I've "Loss'd" It!

OK, that's a little bit of poetic license which is a little cheesy and I'll go ahead and apologize for it! What this is about, is that on July 17, of last year, when I posted about bringing up the WHS v1 file server, there was a section on ripping my music collection to it "losslessly". Weeeellll.....I was hopelessly defeated by the procrastination monster and it never happened. 

So, here I sit, one year and four months later (give or take), ripping CDs to the new, WHS 2011 server which not only has the new OS, but is pretty much new guts as donated by the mystery benefactor.....otherwise known as my brother. The old guts have gone on to live a happy life with a friend in Colorado Springs. The only parts left from Hercules (v1), are the two Hitachi 2Tb hard drives and the case! It's so different, I actually thought about renaming it the Spectre.....you know, the AC-130H gunship? 

 But given it's job as a small network file server; a little much.

Has the ripping gone well; yes. Has it gone smoothly; kind of..... I have found that a number of CDs cause WMP to "spit-up" when it goes to look for the album info on the Internet. Admittedly, without deep research, but never-the-less, I'm going to blame this on the Millenium Act that, that morally reprehensible Arkansas snake-oil salemen signed into law! But it's a pain in the A**! I'll figure out a way to get around it though and it only occurs on about 5% of my CDs. What I can say though, is that the end is in sight! I'm on the last of my 6, 40 CD albums. There are a few of my wife's that I'd like to rip and some other random ones that are in a drawer, but the vast majority of my CD collection is now in computer files!

Unfortunately that leads to the inevitable project that I've been trying mightily to avoid. I really need to rip some, (and I really want to emphasize that) of our movies into file form so I can crunch them down into a more travel/tablet friendly format. Anybody know of a good (meaning easy to use...as in one step), cheap software that they'd recommend for this? 

Oh, yes: I've been meaning to ask. Some might have noticed my format change where I've moved from the longer, more elaborate but more infrequent Blog posts, to the current, short, quick-hitting, but more frequent posts? Please comment if you have thoughts.