Standardization

I like standards. I like things to have a format, the type that makes things easier. What I'm talking about now is music. I have a lot of music and it is all somewhat organized. I went through it all with a program called easytag that rewrites all the file names and even the folder tree to a set way. But sometimes the ID tags of the files are missing or just goofy. I got new music and some of the album names wound up as the artist, rendering it useless to me basically.
And I had a conversation with Colin about quality difference and I started thinking about what format I want my music in. Right now it's all organized in mp3s because that's what easytag can read. So I went through with a script that finds all the m4a files and converts them to mp3. But this loses a lot of quality. Like, a lot.
The best option for quality and functionality is basically FLAC. It's a free codec that is lossless, so it's super high quality. Higher than you can probably hear. Problem is, file sizes are also large, and can be 3 times as large as their mp3 counterparts. This means 3 times less music when putting them on a portable device, which is sad. On my computer I don't notice because storage is so cheap, but on my 2gb mp3 player I definitely notice.
I also don't remember what quality I have been using for years to rip Cds, probably the fastest as it takes about 15-20 minutes to rip a CD in FLAC. That's just a long time to rip a CD I feel and I get most of my music from the KUMM station and time is limited to about 1.5 hours of ripping. That means I can only get about 4-5 Cds ripped during a show. But that is the only place I can get CDs of a lot of music for free. The internet is another option, as a lot of music torrents are in FLAC, but then I run into file name issues again and I get frusterated again.
So, the plan as of right now is just to rip the music I own into FLAC and try and get my favorites into FLAC and enjoy them.