I am kinda embarrassed to even answer this, but here ya go.
around 170 gigs of MP3s from various sources on DVDR and some CDRs (from longer ago).
around 400 gigs of lossless bootlegs from D1M3 etc.
around 100 gigs on DVDR that are FLAC rips of stuff I've sold.
iTunes library hovers around 150 gigs as new stuff gets added and old stuff deleted. Maybe 20 gigs of that is stuff I've ripped from CDs I still ahve.
iPod goes back and forth between 10% and 60% of the iTunes depending on my mood and what I'm into at the time.
― sleeve, Thursday, 17 September 2009 02:47 (fifteen years ago) link
Don't feel embarrassed, sleeve.
Trust me.
― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 17 September 2009 02:48 (fifteen years ago) link
also I still have at least 1000 CDs to rip, but I want to keep most of them so I have no real incentive to do so unless I need it on the iPod for some reason.
lol xpost
― sleeve, Thursday, 17 September 2009 02:48 (fifteen years ago) link
i ripped more than half my cd collection and sold it a week or so ago. got a decent return too which is funny because cds are worthless to me other than the booklet or packaging having something interesting
― am0n, Thursday, 17 September 2009 02:54 (fifteen years ago) link
I was born quite a bit before 1990 and the idea of having all my music with me at all times is still really appealing to me. I've got a 120gb ipod but my music collection is around 250gb so too often I end up thinking about listening to something I haven't heard in ages but not having it with me.
I was also thinking the other day about how much I don't miss the time I spent every day picking the 12 CDs that I would have with me at work all day; it's so much easier to carry this tiny little box with 100x more albums on it. I also don't miss walking around with a bulky discman that ran for two hours before losing battery power.
But on the other hand, records from that era when I was in college, delivering pizzas, listening the the same CDs in my car over and over just stick with me and mean so much more. Listening to things that I couldn't find for years and stumbled upon in some record store somewhere, or put off buying for years because something else was always a bit more urgent, when I can just google particular phrases and listen to pretty much anything within 10 minutes. I don't get that attachment and involvement any more, I just do it because I can so why not?
― joygoat, Thursday, 17 September 2009 03:44 (fifteen years ago) link
"I don't understand people who dismiss the desire to have all one's music at any given time. Just because you aren't interested in the idea doesn't mean no one else should be."
Well I don't understand the desire at all (or more accurately I don't understand someone being incredulous about someone else not caring about not having access to ALL one's music at any given time.)
― Alex in SF, Thursday, 17 September 2009 03:45 (fifteen years ago) link
"I was also thinking the other day about how much I don't miss the time I spent every day picking the 12 CDs that I would have with me at work all day"
Would totally miss this btw. iPods are listening to singles and mixes I've downloaded and misappropriated albums. Stuff I really care about I listen to on CD.
― Alex in SF, Thursday, 17 September 2009 03:47 (fifteen years ago) link
I'm geared towards albums and have no desire to muck about with playlists
You know you can set up playlists that sync full albums.
(iTunes - Controls - Shuffle - By Albums)
Annoyingly, yes, you have to change this setting if you want to shuffle songs in iTunes itself.
We should talk about who has the most over-engineered set of smart playlists to fill their iPod. Mine give me 60/40 new/old stuff, about 70% albums, 15% singles (tracks with a blank album field) and 15% single-track mixes (with Mix in the Grouping field.) Plus playlists that reference those to give me top rated, top rated and added recently, top rated but rarely listened to ("Unpopular favorites"), added in the last day, week ... etc. Oh, and a regular old playlist where I can add audiobooks and old albums that I absolutely have to have.
― ok star grumbles (lukas), Thursday, 17 September 2009 04:34 (fifteen years ago) link
I don't really get archiving mp3s on DVD-R. The one thing I've noticed is that DVD-Rs with even a few scratches in them are hard for computers to read. If I cared about losing mp3s, I'd hate to rely on those.
― Mark, Thursday, 17 September 2009 04:41 (fifteen years ago) link
yeah DVD-Rs will probably last 3-5 years tops
― Randy will be autographing copies of his fascinating autobiography (dyao), Thursday, 17 September 2009 05:27 (fifteen years ago) link
OK so here we go...
I just burned my 412th DVD-R of audio. Adding that in with the video collection (most of which is out-of-print television or movies that aren't on Netflix) I'm looking at a minimum of 5-6 TB of storage. Everything is cataloged via CD FInder and a custom FileMaker database so it's easy to do lookups on criteria like "everything released in 1971" or "anytime Pink Floyd played 'Obscured By Clouds' live in 1972", etc. Getting everything into that catalog system took some work, but it's pretty easy now. On top of all that, there's band recordings, video projects, etc.. - all of which need to be archived.
Now that 10.6 is out with a speedy enough Finder, I'm looking at moving the whole works to some sort of desktop RAID 5 system.
― Elvis Telecom, Thursday, 17 September 2009 05:51 (fifteen years ago) link
>>> I don't carry all of my books around with me, so why all of my music?
>> because you can?
> I "can" poison my girlfriend and throw my cats out of the window to a certain death, but I don't.
but there's no benefit in doing so. (i'm guessing 8) )
you don't carry books around with you because they are bulky and there's no easy way of getting digital copies of them, you certainly can't do it yourself. (plus the reading thing that musicfanatic points out - you can't read whilst walking down the street. not that people don't try)
whereas an ipod that'll carry everything you own is about the size of a fag packet. and costs only about double a 8G mp3 player.
that said, i have only an 8G player with about 2000 oggs on it. i tend to keep the most recent purchases on it (which is everything from this year and half of last year) rather than personal favourites. i'm tempted to buy another that'll be nothing but all-time personal favourites.
(there are a lack of large capacity personal players out there, ipods and those archos things (which are marketed as video players) being about your only options. and neither of those appeal to me for various reasons)
main collection, digitised from cds over a 6 month period, is 17,000 / 750G of flac files on a 1T disk somewhere. and mostly not backed up (what to, another £100 HD?), which i must do something about. but most of my listening is on the walk to work and back.
― koogs, Thursday, 17 September 2009 08:40 (fifteen years ago) link
We should talk about who has the most over-engineered set of smart playlists to fill their iPod.
I don't use iTunes (too slow and a resource hog) but I use J. River Media Center, which has similar functionality but is much faster, watches folders and has an interface I prefer. I set up a Primary and an Offline folder for syncing, that way I know exactly what is on and off the iPod and it's easy to move things between the two. I've got two playlists - one for Recent Acquisitions (which is unplayed stuff I've ripped and added during my big rips over the last couple of years) and Sharp, Short Bursts which is 2 hours of random tracks not listened to in the last six months which are less than 3:30 and have a BPM>150 (mostly punk).
not backed up (what to, another £100 HD?)
Yes, exactly. Space is cheap, get two. Even better, get a drive for your mother, bring your drive when you visit and make an off-site backup while you're there.
― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Thursday, 17 September 2009 13:57 (fifteen years ago) link
J. River is great. since i finally lost it with itunes i try pretty much anything that comes out and media center is still my favorite by some way.
― aarrissi-a-roni, Thursday, 17 September 2009 14:02 (fifteen years ago) link
To clarify my point about books, it seems most of us collectors have accumulated hundreds of gigs of music files. Hence, with 2009-era technology (bulky hard disk players with short battery life that max out at 160 GB, or svelte flash players with long battery life that max out at 32 GB), any current portable will force us at some point to make a choice about what portion of our collection to carry. A larger fraction of the library that has to be recharged nightly, a smaller fraction of the library that has to be recharged weekly. But we're already consigned to having a mothership and our pod.
Some day memory costs and collection sizes will converge again. Maybe a smart manufacturer will provide a thoughtful base for a FLAC friendly player (with wifi (network & remote), high-quality s/pdif audio output, and hdmi output for TV file browsing), so that a portable can truly displace other media storage at the home too. But I suspect 160 GB is already well beyond the needs of all but a tiny fraction of users (ILMers, I presume, are atypical), so the market is small.
― hypermediocrity (Derelict), Thursday, 17 September 2009 15:06 (fifteen years ago) link
> Yes, exactly. Space is cheap, get two.
that's not cheap. plus i'd rather be spending the money on more cds.
― koogs, Thursday, 17 September 2009 15:10 (fifteen years ago) link
price of numerous shelves/wallets/racks over the years vs price of a couple of hard disks
― unban dictionary (blueski), Thursday, 17 September 2009 15:14 (fifteen years ago) link
500 GB HDs in an external enclosure are running $60 these days. For $140, you can find external enclosures for your TB 3.5 drives that will play all your mp3s and HD video through the home system.
But the major advantage is simple: Backing up a large collection requires days of time swapping/labelling disks. An external drive requires about 2 minutes (and a few hours of overwriting while I sleep). My days are worth more than $60.
― hypermediocrity (Derelict), Thursday, 17 September 2009 15:29 (fifteen years ago) link
i'm probably gonna bite the bullet and stop bothering with archiving tracks/albums on external hard disks altogether other than back-ups of what's on the desktop pc itself. i hardly ever need to turn the external drives on for anything so fuck it. i've got between 17-20,000 or so tracks (+ mixes) just on the desktop hd and that's quite enough alongside streaming apps.
― unban dictionary (blueski), Thursday, 17 September 2009 15:57 (fifteen years ago) link
god i don't even know. i stopped counting at the 4TB mark. i have 5 1TB HDs and 1 shiny new 1.5TB drive that have, respectively, <50s-60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and Various. most are at the 80% or greater fill rate, also have two internal drives at 600MB that i use for formatting, sorting, renaming, downloading, etc
and i've been dumping all my backedup DVDrs back onto my drives, because i was finding they were not lasting very long and i was getting lots of CRC errors on them.
i also have given up on trying to systematcially rip my collection of cds and vinyl - but was doing so to archival quality (flac and big cover scans). too much effort.
the only thing i'm making "second" copies of now is flac and wavs i've bought off beatport and juno, etc - as i figure if i've paid money for them it would be a shame to lose them altogether. kinda dumb argument i know, but it is what it is.
i have more than i could possibly listen to in a lifetime, but it's amazingly manageable. and i continue to accumulate.
serious OCD fetishization too, all my directories/files are tagged and named correctly, through some handy apps - and my directory naming structure is "ARTIST - TITLE (YEAR) [FORMAT] {other info}" like :
Eddie Kendricks - Eddie Kendricks (1973) [FLAC] {2007 Remaster}
Probably more than any of y'all cared to know, but, again.... OCD
― rentboy, Thursday, 17 September 2009 16:52 (fifteen years ago) link
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Drobo:
http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/richmedia/images/blank.png
Perfect for an irreplaceable and unwieldy music collection.
Hot expandable up to 16TBRedundant data protectionMix n match drive capacities
― etaeoe, Thursday, 17 September 2009 18:10 (fifteen years ago) link
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Drobo
I don't like that Drobo's storage format is proprietary, but' it's something to consider. From all the reviews of it, it's good as near-line storage but not something that you want to use as a home server.
― Elvis Telecom, Thursday, 17 September 2009 19:54 (fifteen years ago) link
i need to get into the habit of burning new purchases as flacs to dvdr as i buy them. i have about 600G of flacs that i only have one copy of... i have the original cds but it'd take me another 6 months to re-rip them.
When I rip new music, I just ftp it from my NAS to my backup at work. I have 3 1.5 TB drives in a RAID config with 3TB available, with the option to add another 1.5TB. I'm about 90% done ripping my collection. I'm halfway through my Jamaican music, and just have Brazilian, world/global and jazz left. Woo hoo!
I find myself listening to music so much more at home now that it's mostly on flac-Squeezebox and can play simultaneously in every room in the house. I have a few playlists mainly for new music, that I create in MediaMonkey and export to Squeezecenter. The last few days I just put it on random on my Jamaican and soul folders, and hear stuff for the first time in years.
― Fastnbulbous, Thursday, 17 September 2009 20:26 (fifteen years ago) link
Just ripped my CD of Celtic Frost's Into The Pandemonium to iTunes, which means I now have exactly 33500 songs in my library (128.46GB). Still trying to get rid of more CDs...
― Gavin in Leeds, Thursday, 17 September 2009 20:43 (fifteen years ago) link
so i'm thinking about redigitizing my cds next year and putting them on some networked storage. couple reasons, incl. it'd be nice to have all my shit in itunes at the same time, easier to add stuff to ipod/iphone, i'll be moving in with my gf and then we can both access music on the network, and most importantly a lot of my rips are like 9 years old and were done at 128 on musicmatch or something. even now i only rip at 192 to save space. so i think i have two basic questions--
anyone have experience with network storage--good/bad products, etc.
should i use apple lossless when i re-rip everything? is that overkill? would 320 be ok? ideally i'd like to do everything in itunes just because it's easier but i'm open to ideas. i really need to do some test rips at different bitrates soon.
― omaha deserved 311 (call all destroyer), Friday, 20 November 2009 03:47 (fifteen years ago) link
if you are keeping the discs i personally would consider lossless overkill. i keep my vinyl transfers as flacs but everything else at 320
― indie spare (electricsound), Friday, 20 November 2009 04:03 (fifteen years ago) link
you should be fine w/192; i can't for the life of me distinguish 320 from 192.
― oh (skeletor), Friday, 20 November 2009 04:24 (fifteen years ago) link
this could be of interest:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mp3/review/2009/11/18/Sounds-Good-To-Me/p1
― Mark, Friday, 20 November 2009 04:25 (fifteen years ago) link
I do everything to lossless so I never have to do it again.
― Popture, Friday, 20 November 2009 04:27 (fifteen years ago) link
mark thanks dude that was a cool article
― omaha deserved 311 (call all destroyer), Friday, 20 November 2009 04:48 (fifteen years ago) link
if you rip with iTunes make sure you turn error correction on - if you're on a PC you should use EAC + lame, it's better. on Mac I like to use Max because it supports mp3 and FLAC.
I agree about the bitrate tho - you should worry more about upgrading your listening equipment before bitrate (then again upgrading bitrate is just a matter of hard drive space whereas it can cost $$$ to get good equipment). I do everything using VBR which is the best compromise between 320 and 192 imo
― 囧 (dyao), Friday, 20 November 2009 04:49 (fifteen years ago) link
what popture said. do it lossless. then you only ever have to do the ripping once and can transcode everything into any current or future format as the need arises.
― koogs, Friday, 20 November 2009 10:13 (fifteen years ago) link
My music collection is sadly digital now, I couldn't afford to buy all the music I get.While I agree in most part that a mp3 can't quite be as fetishised as much as cd/vinyl, there's still a pride in my music collection - making sure everything is i V0,except electronic releases i 320. I've got 341gb of mp3, split chronologically.
my folder structure is as such:2008-092008-09\artist2008-09\artist\album
then everything played through itunes.
I'd never buy a CD anymore, the only CDs I've received in the past year are promos. If I was to buy something it'd be o vinyl - but as I'm curretly sellling alot to make rent, I can't see myself doing that often in the future.
― Josh L, Friday, 20 November 2009 10:56 (fifteen years ago) link
when you rip FLACs, what level of compression do you use? I'm confused about what the difference is. isn't any FLAC lossless, anyway?
― original bgm, Friday, 20 November 2009 14:33 (fifteen years ago) link
i rip to VBR now after years of suspicion caved in, setting an average rate of 256. haven't actually ripped a CD in many months and in that time somehow my copy of CDex doesn't seem to work anymore. itunes ripping and .m4a can fuck off - since i updated itunes i can't import .m4a's directly into Acid Pro anymore (this was always kinda random tho)
― mdskltr (blueski), Friday, 20 November 2009 14:43 (fifteen years ago) link
> when you rip FLACs, what level of compression do you use?
the default (-5 i think). the others say they are faster (although -5 is fast enough) or smaller (but that's dependant on what you're compressing) so i don't bother. as you say, it's all lossless.
i've seen results from 11% of original size (very quiet track) to 70%+. it's usually 50-60% though. i have 17000+ flacs ripped from cds (and about as many ogg / mp3 copies of the same files) on a 1TB disk which is 75% full.
― koogs, Friday, 20 November 2009 14:52 (fifteen years ago) link
I rip to 192kbps MP3 to save space on my player. However, I use the LAME encoder and I always set the quality on the highest (slowest) setting. I find that using that setting makes a very noticeable difference in quality vs. a 192kbps MP3 encoded with other encoders. Since I do most of my listening in the car, where there's a ton of extraneous noise, I think that the quality is good enough.
― o. nate, Friday, 20 November 2009 15:24 (fifteen years ago) link
the others say they are faster (although -5 is fast enough) or smaller (but that's dependant on what you're compressing) so i don't bother.
by "faster" do you just mean how long it takes to do the rip?
thanks, koogs.
― original bgm, Friday, 20 November 2009 15:47 (fifteen years ago) link
(the ripping and compressing are usually two different stages, ripping is done to an intermediate wav file and the wav is then compressed and deleted).
but, yes, i meant how long it takes to compress the wav.
(how long it takes to do the rip seems to depend on how thorough it's being, the state of the disk and software - the windows box at work is way faster than my linux laptop but the laptop will successfully rip without errors things that the windows box can't)
― koogs, Friday, 20 November 2009 16:00 (fifteen years ago) link
i am intrigued by this "max" program mentioned above--could rip high-bitrate LAME-encoded mp3s which might be perfect.
― omaha deserved 311 (call all destroyer), Friday, 20 November 2009 16:05 (fifteen years ago) link
unscientific test using the biggest wav i had lying around (822727292 byte mix cd)
compression level 0josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 613424186 bytes, ratio=0.746real 1m59.235s
compression level 5josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 554256133 bytes, ratio=0.674real 1m52.021s
compression level 8josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 547994685 bytes, ratio=0.666real 2m11.511s
so 5 (default) is actually faster than 0 (fast) and has only slightly worse compression than 8 (best)
― koogs, Friday, 20 November 2009 16:17 (fifteen years ago) link
I always rip at level 8, why not take time and save space.
lately I've really been enjoying the fact that VLC can play flac audio, makes it so much easier to check out sound quality of various files.
― sleeve, Friday, 20 November 2009 20:36 (fifteen years ago) link
Much love for this thread, it makes me feel slightly less of an OCD lunatic.
I was inspired by some comments here to make the effort to add album art to the 3500 or so singles/non-lp tracks that lacked it. Took me a couple of months but I wound up with only 25 tracks that I couldn't find covers for. Quite amazing that between Discogs.com, Rateyourmusic.com and Google Image search there's art for almost everything.
― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Saturday, 21 November 2009 20:26 (fifteen years ago) link
If something doesn't have art, I make it myself. Like some mixes and comps.
One of my greatest victories was finally finding scans of each disc of the merzbox.
― Jeff, Saturday, 21 November 2009 20:31 (fifteen years ago) link
Yeah, for radio sessions and bootlegs that have no official art I mainly used interesting band shots - it's nice to have an image of the actual artists.
I forgot to mention I've also been ripping a lot more of my collection and have revised my must-carry-everything viewpoint. I've got a full 160gb iPod and as I was listening to my recent rips it dawned on me how much was second tier in the first place - nice to have, not needed to walk around with. So I've got about 2/3s of my stuff at any given time and feel satisfied.
― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Saturday, 21 November 2009 20:41 (fifteen years ago) link
this is seriously the biggest waste of time in the universe
― steady mmmobyn (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, 8 January 2010 13:34 (fourteen years ago) link
what the fuck is wrong with us
What, maintaining it or organizing it?
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 8 January 2010 13:35 (fourteen years ago) link
i mean, both really
― steady mmmobyn (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, 8 January 2010 13:35 (fourteen years ago) link
Yeah, man, CDs don't take 25% as much organising and backing-up as MP3s do.
― exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy), Friday, 8 January 2010 13:36 (fourteen years ago) link