Copying your music collection to hard drives: who else is doing this?

Grant's post was spot on - those are the exact reasons why I do needle drops, also.

His #4 is, imo, also accurate. I've AB tested quite a few of my needle drops with a comparable CD, and I usually prefer the needle drop. And I've ABX tested just to be sure I can hear a difference at all (and I can, it's usually very obvious). And I don't even have a high-end system.

I can cite many examples, and trust me that if I thought my LP's sounded the same, or worse, I wouldn't be doing these needle drops at all - used CD's are so cheap now that I could just buy those, rip them and be done with it. I actually wish the CD's sounded better, because it would save me a lot of time.

 

Yeah? You ever try to digitally remove every single little tiny click manually from a file? You'd be sitting there for a good hour for each song! I once spent more than six months declicking a noisy two-and a half-minute song that way! It came out nice, though...then I found it on CD!

 

heh. At least you're honest. Don't see that much anymore. Hey. Enjoy your hobby. I'll keep shooting 8-ball and trying to perfect my Cricket game on my Unicorn Sportcraft dartboard while i spin my records and CDs. Nicest board i've ever thrown on! $45 on amazon. No pop-outs. Ever!

 

Well this is just awesome. I have a dbpoweramp license (maybe 2 years old now) that I was using under WINE on a Linux box. I have a Win 7 VM on my Mac so I will give this a go. An updated license for dbp would be well worth it on time savings alone! Many thanks for the tip.

 

See, if you had just bought iZotope RX2, you could've de-clicked and de-crackled most of that in five minutes. The really bad ones, you still have to redraw and fix by hand. But with a little help with the computer de-clicking programs, they can help quite a bit.

If it makes you feel any better, I once did the same thing, trying desperately to clean up a rare single. A week after I finished it, I played off the result to a friend of mine, who said, "oh, I have that LP -- still sealed. I'll give it to you for free." I slapped the LP on, transferred it to digital... and the raw LP sounded a hundred times better than my meticulously de-ticked, de-clicked file.

 

Microsoft offers a free tool called SyncToy that allows two folders to be kept synchronised.
Very easy to use and works perfectly. It manages additions, deletions, and updates.
If you start with two folders that already have the same contents it will not re-copy anything.

 

This was years before RX had been introduced. The record was in baaaaad shape, but the only copy of the song I could ever find for many years!

 

SyncToy is a wonderful tool.

I don't use it for music files, but do use it for work, to back up files to a USB drive. All files are under C:\work (duh!) and I run SyncToy every Friday. Good job by Microsoft to make this tool available for free.

 

I use Time Machine on MacOS to back up the partition that contains my music files.
After the first initial back-up, it scans and copies the changes but doesn't delete from the back-up drive those files that I have deleted from the hard drive.
Eventually TM does delete from the back-up drive, when space there starts to become an issue.
I have found this to be a life saver on quite a few occasions, where I could go back a month and find a lost precious file, inadvertently deleted from the hard drive.

If I used a sync software, I wouldn't be able to do that.