Paul D G

So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

I've thrown together a media PC for my home theater. One of the reasons was because I wanted to digitize all my CDs and have them immediately accessible from my couch.

Has anyone done this? What compression techniques did you use, and how much disk space did it consume vs # of discs? And what software did you use?

I'm using Media Monkey for the software app. And I intend to encode high frequency listening items in FLAC, with lesser stuff at 320k. At least that's my intention. I can't get my head around the math right now.

I have an estimate 1500 cds to deal with and I'm trying to get a grasp on how much disk space I'm going to need.

-paul

Brandy S

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

I've got my entire music collection on an external drive. It's over 5,000 CDs on a 750GB Seagate (Firewire/USB 2.0). Bitrates between 192-320, with some FLAC thrown in. (The drive is not near full however!)

Todd Barattini

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brandy S It's over 5,000 CDs

Wow, that one hell of a collection!

Regards,
Todd
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James_S

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

I also have my entire music collection on an external drive, a 500 GB to be exact. I am not sure exactly how many CDs there are, but I have around 36,000 songs and bitrates are between 192-320 also. It's around 250 GB in total +/-

I also back everything up in a .rar format and backed up on a server. Can't be to careful nowadays.

Do you spend time with your family.....
Cause a man that doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.
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Paul D G

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

So I've decided to just rip everything as highest quality mp3s. I probably won't notice the difference between tracks encoded in flac or 320k mp3.

Does anyone have an opinion which is better sonic-ly? 256k variable bitrate or 320k constant?

I think 256vbr would result in smaller file sizes and, I assume as good if not better audio quality.

-paul

Christ Reynolds

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

Whatever sounds best to you is the best sonically.

CJ

And then when I feel so stuffed I can't eat anymore, I just use the restroom! And then I CAN eat more!

Thomas Newton

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

Uncompressed CD Audio runs about 10 MB per minute, so if all of the discs were full-up (80 minutes), and you encoded them uncompressed, you'd need (1500 * 80 minutes * (10 MB / minute)) = 1,200,000 MB (just over 1 TB).

320 Kilobits per second encoding == 2400 Kilobytes per minute == about 23% of the uncompressed CD audio rate. So if you encode 1500 full CDs' worth of audio at this rate, you'll need about 276 GB.

Probably many of the CDs will be shorter than 80 minutes, and you will end up using something like 1/3 less space.

DaveF

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

From last year, article about a fellow with an 850 GB, 11,000-album iTunes library.

I've got my entire library on my MacBook Pro, in iTunes. My library is a normal 200+ CDs.

But I'm curious if anyone knows the solution to a problem that stymied two years ago: I meant to create an archive library of my CDs. I wanted to rip all my CDs to a lossless format. Then I wanted to be able to re-encode those to a format and bitrate of choice, according to my current portable player. So, if a few years later I had a larger capacity player, I wouldn't need to re-rip all my CDs, but I could just re-encode my archive at a higher bitrate or newer format.

But I couldn't find a way to preserve CD (ID3?) info in an archive. Or, more specifically, I could find any programs that could re-encode from an archive and also figure out the CD info. It seems an obvious problem, but I couldn't find anything and I did a serious search for it.

Gabriel.H

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

I've got all my music on a 300 GB internal drive. I'd say I have a little over 26,000 songs, most of which are WMA format @192 kbps.

Scott Merryfield

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

I have approximately 600 CDs converted to 256K VBR MP3's. I use iTunes to organize the music, and used Exact Audio Copy with a LAME encoder to rip the CDs. We mostly play the MP3's on our iPods, and the quality is more than satisfactory for me (I have Shure E4C earbuds).

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Brandy S

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

I had more than I thought!
Here's a screenshot I just took of my Music folder properties...
http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r...nred/Music.jpg

Adam Lenhardt

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

I have 2190 songs, 5.9 days work of music, on my harddrive. The only problem with one massive music archive is that my old failing harddrive introduced plenty of barely noticable skips into a lot of my songs before I finally replaced it. These problems transferred over to my new harddrive, and I'm having a bitch of a time weeding them all out.

Greg*go

Re: So, who's put their entire music collection on their PC?

My current stats:

22,570 songs
appx 1309 albums
avg bitrate: 173 kbps
size: 90.8GB
play time: 7wk 1d 16h 14m 06s

I did most of this a couple years ago using CDex. I have updated the encoder (LAME) accordingly as new releases have been made, but I'm not about to redo anything with the newer encoder. I remember doing pretty extensive testing (for me anyway) before deciding on the format and bitrate to use. I decdied on the VBR method, with 320kbps as my max & 112kbps as my min. It will use 320kbps if needed, so why not use VBR?

The most fun was getting married, then combining my digital audio collection with my wife's. As it turns out, we