IPOD Noob Question

Hi

I have recentley purchased a nearly new IPOD photo 60GB. Very pleased with it and still learning. I also own a Squeezebox for which I have converted the majority of my 700Cd's to FLAC. I understand that I need to convert from FLAC to an alternative format and have experimented with MP3 224kbs which seems ok, first question is am I coverting into the best format for Quality/Space/future compatibility??? I am using Poikosofts Easy CD-DA Extractor v9.0.2 for conversion and the available list of formats to convert into is huge!!!!
i.e so many different aac formats :crazy:

Second question is when I convert say 20 albums each session, how do I get Itunes to put them into its own interface, I have tried consolidating my music collection and ended up with 2 copies of everything in itunes - Is there a way of deleting these dupications onmasse
rather than 1 by 1 as theres about 400 duplicates!!!!!

Thanks in advance for your comments.

I can't really comment on Itunes as i don't use it or own an Ipod.

However, i can say that given the fact you own a Squeezebox, and providing you have the HDD space, i think you have made the right chioce in ripping to FLAC for the following reasons;

1) The Squeezebox 2 and 3 support FLAC decoding natively. You can use other non-native formats, but they are decoded serverside. This mean while they will play very nicely on the SB, but you lose the ablity to fast-forward/re-wind tracks.

2) FLAC is future proof in that it's lossless (same sound quality as the orginal CD). You can now transcode to other formats without having to re-rip you CD's all over again and with minimal loss of quality (i.e. transcoding WMA -> MP3 can result in much lower quality).

3) FLAC supports proper true gapless playback, so any DJ Sets, Audio books, live gig's etc will play back properly, just as they did on the CD. That said the Ipod does not support gapless playback.

I would also suggest you use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to rip your CD's. EAC is by far the best CD ripper.

I can't help you with importing into itunes though sorry. But my guess is that you are transcoding into MP3, but then itunes is transcoding it again into ACC, right? Maybe try converting the FLAC's into ACC to start with? Can't itune import striaght from FLAC? Maybe it cant 'out of the box', but a pugin/update might be available.

Oh yeah, just to add that itunes support is in development for a (near) future Slimserver release. Which will be nice for people who have bought DRMed tracks from the Itunes store.

Thanks for the comments Dom I appreciate the reassurance.
Look forward to the support with Squeezebox v Ipod.

Any users of Easy CD-DA Extractor know which format of aac to use thats compatible with
Itunes???????