Music app and the mother of all oversights in my opinion...

Question

(iPhone 4S 32GB iOS 5.1)
I've highlighted the questions as i've ranted on...
This is an odd one regarding the music app. I've been using itunes match now for a little while. Album artwork is still buggy; it appears that the artwork is re-downloading every time i launch the app resulting in no artwork everytime an album is played until it's reloaded. This to me as a music lover is very annoying as i like all my musical ducks pointing the same way. So my method of getting around this was to turn off Match all together and go back to the ol' classic tried and tested manual music management. All music removed and started fresh. I load up my manually selected songs and albums, All is well. Except cover flow. For some reason now even with itunes match turned off; Cover Flow shows me a bunch of completely random albums that aren't even on the iphone yet there is no sign of them on the regular view what-so-ever. Completely unsearchable.
Anyone have any ideas on this / have the same issue?
I've taken all the usual steps, restoring the phone etc.
Next and finally the biggest annoyance with the best phone on the market.
I use my phone on the go 99% of the time. I use the earphones with the mic. For some reason during a call I can hear my own voice in my ears. This can be tested by making a call to 1-800 APPLE and blowing into the mic. There SHOULDN"T be any noise. The issue being is that i can hear a mouse pass wind on the other side of the street but the person on the other end is in the mix somewhere. When i used to have the 3gs this problem didn't exist... So i gathered must be the noise cancellation mic. Nope. Making a call with the Skype app the problem goes away. it's like being in a sound booth with just the person i'm on a call with nice and clear in my ears. So the hardware is sound. I took it the the Apple store in SOHO and spoke with a genius about it. We tried 3 iphones, 4 sets of earphones even his own personal iphone... Same problem persists. He had to concede that he had no idea why it was happening and said he now was going to be bothered by it!
Does anyone have a work around or solution?
I've even bought non Apple headphones to see if they work but to no avail. I don't need to hear myself and my surroundings Apple Devs... please fix it!!

Answer 1

Harmac95 wrote:>
- Apple - Windows hardware? - does it really matter?
Either.
- Which software? - many have recommended iTunes, is it really the best?
iTunes is most definitely not the best ripping tool. It has no flexibility in file naming, and does not have as good error correction as Exact Audio Copy or Audiograbber.
- Ripping settings? - audio file format???? - hard disk space needed?
This is where it gets a little tricky. Given what you are trying to, an uncompressed audio format like WAV or AIFF would fit the best, and AIFF is probably the better choice since it allows tagging of the files. Figure 10 MB per minute of music, or about 500 MB per CD that you rip. For 800 CDs, allow at least a half TB.
A compressed lossless format would be about half the size, but unfortunately iTunes does not support the leading uncompressed lossless format (FLAC), and the proprietary one that iTunes does support (Apple Lossless) has very little support outside of Apple products. So that is too much of a gamble given your requirement about "use with any player/software in the near future."
That is my opinion! Given that you have pretty strict requirements, and that you only want to do this once, do a little more research before you decide...