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I'm redoing my entire iTunes library

themoonisdown09 said:
Hard drives are very cheap now, so I'm not worried about space. Also, storing 1,000 CDs on a single hard drive takes up a lot less space than 1,000 physical CDs in my closet.



It all depends on what I'm listening to the music with. If I'm listening to music with laptop speakers, TV speakers, iMac speakers... then no, I can't really tell the difference.

If I'm listening to it with my sound system, then yes, I can tell a big difference.
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good points. and yes HDD prices are ridiculously low. I'm about to get 1.5TB for $150. That's just sick.

I've thought about doing what you are doing, but only ripping Lossless since I'm perfectly fine with my high quality MP3's I've ripped. Guess I should see how much space 500 CD's would take up for lossless. I'd sure like to get rid of my CD collection. And that would mean making sure my backup plan is in top shape (thinking one of those RAID 1 Western Digital external drives).
 
Are you guys saying that you give away or sell your original cd's after ripping them?

I struck gold yesterday - in my quest to turn my library into 100% legal music, I found a used cd & record place that has tons and tons and tons of cd's for $2 a pop. Mostly the 80's and 90's top 40 pop crap that I listen to. I'm going to be able to replace a lot of the stuff I got from questionable means at very reasonable prices.

I'm really looking to convert from original cd's as much as possible, rather than relying on online downloads via amazon mp3 or emusic. I would rather have the original media myself and be able to make my own choices about ripping quality. And have the option to change my mind down the road as technology and file formats change.
 
skruggie said:
Are you guys saying that you give away or sell your original cd's after ripping them?
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I still keep my CDs. I'm too afraid to get rid of them so soon since I just finished ripping my collection as lossless. Once I get a Drobo or some kind of RAID system going, I will feel more comfortable with selling them.
 
skruggie said:
Are you guys saying that you give away or sell your original cd's after ripping them?

I struck gold yesterday - in my quest to turn my library into 100% legal music, I found a used cd & record place that has tons and tons and tons of cd's for $2 a pop. Mostly the 80's and 90's top 40 pop crap that I listen to. I'm going to be able to replace a lot of the stuff I got from questionable means at very reasonable prices.

I'm really looking to convert from original cd's as much as possible, rather than relying on online downloads via amazon mp3 or emusic. I would rather have the original media myself and be able to make my own choices about ripping quality. And have the option to change my mind down the road as technology and file formats change.
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That would be a drastic move, though I could see people doing this. One need a serious backup system though. If I ever lost my data, I'd be really PO'd. I'd love to get a Drobo system. My CD collection makes up 1/3 of my music, the other 2/3's are from torrents (it's rare that I'll buy a CD anymore). I'm in to jazz so I don't mind buying those (24-bit remasters) and need to start hitting the stores again to find some stuff.
 
I am in IT and I think Raid for a personal household is a waste of time and $, the easy way to do it is have a Time Machine HD to backup to and use the Disk Utility inside of Leopard to mirror to another disk, I have twin Seagate 500 GB 7200 RPM with 16MB Cache, both are in the same external chassis and once a week I mirror them, and store the mirrored Drive in my firesafe, the other stays connected to my Mac Mini, this way I have Double the Protection for like $120.00 including drives and Drive enclosures, it will also be easy to upgrade to bigger drives later on since the enclosure will accept up to 1 TB Drives.

I bought two of these off eBay for under $20 each, they serve another purpose to because they work as a media reader for my Mac.

http://www.rocketfishproducts.com/p...ve-enclosure-kit-for-35-sata-hard-drives.aspx

The Drives I bought off of TigerDirect.com

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4499974&CatId=2459

The drives have 5-Year Warranty's or most have at least 3 Year anyway so it works really well and simple for the least experienced person to manage.

That is just my $0.02 cents into the whole thing, then it doesn't matter what format you use because you will have enough space and a backup of your backup :eek:

Wicked1
 
Remember kids, if you sell or give away the CD, you no longer have the right to listen to tracks ripped from it.
 
Wicked1 said:
I am in IT and I think Raid for a personal household is a waste of time and $, the easy way to do it is have a Time Machine HD to backup to and use the Disk Utility inside of Leopard to mirror to another disk, I have twin Seagate 500 GB 7200 RPM with 16MB Cache, both are in the same external chassis and once a week I mirror them, and store the mirrored Drive in my firesafe, the other stays connected to my Mac Mini, this way I have Double the Protection for like $120.00 including drives and Drive enclosures, it will also be easy to upgrade to bigger drives later on since the enclosure will accept up to 1 TB Drives.

I bought two of these off eBay for under $20 each, they serve another purpose to because they work as a media reader for my Mac.

http://www.rocketfishproducts.com/p...ve-enclosure-kit-for-35-sata-hard-drives.aspx

The Drives I bought off of TigerDirect.com

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4499974&CatId=2459

The drives have 5-Year Warranty's or most have at least 3 Year anyway so it works really well and simple for the least experienced person to manage.

That is just my $0.02 cents into the whole thing, then it doesn't matter what format you use because you will have enough space and a backup of your backup :eek:

Wicked1
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That is great, if you have 500gigs of content. How would you handle say 4tb of data? Which is not unheard of in the home theater world and people who are ripping movies and music. Others might want to take a look at what people in the home theater forums are building.

www.avscience.com just for starters.
 
Galley said:
Remember kids, if you sell or give away the CD, you no longer have the right to listen to tracks ripped from it.
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And on this note, I'm expanding my cd storage books that I abandoned years ago. With the amount of music that I am now legally replacing on cd, I am quickly running out of room.

Apparently there are quite a few used cd shops in my area that I never knew existed...it's a goldmine. Had I known about these places years ago I never would have gone to the dark side to begin with.
 
skruggie said:
And on this note, I'm expanding my cd storage books that I abandoned years ago. With the amount of music that I am now legally replacing on cd, I am quickly running out of room.

Apparently there are quite a few used cd shops in my area that I never knew existed...it's a goldmine. Had I known about these places years ago I never would have gone to the dark side to begin with.
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I have one right up the street from me. It is freaking nice. I pay on average 3 to 5 bucks a cd. I have also gone to ebay a lot. I just have to make sure I watch the shipping charges that some of these people ask for. Highway robbery I tell you!
 
Just wanted to report in, I have made it into the G's. There is definitely an alphabet slow down as I am acquiring new cd's. The amount of cd's I now own is growing rapidly.
 
Same here, I am many GB's in and still a long way to go! But, I don't think I will import everything as before, because there are some CDs that I don't listen to anymore.

I am finding it odd that some CDs rip in iTunes at 23x speed whereas others don't get over 6x or 7x. What could cause that? Quality of CD perhaps? They are all original.
 
tomacwhite said:
I am finding it odd that some CDs rip in iTunes at 23x speed whereas others don't get over 6x or 7x. What could cause that? Quality of CD perhaps? They are all original.
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Yes, if your drive has difficulty reading a disc, ripping speeds will be much slower.
 
themoonisdown09 said:
That looks like a nice hard drive. I like that it doesn't need to be plugged into an outlet (if you use FireWire). It's a little pricey for the 500GB of storage it offers, but it has no fan, which is a big plus. I'll look into this drive more... thanks.
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I have the same hard drive. It is great!!

Most of my files are 192 or 256kbs.
 
I must admit, I don't understand this obsession with ripping to lossless. I guess whatever floats your boat. But for the vast majority of people, I don't think a difference can be heard if a decent bitrate is used.

I keep hearing talk of "the future" when people support their decision to used a lossless format, but the one thing that I never seem to see mentioned is the fact that as we get older, our hearing gets worse, not better! I figure if I can't tell the difference now, I sure as heck won't be able to tell the difference 20 or 30 years from now. I'll be lucky to hear anything at all! LOL
 
MadeTheSwitch said:
I must admit, I don't understand this obsession with ripping to lossless. I guess whatever floats your boat. But for the vast majority of people, I don't think a difference can be heard if a decent bitrate is used.

I keep hearing talk of "the future" when people support their decision to used a lossless format, but the one thing that I never seem to see mentioned is the fact that as we get older, our hearing gets worse, not better! I figure if I can't tell the difference now, I sure as heck won't be able to tell the difference 20 or 30 years from now. I'll be lucky to hear anything at all! LOL
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Agreed, I don't feel the need to keep a second lossless library. It seems to me to be an incredible waste of space - and even if I did this, it wouldn't include the music that I buy online anyway, so what's the point?

On another note, I want to point out how very annoying it is that apparently many of my cd's from years and years ago went missing and now I have to hunt for them all over again, in my quest to keep my music library above reproach. Ugh, it was bad enough when I went from record to cassette to cd, but to have to replace cd's that I have covers for and not the actual discs...just ugh!
 
skruggie said:
On another note, I want to point out how very annoying it is that apparently many of my cd's from years and years ago went missing and now I have to hunt for them all over again, in my quest to keep my music library above reproach. Ugh, it was bad enough when I went from record to cassette to cd, but to have to replace cd's that I have covers for and not the actual discs...just ugh!
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The same thing happened to me when I was importing all my CDs. I found about 10 CD cases that had artwork in them, but no CD. What's even worse is that most of them were albums that I really really like, not just some album with one good song on it.
 
Sorry about the bump,but one thing regarding apple lossless has always irked me. People complain that since it is propriety it may not be around in however many years, when apple fails, but

1. Apple is not going to fail inn the near future, and
2. If by some terrible stroke of fate, apple fails, there will be both legacy support for apple lossless, AND programs that can convert between apple lossless and other more current formats.
 
philipt42 said:
Sorry about the bump,but one thing regarding apple lossless has always irked me. People complain that since it is propriety it may not be around in however many years, when apple fails, but

1. Apple is not going to fail inn the near future, and
2. If by some terrible stroke of fate, apple fails, there will be both legacy support for apple lossless, AND programs that can convert between apple lossless and other more current formats. (if we're still using computers:rolleyes:)
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I agree, I rip everything in lossless, the few CDs I've come across that were empty jewel cases (as mentioned above) I've been able to track down a FLAC torrent of or even find at The Beat Goes On (used CDs) and have no problem ripping to ALAC. I figure that if I can find a program to convert FLAC or WAV to ALAC, then in the future I can likely find a program to convert ALAC to whatever "the future" holds.
 
philipt42 said:
Sorry about the bump,but one thing regarding apple lossless has always irked me. People complain that since it is propriety it may not be around in however many years, when apple fails, but

1. Apple is not going to fail inn the near future, and
2. If by some terrible stroke of fate, apple fails, there will be both legacy support for apple lossless, AND programs that can convert between apple lossless and other more current formats. (if we're still using computers:rolleyes:)
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Yeah.

Fact: The open source library libavcodec now incorporates both a decoder and an encoder for Apple Lossless.

The people complaining about Apple Lossless are extremely uninformed.
 
It's a good time for this thread to come back up. I have been thinking about doing this recently because my current library has gone a bit out of control. I am going to start over using the lossless on external as an archive. I'll start now and continue this project over the winter.
 
Just wanted to check in and call out how stupid I am. I have started over again.... With lossless:rolleyes:

And I easily have double the amount of CDs I had when I did this little project the first time around. Not to mention my ever expanding collection of vinyl....
 
I'm sure this has been answered before, but I am thinking about redoing my library in higher quality, and I was wondering if it is possible to keep your play counts, last played and that kind of information, or if its going to be lost when you rerip?

Thanks!
 
A Mac Gamer said:
I'm sure this has been answered before, but I am thinking about redoing my library in higher quality, and I was wondering if it is possible to keep your play counts, last played and that kind of information, or if its going to be lost when you rerip?

Thanks!
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If you re-rip, the songs will be new songs to your library, and will have a zero play count.
 
themoonisdown09 said:
The only problem with Apple Lossless or any lossless format is the file size. I encoded a 4:15 song using 256-Kbps AAC and it was 8 MB. I encoded the same song with Apple Lossless and it was 30.4 MB!

I don't know what to do now. I've already done about 20 CDs tonight using AAC. Do you think it's worth it to do everything with Apple Lossless? Also, for those of you that do lossless, do you encode it to something smaller when you put it on your iPod/iPhone?
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I re-encoded my cd's 3 times until I wised up and imported for one final time using apple lossless. Disks are getting bigger all time time.

6400 songs encoded in apple lossless are taking up 170 GBytes of space on my machine to give you an example.
 
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