What I like about iTunes when you share the library is it's all organised by artist>album. eg: iTunes shared library iTunes as a ripper is middle of the road. It's not the very best, but it's a long way from being poor. I always use variable bit rate conversion to mp3 or m4a. But I generally copy or rip the songs from CD to HDD 1st in aiff format before converting to another compressed format. For windows that would be equivalent to wav format. Then converting to mp3. I always aim for 192 kbps + in quality depending on the music & song. But that's a personal approach. Only rarely do I encode less than 192 kbps vbr. VBR is much, much better than CBR!!! (Constant bit rate.) The same applies to video. VBR is easier for the player to handle. It also results in more levelled results so there's no unnecessary conversion of frequency ranges at a rate that is unnecessary & under converting bits of music that deserve more. CBR doesn't allow for that.