I was hoping for some advice on how to digitise all my music.
I have about 1800 CDs and they take up waaaay too much room. Storing them as MP3s would be a pain in the arse as they'd take up to too much hard drive space. I have a 55GB hard rive - no great shakes but alright. But I really want to store them digitally and get rid of all the discs. I'm not really up on file storage software or formats - I basically fart about with MP3, OGG and stuff like that. I don't really see the point of RAR and ZIP files because they don't really crunch the file size down. Surely the CD format would crunch it down though right? If 100 CDs are 700MB (in wqhatever format a CD is) can I store that on my computer in that format, and if so how? And does anyone know of anything quick and easy that I could store files as?
I'm not a computer expert but my girlfriend (who is much more of a tech-head) was telling me about "stick" hard drives. They're small things, literally thick sticks, that hold masses of information and you can basically plug it into any computer and download the bits you want.
Otherwise I would suggest MP3 players or I-Pods that hold a lot of hours (IE Not the shuffle but larger ones).
Storage is the cheapest component of your computer system, you are by no means limited to your hard drive, there is a plethora of external storage options now, look to pay a $1 per gig. I bought a 120gb drive as a backup device, but now my laptop is getting full of photos and music I will just add it as a storage drive, no biggie.
If you are still concerned about data loss, get 2 externals, 1 as a backup drive, 1 for extra storage.
Maybe get a big external USB or Firewire hard disk that is portable and use that. That's what I do actually at home and when you fill a drive, you just add another one. As I'm not accessing it much, I don't worry about losing the data.
I think CDs are in WAV format and much to big to store. We rip about 100 CDs a week at work into our automated system and actually keep them in WAV format for quality purposes but we have over a terrabyte of storage which most people don't have at home.
MP3 is compressed and will make a smaller file than WAV and is probably the best bet. One CD is about 700 MB, not a hundred CDs. I think the average music WAV file is around 5 or 6 MB and a decent MP3 compression of the same file could bring it down to at least half or less than that without losing too much quality.
Just rip them into your system with Windows Media Player or iTunes. I'm about to reorganise my music after I've wiped my system this weekend as my Xbox 360 is great for playing the music downstairs on the stereo but has a poor music selection interface and needs the files properly formatted with artist, title, genre etc. I figured I'd move my existing collection elsewhere for now, rip all my CDs and then gradually add back the bare MP3 files with corrected tags. I was using iTunes heavily but the new version 7 is still dire so I'm working a bit more with Windows Media Player 11 at present.
I was hoping for some advice on how to digitise all my music.
Any half-decent program will do it. I use Musicmatch Jukebox, came on my pc stock and it a) plays music and b) lets me rip from cd to hard drive without too much effort.
I have about 1800 CDs and they take up waaaay too much room. Storing them as MP3s would be a pain in the arse as they'd take up to too much hard drive space. I have a 55GB hard rive - no great shakes but alright. But I really want to store them digitally and get rid of all the discs.
750 gig external hard drive is the sort of thing I recommend for storage. I mean do you know how much 750gig really is? Not even John Peel could use that much space.
I was hoping for some advice on how to digitise all my music.
Use your computer and burn them on to CDs.
I was hoping for some advice on how to digitise all my music.
Use your computer and burn them on to CDs.
:lol: Yeah - that'd be grand. Rip 1800 CDs and then simply burn them back onto more CDs
I'm sure MP3 is your only real option. Rip them and store them either on a hard disk or an MP3 player.
Pilgrim started the ball rolling here.
CDs are basically made up of WAV files (uncompressed audio data) and a specific file table which CD players can read. Technically this is not true but for the sake of simplification that is what you are dealing with.
If you have a CD which is absolutely jam packed it has 700MB of data on it.
So if you have 1800 CDs that means you would need anything up to 1230GB of storage space to store them all perfectly uncompressed.
If you compress to an MP3 there are various bit rates available as Pilgrim explained.
128kbps and 192kbps are the most popular on peer-to-peer networks and even paid services like iTunes and Napster. This is not particularly good quality, although the loss is almost impossible to detect on most systems. However, if I put anything less than 256kbps on my car stereo (a high end factory installed system on a LeSabre) it sounds AWFUL.
256 gives you the quality you need for most devices and systems. 320kbps is almost lossless in quality, impossible for the human ear to detect the difference.
Now for some arithmetic
320kbps (kilobits per second) means 40KB/s (kilobytes per second). An 80 minute CD is 4800 seconds long, so 40KBx4800 = 187MB.
So you have shrunk the filesize of a CD down from 700MB to 187MB, with almost no human detectable loss in quality. Your 1800 CDs would now fit on 328GB of hard drive space.
Bear in mind when you buy a hard drive that you are
(a) buying something that will dwindle in value over the years, don't buy the biggest you can get now as it will be sold for half that price next year
(b) buying something that may crash at some point as it contains mechanical moving parts, so a backup is recommended
Also keep this in mind. A 400GB hard drive is not 400GB. It is 400,000,000 Bytes. Which is 381GB. Then you will have to add in a little "padding" as each file is made up of a certain number of clusters of specific size. So a 400GB hard drive will only fit maybe 350GB of data on it, to be safe.
If any of the above is unclear please ask me to explain, as I'm not sure I understand some of it myself ;o)
If any of the above is unclear please ask me to explain, as I'm not sure I understand some of it myself ;o)
Sounded like a great explanation to me.
A simpler way is to throw away all of the boxes and keep your discs in those zip up binders. reduces the weight and volume problem right away, you wont have to deal with compression issues or hard drive space.. oops I missed the point roll
A simpler way is to throw away all of the boxes and keep your discs in those zip up binders. reduces the weight and volume problem right away, you wont have to deal with compression issues or hard drive space.. oops I missed the point :roll:
Yeah I did that and bought a bloody great crate to hold them in. It's in the way now. But thanks everyone. Looks like I'll just have to cut some fat out of my collection first.
1800 CDs in jewel cases fit into a space 85cm x 62cm x 60cm or similar. (That's about 3ft x 2ft x 2ft in old money)
Or into this:
3.5 x 11.2 x 18.8 cm
That's just a 400th of the physical volume of the CDs.
That looks like a great deal, by the way, a 500GB external for $200 and it's a LaCie, they are nice sturdy drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6822154150
I switched a lot of our business over to NewEgg and they're great. Even without a government discount, they still undercut some of the government suppliers.
I agree that those LaCie drives are good. The no-name drives can be a bit hit and miss though.
...or you could wait a year or so and buy a by-then-mainstream-and-much-cheaper Blu-Ray or HD-DVD burner.
Blu-Ray discs are 25GB each. That's 130 CDs on a single disc... your whole collection would fit in one of those visor CD holders.