
-"PC vs MAC"
-lossless audio codecs vs lossy audio codecs
but just discuss the software to manage my library and make playlists.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement