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

Grant, he has the right to his opinion, you know.

Are you on a crusade again?? Chill, my friend.

 

I am currently using Diskeeper. It defrags fast, like in minutes.

I choose FLAC because I didn't want to be stuck with any proprietary formats. I started out using WMA lossless, but realized that opening them and encoding them take a lot more processing power...and it's Microsoft.

 

hey, music is like food to some of us. that's why we are here. Music ranks as #1 in my life.

 

Well, Sckott, i'm not selling my collection. I just want to reclaim space and back up my music. Hard drives? That's why you copy the hard drives! Redunduncy! Doug has it right! In the end, I don't care about the physical value of records and CDs. All I want is the music!

 

I realize he has an opinion. But, I saw it like a threadcrap.

I am very relaxed. And, crusades aren't bad, but i'm not on one.

 

The questions weren't directed to me, but actually that is precisely why I'm engaged in a server project. My cylinders, 78s, and LPs are in pretty good order and easily accessible by a computer database. My CDs, however, have never been in good order, and (thanks to the space I've devoted to the other formats!) I really don't have a place to set up a good physical storage system for them. Generally, they've been stuffed in boxes or heaped in piles at the backs of closets. Putting them all onto a server (albeit in .ape format, not FLAC) will make their contents easily accessible while the discs themselves can live in bulk storage somewhere.

A side benefit: I can organize my music much more sensibly than with physical media. I'm a classical collector. Putting the music on a server finally frees me from the tyranny of the coupling--the Schumann piano concerto never again will have Grieg's counterpart as its inevitable handmaiden; Bach chorale preludes are arranged singly by default, rather than as hour-long "suites" on a CD side, which is a presentation both contrary to what Bach ever would have wanted and deadly dull to boot. I can also easily group like works together, as with Scarlatti sonatas in Kirkpatrick pairs.

The downside? Well, as anyone who's hung around the forum for the past year probably knows, I am responsible for more "help! my server is doing something bizarre!" threads than probably any other SH member. In fact, I have one running now parallel this one. It's been a real learning experience, to be sure! Fortunately, my fellow members have been more than generous in offering help when I've needed it.

 

I've always kept my junk in some type of order.

 

I was referring to the convenience of having tunes ripped to a hard disc... sorry if you took it as a slight against your iPod.

 

Actually, I don't! I configured this naming set and it takes care of everything for me. It creates an artist directory if it doesn't already exist and it creates album subdirectories AND it names the file so that alphabetized files sort in an order of artist/album/track number/song title. It's an alteration of the default naming set and it works great...I use the same string in the converter for making the mp3 dupe of the flac directory.:

[IFCOMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],Various Artists[]\[album][IFMULTI]Disc-[disc][]\[artist]-[album]-[track]-[title][][IF!COMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[artist][]\[album][IFMULTI]Disc-[disc][]\[artist]-[album]-[track]-[title][]

 

Are you scanning all artwork & the disc to preserve the visuals? (also noting the disc matrix information) ... just in case it's all gone one day...

 

I don't have the time to back up my whole collection, and prefer to not have that added expense also.

I'm years away from doing all the needle dropping I need to do, as well as months away from having my MP3 player loaded up sufficiently. My collection is much larger than Grant's. Not a bragging point or anything, it just is.

But I do want the 300 disc changer from Sony so I can have that many discs on hand to choose from on the remote control. That investment would make the most sense to me. I could put the hundreds of OOP LPs onto CD-Rs and into this player which would be a pleasure to have handy with the touch of a button.

I now have everything in order and can find stuff when needed with no problem.

 

I think i'll try this to see if it works for me.

 

I don't worry about the artwork. Scanning and saving it would be too much work, slow me down, and take up HD space. I have over 2000 CDs alone!

The bottom line has to be the music. Shame to lose the liner notes, though.

 

But the difference is: if my house burns down, the drives I keep somewhere else will be fine. I'll be able to get my life back together fairly quickly, assuming I can still walk and eat, and we can dodge floods and/or radiation damage.

Having survived one major earthquake, and a few other less-disastrous situations, I had to take stock of what's really important in my life, and what isn't. It took me a long time to realize, I don't care about the piece of plastic that has the recording on it; I only care about the music. How I listen to it doesn't matter to me, as long as it sounds good.

At least if we do have a fire or major earthquake, I can grab four drives and run outside. I can't do that with my 12,000 CDs, 5000 records, and 2000 45's (the last time I counted them).

Then there's the sheer convenience of being able to pull up any song on the drive in about three seconds, which I can't do with the CDs. That, plus having all the album artwork and booklets (which I'm also digitizing), makes this "virtual collection" better in some ways than having the real CDs.

I have a small advantage over most people in that I've worked in many situations where we've had to deal with hundreds of terabytes of data, finishing TV shows and films on servers. I had to learn more about file formats, backups, transfers, data migration, and on and on, far more than I ever wanted to know. But that's what ultimately made me realize that the ultimate audio format is no format at all -- just the music itself. That's enough for me.

 

I'm with Hypnotoad on this one. Though I have a couple thousand CD's on a server, I still listen to CD's and LP's a lot more...

The server is nice when I'm busy, but I'd still rather listen to the disc and that way if the HD's ever take a dump, I still have my music collection.

 

Yep, with three copies, two external drives and a heaping stack of DVD-R. I'd duplicate these and keep them elsewhere but I know if I were to retrieve them I'd be hit by a bus.

 

Concur: I still spin vinyl when I'm doing critical listening.

However, the ease of having it all on a hard drive - and accessing it through Sonos - on four different systems all over the house - is awesome.

I'm using a mirrored drive and a backup on a local hard drive (two different physical locations - and I kept my cds. It's all in AIFF. I have external DACs on the Sonos units. Sounds really good.

 

I did this one year ago. Best decision ever! The space taken up by 1000+ CDs is overwhelming IMO. I just looked at my collection one day, and thought "this borders on looking like someone with a weird CD OCD problem". Even though everything was organized, it just appeared too cluttered.

I ripped everything via EAC to a Infrant ReadyNAS with 4x400GB drives in X-RAID config. One day I'll figure out how to do a backup on a 1TB drive and store it off site.

The best thing is being able to find a song or album with the click of a button, or easily making a custom playlist (also ultra-fast) without having to fool with looking for, and leaving the couch to swap out CDs. Convenience is KING!

 

36,000 songs using 700GB on a 750GB drive

 

I've been doing this for a while. Ripping with EAC Secure mode FLAC8. So far filled one 250 GB drive and almost filled a 320 GB drive.

 

I did this a long time ago (2002 or 2003) and made the mistake of burning everything to 128kbps (CD Quality according to the "experts"). It took me at least a month to burn my 1200+ CDs.

A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted better sound quality and hard drive prices were falling. I bought a Buffalo Terabyte server for storing recorded movies and music. I also bought a Sony VAIO VGX-XL1 Digital Living System, which combines a PC with a 200-disc DVD/CD changer/recorder (I reviewed it here).

The reason I wanted this particular model was that it could batch burn 200 CDs at a time into WMA Lossless format. It also grabs all of the information that I wanted including artist/album/artwork. While I know EAC would probably be more error free, I did not want to spend another month burning my collection. (of course, I had to add a lot more hard drive space)

I should also mention that I have transcoded all of it into Apple Lossless (for my iPod) and FLAC (for my Kenwood Music Keg) using Foobar.

The great part is that I have a few Rokus (with various outboard DACs) around the house, so I can get to any album in my collection in a matter of seconds. I use an iPod Touch as a remote.

 

Who are these so-called experts? Send them here! We'll set them straight!

 

I have to admit, I love the convenience!

 

What player do you use to play your FLAC files? Are playlist exportable?

 

I take it on faith that once I've got a flac library on HD, the day will come when that entire library is considered comparatively small and will be copied to a purpose-designed server for the car.

Grant, did you try that string?