Is iPod The Replacement For CD's?

Pssshhhh....

CD's are soooooooo 90's!!!! LOL:P

Actually you can search your musi library alphabetically. The cds are organized by name or by artist or allbum title or eve composer fi you are searhcing for sometihng particular on the ipod. There is no need to manually enter the album or track titles cause when you insert a cd into the computer it connnects to CDDC and gathers all that info. there is no need to make individual playlists of each album because they are already easy to search for as mentioned above. Its actually fool proof once you import your cds to your computer. Then you can find everything fairly easily. Man i still remember the good ol days of cassete tapes man imiss those years. :P

GFF:)

The Ipod has a hierarchal structure to it. It will automatically oganize your music. When you put a CD into Itunes, Itunes will automattically get the song name, artist, and album name. When you import that cd into itunes, that info gets transfered to the individual files , otherwise know as tags. When you put to your iPod, the ipod will read those tags and then automaticaly organize your music. From the ipod main menu there is a selection called music. In that there are selections for artist, album, songs, ect. When you select artist, a list of all your artists come up, when you select the artist you want, a list of all their albums come up, select an album, a list of all the songs on that album come up, select the song and it plays. The album menu just lists every album by name that you have. Songs menu just lists every song you have in one giant menu.
You can make playlists if you want to play any grouping of song sin the order that you wish, kind of like a make your own favorite songs cd.
Hope my info helps.

Is the key to dump all your songs into the iTunes library and keep the songs linked to an album title using individual playlists for each album?
Please don't create a playlist for an album or artist. There is no neeed at all to do this.

On the iPod, just select Music -> Album, then select an album and press Play.
In iTunes, turn on the Browser (View - Show Browser), then select a Genre, Artist and/or Album.

I also take it that I will need to go through and physically name all albums and songs in order to have ease of access and identification of tunes.
If they are commercial CDs, you most likely won't have to get any info. iTunes will look it up for you.

Once you have named everything correctly, does iPod automatically search albums by title alphabetically? Or, do you just have to forget the concept of albums?
You can do it a number of differnt ways.
Song
Artist
Album
Composer
Genre
Create Smart playlists and expand that even further.
Length of song, rating, # of times played, not Recently play, Recently added & not played, comments you put in the song, etc...
You can do it a gazillion different ways, very easily.

That is enough questions for one thread. As you can tell, I mainly need an introduction to method of management and how to use the iPod correctly.
First off, you can download iTunes right now for free and play around with it. Go here -> iTunes download
You do not need an iPod at all to use it.

Once you have the albums RIP'd onto the computer, you sort or display however you want with a few mouse click.
It's not a matter of organizing because it's already done by iTunes.
You can view with the songs separated by Album and a view of the album cover.
You can view a only specific artist (or group of artists). or Albums, or Genres or...
Show all songs with "Blue" in the title...
Show all songs composed by Mozart...

(sounds like a freakin' advert, eh?)

Go get iTunes and start here -> iTunes Fast Start: The New User's Guide to iTunes

connecting the iPod to your car stereo is better by using the cassette plug-in adapter than using the FM transmitter gear
That is my experience. Definitely more volume.

It sounds like iTunes does not go to tags to extract song names and other song info
Not sure what you mean but yes, iTunes uses the ID3 tags for everything.
but when you import (export to iPod) into the iPod, the information is then read and displayed.
Same as iTunes, yes.

but it has never shown album titles or song info, just unnamed album (which I re-name) and track 1, track 2, etc

Is there a preference I need to switch on in
Absolutely.
In iTunes, go to Prefs -> Advanced - Importing.
Tick "Automatically get track names from the Internet."

And here's a good one. If you imported a commercial CD with iTunes, you can still do it.
Select View -> Show browser.
Select an album, then menu Advanced -> Get CD track names.

Many of my CD's are a few years old, maybe the tagging was only started after the advent of the mp3 format and iTunes.
If it does not come back with track names, you can add the info yourself (make sure it's correct) then select teh Album and menu Advanced -> Submit CD track info. This will send it to Gracenote CD database, which is the database iTunes uses. (www.gracenote.com)

Are you on iTunes 6 or 7 (or earlier maybe?)

My theory on ripping CDs
a) The iTunes encoder ***** a lot of life out of a recording. Please do yourself a favor and encode your MP3 files using LAME.
b) The iPod is not forever. The time consuming part of ripping a CD library is feeding the CDs through the computer. I don't plan to do that again, so I ripped all of my CDs to lossless WMP files with Windows Media Player (WMP can rip multiple drives simultaneously and lossless WMA files are smaller than Lossless Apple files). That way I can batch convert all my music to the next big thing when the iPod is obsolete.
c) I batch convert to MP3 from the lossless WMA files using DBpowerAMP software. I'm converting to high quality VBR files for me, and smaller VBR files for the wife and kids (they want quantity rather than quality) - although the lame-encoded sub-100 KBPS files sound pretty darn good. I downsample to 32 KHz sampling which allows the MP3 encoder to preserve more of the high frequency spectrum.

By keeping the lossless files online, I can reconvert to a different bitrate in the future without re-encoding compressed files (a bad idea).

Do yourself a favor and do NOT assume that all encoders are created equally. Choose a song with great stereo separation and good imaging and convert it using several encoders. If you can't hear the difference, then iTunes is easy and convenient. If you CAN hear the difference, then choose the one that preserves the music and go from there.

I chose LAME.

Homebrew Wintel Windows XP Pro 30GB 5.5G - Black

I deosnt sound like he's an audiophile, and to me and 99% of consumers out there, the default aac 128 sounds just fine. hes been ripping muisc to itunes using teh defualt setting anyway. I can rarely hear any difference, though I do run across some bad encodings. Ive stuck with AAC 160 from now on as a happy medium of quantity and quality.
Now back to Ken, the reason why Itunes never found any cd info is that you have to mak sure you are connected to the internet when you insert the cd. The CDDB is an online database and has found around 99.9% of all my cds. Also if you sill have sone tracks labled "track #" you can select an album and then go to the advanced menu and select , GET cd track names. Ths will only work only if you are conneted to the internet toogh

I am not a keen audiophile, but I can tell you how disappointed I was when I connecting my G5 Tower to my HiFi System using the optical cable (Toslink)and played some MP3 encoder music files. The sounds were thin and without depth and soundstage.By changing to Apple Lesloss, it got significant improvement but still far behind the orignial sound quality from a CD. Finally I tried AIFF, of course it ate up many space, but at least it was acceptable.

In case you have significant storage space of Hard Drive on your computer, ripping with AIFF is a good idea for CD replacment, bear in mind it is always easy to down grade coversion i.e. from AIFF to MP3, but not the other way round

I am a huge audiophile and love CD's. I myself in the 6 years since purchasing cd's have attained around 290, and I would not have gotten an ipod if you had to name every single song. Its so easy that you just pop your cd in, itunes will name it, rip it, add it your library and the next time you plug your ipod into the computer it puts it on it. The only thing you have to do yourself is get the album art, which is free, and all you do is right click and click get album art. As long as you have an itunes store account its just one click away. The ipod makes music loving easy. It categorizes your music by artist, genre, album name etc. It rocks. You can listen to any of your 500 albums, any time you want. I have an 80 gb ipod and my 290 albums only took up like 12 gbs. It's incredible.

I am also into my audio & I have to say that truly CDs sound terrible compared to the old vinyl.
They are convenient, that is true, but they are cold sounding and lifeless mostly.
Taking a CD source and squashing it (however you do it) will only detract from the quality & I guess that is why there is a built in EQ system in the Ipod.
Look at real audio gear & you will find that the best stuff won't even have a tone control on it.
But, we are in an age of convenience & the ipod is bringing music to millions as it is so easy to use. If you enjoy something you hear on an ipod, then you will adore it from the original source.

I have a very very good ear and I usually can hear differences between sounds on anything, and the ipod is top notch. The generation growing up with cd's and ipods have no exposure to tapes and vinyl's, and so they don't even bother looking at them. I'm 17, but my first exposure to music was through vinyls and tapes. I didn't buy a cd player until I was 11. So they are used to that sound. Even I am. My record player was a sesame street one for like, $20.

Old argument I know, but the biggest advantage of CDs over vinyl is that CD playback will be the same each time. With vinyl, every time it is played the vinyl is damaged by the needle. Then there is static sticking dust to the vinyl causing more problems.