Digitizing your entire music collection (including vinyl and dvds)....

After a recent burglary of my cd player and about 15 cds from my car (rock through the window) I realized that I am obbsessed with music more than I originally thought. I can't imagine if my whole collection was taken from me. You can take my instruments, my G5, my clothes, my car, my wife.....BUT NOT MY MUSIC.

I was thinking about digitizing my whole music collection. My dvd's too. Has anyone else done this with their entire collection? Including your vinyl? I figure if my house goes up in flames it would be easier to grab a hard drive than crates of records and cds. I was wondering what the downside of this would be? If the hard drive dies, would all my music be lost? Would it be wise to make a couple of backups? And if you are digitizing your whole collection, are you making mp3's or wav/aiff files? Any thoughts? :wave:

Originally posted by Ryst nd if you are digitizing your whole collection, are you making mp3's or wav/aiff files? Any thoughts? :wave:

If you're going to go through the effort of such a tremendous project, go with wav/aiff files. You can downsample later but not the reverse!

With the cost of storage these days this seems like a completely reasonable project. )

No, I haven't digitized all my records or CDs or whatever, but sure, seems like a great idea. I don't have that kind of time. But if you do, great. I want to archive my multi-track tapes but never get around to it, either.

WAV or AIFF files. You can be darn sure that if I spent that much time on something, I'd back it up onto a second HD and store that HD somewhere else that's safe (friend's house, safety deposit box, fireproof safe, or something). Back up, back up, back up...

Do you have any Sony recordings in your collection??? You will of course have to delete the digital copies if your originals go up in flames...!

Originally posted by Base Do you have any Sony recordings in your collection??? You will of course have to delete the digital copies if your originals go up in flames...!

How so?

It's in Sony's copyright / disclaimer or whatever it is, they state that if you make any electronic backups of the cd's, you must delete them should you sell or lose the original. Although I did say it in sarcasm, tossers....!

Originally posted by Base It's in Sony's copyright / disclaimer or whatever it is, they state that if you make any electronic backups of the cd's, you must delete them should you sell or lose the original. Although I did say it in sarcasm, tossers....!

It may very well be unenforcible -- If you sell the original, yeah, you've divested yourself of ownership, but archive backup...

put em to the test

An alternative -- or perhaps an augmentation might be to subscribe to a monthly service. For $5 a month (paid yearly) I can stream about 85-90% of what I'm looking for any time I want (as long as I'm on an internet connection.)

I've finally been able to hear some of the music that was gone when 2/3 of my record collection got stolen back in '74... (I replaced a lot... buy you know how it is... a triage situation. Some things got replaced twice. I went through this weird thing where, if I found a cheap used copy of a favorite record, I'd buy it -- even if I already had it. In some cases... like the Seeds album with "Pushin' Too Hard" and "Can't Seem to Make You Mine" I ended up with three or four copies. Of course, they were pretty cheap. )

Anyhow, I no longer feel like I'm going to have physical copies of a bunch of CDs. They're just dead weight. (Now about the 1200 vinyl disks down in the garage...)

I doubt they'd even try for your average listener, even if you had hundreds of cd's, if it's for personal use, they wouldn't really get much out of it. It's just the sheer arrogance of putting the disclaimer in annoys me

er, anyway, back to topic The subscription idea isn't a bad one, I've got most pf my cd's on my mp3 player and backed up on DVD now anyway. I've started downloading mp3's of the stuff I have on vinyl (which isn't much)...

Originally posted by Base I doubt they'd even try for your average listener, even if you had hundreds of cd's, if it's for personal use, they wouldn't really get much out of it. It's just the sheer arrogance of putting the disclaimer in annoys me

It's not arrogance, it's strategic protection - it's a "reservation of rights" (while they may not actually have the right - esp in different jurisdictions, it is a call out that *if* they do -- they are NOT relinquishing it...ie they are reserving it)

In a way, it's kind of the opposite of arrogance...they are watching their angles (ie they feel exposed enough to craft that) -- that can be much more dangerous...an arrogant guy is going to be complacentleave a hole, the guy who's scared enough to be really on his {censored}...that guy'll get ya

I guess I've got a decent amount of my music converted and a good deal of my spoken word stuff

I generally try to "digitize on next access" and suplement that with spurts of digitizing as a chore as otherwise the task becomes too big

Yes - BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP

storage is pretty damn cheap these days, so back {censored} up!!

as far as the house fire scenario -- yeah, you want an offsite backup (the further you can get it from your primary site the better -- folks in Louisiana just learned that one )

swap trays (or a lot of peeps use external drives for the same purpose) really help there

I've been collecting vinly most of my life, my guess is I have about three thousand records (1500 in NYC, 1500 at my folks house in CT).

I really want to archive everything to WAV, but the sheer volume makes it a daunting task.

It definitely takes a while

1) Storage -- the good thing is, storage is getting cheaper and digital storage is fungible (buy some storage...buy more when needed...there is a goodly chance that the process will be slower than the price-shift)

2)Process - ugh with vinyl this is the bitch -- you are pretty much going real time and the playback equipment really counts

eh, I';m a big proponent of doing it as I do it (not because it's superior - it's inferior...just because it's the only one I found practical for a lazy ass like myself )

I say, start with "some" and work TOWARD "all"

I had most of my collection ripped onto my computer at work, so I wouldn't have to carry the disks to work anymore, or pick which ones to take. Then my hard drive died.

Ugh.

I would suggest ripping using the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format. It's faster than using MP3 or OGG, and smaller than WAV. It's also (as you might guess) lossless.

So basically, save it all on a hard drive or two.....then back up to another hard drive or two.....and also back up to DVD's. Yes, a daunting task. Especially considering that I no longer have a lot of the cd cases that came with my cd's. But finding the title of each song is pretty simple online these days. Well, this will be quite a task for me but I need to organize this {censored}...I got too much music and I have a hard time finding a lot of it. I will start with a few cds a night and maybe by 2010 I will have it all done.

depending on the size of your collection and your "time value"

you *might* (and others might have other opinions) just want to do multiple backups onto media that can take the thing in one big gulp (I like DVDR for deltas, but multiple DVD for primary backup can get kind of messy in the admin)

This is exactly where I'm heading when the future meets my needs at some point...

Can you say what service you use and streaming rate(s) that is available? ...sometimes the streaming rate is had to find in the site adverts - 128kbs won't get my attention - maybe at some point 256kbs or thereabouts would be more the norm. Lossless would be better!

Digitizing all your CDs is very easy and not very time consuming as long as you do it a little at a time.

I digitized ALL my CDs over a period of about a year. However, I did not go to aiff or wav. I still have the CDs in case I want to hear the full CD quality. But I never actually use the CDs anymore.

I went to mp3 files at the lowly rate of 128 kbps. For me, that is good enough and means my collection is available on any device I want.

Realize that stereo CD quality audio turns into about 10 megabytes per minute. So, a one hour music CD is about 600 megabytes. Most CDs are a bit less than that though and a few are more.

So, if you have only 100 CDs, then you only need about 60 gigabytes of storage. If you have 1000 CDs, then you need 600 gigabytes.

Nevertheless, the convenience of having only about 1/10th the storage space in a 128 kbps mp3 is a nice feature to me and more than offsets the signal quality lost in compression.

Now, archiving vinyl and tape is a big hassle. That would take a long time because you'll need to break up the audio files with a wave editor, and then supply names for all the tracks.

I'm in the slow and steady process of uploading all my CD's to itunes. I've got an 80gb USB drive as the master (buss powered, simple to use anywhere with the laptop), a FW drive for backup, and of course my ipod (40gb gen 3) for selected portability.

Except for some very high quality classical, I'm going aac @192, and it sounds great, at about 1/3 the space of .wav.

I've put everything I've done at 192k mp3s. The quality's great without the massive space requirements of WAV. My thought was that if I needed WAV quality for something specific I could always get it from somewhere. I've never needed it yet.

Backups of the collection are essential. I found an easy, reliable way to do it. Simply gave the whole thing to a friend in another state, plus put one in the basement.

Please tell me you're kidding about the quality. An MP3 at 192k is nothing qualitywise to the CD audio.

Try this trick. take a song, convert it to MP3. Now, import that MP3 audio and the same songs CD audio in .wav or aiff format into your DAW. invert the polarity of one, align them, and hit play. What you hear is the audio the MP3 lost in the conversion....and you'll be amazed at how much that is.

Drives are cheap. If you insist on continuing this practice, for God's sake don't get rid of the original CD's. You will some day want to listen to what the music actually sounded like, and not the heavily compressed, fidelity compromised mp3's.

Ryst I know what you mean. When I was in college about 10 years ago, my apartment was robbed. They took every single piece of music I owned. I still haven't replaced most of it. At the time it was probably about 150 to 200 albums. I generally, don't get to uptight about possessions, but that put me on the edge of sanity. Luckily my axe was with me or else I probably would have had aneurysm.

I think I am going to convert all my cd's to aiff files. Then I can get rid of them. I just have too many of them. Plus storage is so cheap that I don't mind the large file size. A few years ago a friend of mine did the same thing and I thought he was crazy. He just gave his cd's away after digitizing them. Now it looks like he had a great idea.

I've been taking mine to a local used CD store. I've already paid for my ipod, all the accessories, 80gb USB hdd for the files, car dock, power supply, dock, extra FW cables, plus it paid for an airport express base station that I use to send itunes to the home stereo.

I digitized my collection of 350 or so CDs not long ago, mainly so I could listen to them on my iRiver.

Recently I've obtained a "squeezebox" device from slim devices that I have in place of the CD player in my house now. I have given my CD player away. The squeezebox plays music files that are on the computer in the other room, and has a display readable from several feet away, and a remote.

The main reason was that I was tired of the space the CDs were taking up. I do not have a large house.

I use the .ogg format at around 256k instead of MP3. FLAC would probably be a better choice though.

There are services out there that will rip and encode your CDs for you for around a buck each. Otherwise you can do them a few at a time as others have suggested.