I'm going to re-import my entire CD collection using 256-Kbps AAC encoding and try to get all the album art from iTunes. For the tracks that are not on iTunes, I will try to find at least 500x500 album art photos.
Just to give you an idea of how long this will take, I currently have 14,000 audio tracks in iTunes! I probably only have about 50 songs that were downloaded from Amazon.com, the rest are on CD.
So... has anybody else recently decided to do this? Is anybody avoiding this because it's a long and tedious process?
Edit: After all the suggestions, I've decided to rip all my CDs as Apple Lossless. Hopefully this will be my last time to ever have to do this again.
Well, I'll give you my $.02.
I spent a long time importing/ripping my cd collection which is over 5000 cds. Yup, 5000 legit cds. I think they add up to about 40,000 tracks.
I am on Windows.
Ripping a typical 60-80min cd into MP3 format on a decent computer (chip speed, ram) is going to take roughly 10 minutes. So for me, 5000 cds = 50,000 minutes. About. Roughly. No, I would not recommend setting your cd drive's Read speed at 32x. There's no reason to risk it....set it to 8x or 12x at max and that's PLENTY fast while still ripping properly. So 50,000 minutes is about 833 hours...or 34 days non-stop ripping.
You should also have a reality check and expect that if you were to sit down for 34 non-stop days and rip, your cd drive would probably burn out. $30 for a new one. I used multiple machines which also had multiple drives. So I would swap here and there to mix it up. I spent over a year ripping due to the sheer # of cds as well as my ability to tolerate the monotony.
Next up is perfectly tagging. Most likely your ripping software is not going to identify all cds perfectly...this could be mispellings, wrong years, wrong genres, wrong track order (I hate that), artist/title are swapped, etc. This is because the ripper looks at an internet database for info...and the database is only as accurate as the human who entered it. So expect that you will need to likely edit, in some shape or form, 50% of your ripped material...you can either make the edits before you rip or after you rip. I tpyically let my ripper (CDEX) find the info, rip the tracks, and then later if it logically makes sense, use a tool to change the files such as filenaming conventions, proper case, dashes versus slashes, etc. If it's a typo, I fix it before I rip. 5-30 seconds for a typo fix but those seconds add up.
Tagging can take quite a long time since you have to at least sit down and figure out how you want to take the ID3, how you want to name your filenames, and any Comments you might plop in to help your Smart Playlists. I have been using a freeware app called ID3TagIt which is amazing. Amazing. AMAZING. You need to have general knowledge of computer Expressions so you can tell ID3TagIt how to automatically name/rename the filenames and ID3 info. It's not hard but don't expect Mom or Grandpa to figure it out. There are numerous examples and I would be happy to share some if you provide examples of what you want to do.
So...this is probably going to take you some time...and it will get REALLY boring soon.
That's why I gave up trying to do 50 cds a weekend because at about disc 15 I was annoyed that I couldn't do something else in the house.
If you have any questions, let me know.
-Eric
