I do want to point out one caveat to the idea that “artist” and “album artist” should always be the same.

If you have compilation albums, you will get what is often referred to as “one hit clutter” in your artist list in sonos or other players. Every artist, even if they have one song in your collection, will show up in your artist list making it hard to find what you want. SONOS has a great feature that allow you to view your artists by looking at the artist tag or the album artist tag and to choose whether you want to see these so called contributing artists in a list.

If you want to keep down the clutter, for compilations, such as a blues collection where every song is by a different artist, you mark the album as a compilation in the ripper, keep each song artist in the artist tag, and then name the “album artist” tag “various blues”, for example. With this approach in sonos you have the option of seeing all the artists names or a narrower list. By setting compilation albums to (use album artists),in the artist view, you will have an artist called “various blues.” Under that artist you will find album names and then see individual artist names associated with the individual tracks. In the contributing artist view, you’ll see all the artists. I also had a lot of kids cds too and some of them were compilations. Making them findable w/o clutter was a trick.

You need to play around to see how it works for you. There is also some good advice on the SONOS forums.

If you are using FLAC, this setting shouldn’t matter as FLAC retains the original bitrate. But just because I’m paranoid, I set it to the maximum value. 320 kbps was the highest and it appears 1024 now is, so put that value in, just in case.

Is it better to use the higher setting? Or is 320 kBit/s
optimal?

For what it’s worth, my goal is make very accurate
rips.

Thanks for answering what may well be a dumb
question.

Tom Trotter

Keith