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[brossmac]

I've pretty much decided to digitize my entire CD collection onto a nice big hard drive.

However, I'm interested in hearing from people who've done it.  Any regrets?  Any tips?

Brad

[GHammer]

I've pretty much decided to digitize my entire CD collection onto a nice big hard drive.

However, I'm interested in hearing from people who've done it.  Any regrets?  Any tips?

Brad

Carefully consider your directory structure. Same for the file names. If you do nothing else, those two will make your life easier as time goes by.
I use artist/album for the directory structure. I use artist - track - title for the filename.

Decide on a format (APE, FLAC, MP3, WMA) and stick with it. Digital audio has the same kind of 'flavor of the month' as any other computer-related, subjective thing. Personally, I like and use APE format.

If you go with APE as your format, you may wish to consider ripping to a single file and using APL files for the individual selections from the master APE file.

Why? Because it's cool. Because then if you have duplicate selections you can simply use an APL to point to the proper track and save a little space. And, did I mention it's cool?

Decide on a tagging standard. You know, what data do you want to have in your tags? Basic info like artist, album, genre. Want year, liner notes, lyrics, album art?

I love my digital collection, wouldn't trade it for the world. Gives me complete flexibility in what I want to hear, how I want to hear it, and by using a lossless format I can transcode to any other (like MP3) without a problem when I want to take music on the road. First thing I do when I get a new CD is rip, tag, add to the library. Then the CD goes into a closet somewhere, haven't taken them out in quite some time now.

I'll also say that you should get additional physical drive space equal to your music collection. Then backup your music as you rip and tag. You surely do not want to trust all your work to a single drive. It'll surely fail and you'll be back at square one.

Have fun!

[jgreen]

Been there, done that, set my music free.  I think you'll find that most users here keep their CDs purely for backup.  There is no downside to this, other than you'll start craving music more than oxygen. 
The exact copy of a CD is a WAV file.  I recommend you rip to WAV, and only think about lossless compression (APE, FLAC, WMA)  later, if you get tight for drive space.  Buy a much bigger drive than you think you'll need.  Once I got the hang of music-on-demand (rather than music locked inside a CD), I ran out and bought a LOT more CDs to digitize.  MC makes it simple to organize music strewn across multiple drives, so a haphazard aproach is fine, also.
As a rule of thumb, a CD platter is roughly 500mb of data.  The max size for the format is 650mb, I believe, while CD versions of vinyl albums are smaller, roughly 400mb.  This should help you estimate your drive space needs.
99% of the time, the YADB will get the album and track info for you.  If you're having trouble getting track names properly, yell for help.  The whole process should take about 10 minutes per CD, depending on your rip speed.  If it's taking 45 minutes, you're not ripping, you're recording, and you need to start over.
Good luck, and have fun with it.  And plan on buying more CDs.

[jgreen]

Ghammer knows MC a lot more than I do, and probably knows a lot more about audio than I do.  But I think he's getting way too stressed over the directory structure, etc.  The reason to use MC and not WMP, is that you can go back and change anything / everything later.  As for "carefully considering", I never have and hope I never will.

BTW--Ghammer, congratulations to you and Mrs. Hammer!  Loved your pix!

[Bill Kearney]

I'll add to the directory hierarchy value.  Using Artist\Album\ makes it easy to handle the tracks outside of MC as well.  It's easy to drag & drop from this hierarchy over onto a portable player, backups or anything else.  The files themselves also benefit from being intelligently named.  Naming the "Artist - ## - Name - Album.ext" has always worked well for me.  The files are already in folders so you could, in theory, not bother putting the artist name on the start.  But if you started mixing and matching tracks in other directories you might regret them all starting with those track numbers. 

A lot of this fiddling is based on the weaknesses of various MP3 players.  If your player *properly* reads ID3v2 fields then it really doesn't matter what filenames you use.  But many players have enough trouble with this that it's often just 'easier' to make the names sensible and avoid the trouble.  There's also limits on how long a full pathname can be.  Putting things with extremely long names can pose problems if you want to move the files onto older media.  It's a good rule of thumb to try staying under 255 characters in length for the total pathname of a file.  That's the WHOLE pathname, not just the track itself.  This is why I have files on a server named "T2" using the pathname e:\home\media\mp3\music\artist\album  but they're shared out as \\t2\music to keep things short when MC imports them.  What my local backup tools on the server require versus what MC uses are different but MC doesn't care as long as it can get to the files.

It's also one of these 'eternal arguments' that won't ever really have a right answer. 

MC does make it easy to 'fix' this later on if needed.  But BE CAREFUL as the tools for doing this can make a mess if you use them wrong.  As in, removing all the tags when the database is wrong, etc...

[jgreen]

Ripping CDs to mp3 IS the wrong answer.  While mp3s can sound very good, they are a "lossy" format, meaning that to get the file that small you have thrown away some of the music.  The difference will be small; while you could tell between the two, you would not notice it when listening to the mp3.

The point is, why throw the music away so soon?  A 250gb drive will cost you $100 and hold 500 CDs, or  $7500 worth of music.  It would be a shame to turn $7500 into a pile of mp3s.

I'm hoping the previous poster is talking about mp3 secondary copies.  This is a great idea.  Rip your collection to WAV, or to a losssless format such as APE, FLAC or WMA (lossless).  Then for your ipod create mp3s, which will be much smaller.

As for long filenames, it becomes an issue if you backup data to CD or DVD, or if you burn mp3s onto another CD, I guess. 

Backups are crucial, unless you've ripped your CDs to mp3, and then I wouldn't worry about it.

[GHammer]

Ghammer knows MC a lot more than I do, and probably knows a lot more about audio than I do.  But I think he's getting way too stressed over the directory structure, etc.  The reason to use MC and not WMP, is that you can go back and change anything / everything later.  As for "carefully considering", I never have and hope I never will.

When I started, I was the same. I had 'rock' 'blues' 'jazz' 'misc' and dumped all selections into those directories.
Once I started wanting to get a certain song or just see what was what, I found that did not work really well.
I'm kinda careful. I like structure. It was easy enough to get things in order, I used a tool to move everything into place.
But if I were just starting to rip my collection, I'd just as soon have it in some sort of order rather than just randomly placed here and there.

Also, as much as I like MC, I don't ever plan around not changing.

BTW--Ghammer, congratulations to you and Mrs. Hammer!  Loved your pix!

Thanks! We're quite happy!!!

[modelmaker]

I have been recording and ripping all my rock & pop to mp3 VBR Hi Quality for 4 and 1/2 years now with no regrets. Once ripped, I never listen to the CDs again, so my ears really don't notice anything "missing". I do rip and record classical & jazz to ape, but that's only 15 to 20% of my collection. I do recomend a lossless format for classical and jazz.

I do use an expander to add a bit of dynamic range, which I have had since my vinyl days and the setting is still about the same as I used for them. My EQ pretty much takes care of the rest. I have to say the fine tuning I do is minimal and reflects my listening tastes more than anything else.

I will admit that my ears are no longer what they used to be and I don't listen "critically" most of the time, (I guess I'm a retired audiophile!). 90% of my listen is at conversation to medium sound levels. I listen mostly to rock/pop.

Listening environment and habits also count. I don't have a soundproof room, so ambient noise is also a consideration; heating/cooling system - mine is forced air so there's always a bit of noise from that, streetnoise is another,etc.

Throw in the 6000 albums that I have ripped and recorded, plus 6000 more LPs yet to be recorded and the new CDs and downloads to be added, the cost of storage does become a factor. I have just added another 200gig drive to the 400gigs (x2 for the back up drives) I already have internally, (again, x2 for the external backups) and it really does add up. (btw that's a total of 1800gig for the math mathmatically challenged ) and I highly recommend doubling the memory for at least one complete duplicate backup of all your music files.

So, for all those reasons mp3 VBR Hi is the compromise I chose. My only real recomendation is to try out the different formats and compare and take the other things I mentioned above into consideration and find a balance that you can live with.

[jgreen]

About a year ago I tried converting some 1411kbps WAVs to ~256 kbps VBR mp3s.  A/B against the original WAVs, I felt the two were "virtually" indistinguishable.  Once a DSP was added to the mp3s, the mp3s sounded superior to the original WAVs.  Superior, but signal fidelity was not preserved (it can't be preserved if it's improved).  My recommendation to retain WAV format, if possible, is on the theory that the original signal record is best kept intact until you actively change it (as with a DSP).  Obviously there are practical considerations that intervene, but plenty of newcomers to digitizing may not understand the concepts beyond digital=mp3.  I was one of them; the first time around I ripped my entire collection to WMA 160s.

IMO, if you're satisfied with mp3s, sign up for (legal) Napster.  I did, and it has opened my eyes.  For $10/month I doubled my library.  Let's go back to that 500-cd collection costing $7500.  You're going to take the time and effort to rip all those to mp3, when you could just download them over 3 or 4 nights?  Fully tagged and in  proper directory structure?  Oh, and the cost?  At $10/month, it would take you 62.5 years to pay off the 500 cds.  At my age, I like my odds with Napster.

IMO again, the difference between WAV and mp3 is paltry compared to the difference between a good and bad mix.  Clipping, flat staging--nothing can save a lousy mix.   Beyond that, going from analog to WAV throws out much more signal than going from WAV to mp3.  Therefore anyone converting CDs to mp3s can take heart.  But if you have the choice, retain the signal intact as far along the path to the speaker as you can.

12,000 albums?  You spent serious money on them, unless they're punch-outs.  Today that 1800 gigs costs less than a grand to double your capacity, and you spent a LOT more than a grand on your music.  As for the 4 1/2 years you've been working on it, join the darn club.  We're all going to have to keep re-digitizng anyway, as standards (hopefully) improve. 

[modelmaker]

AS far as preserving the WAVs - he would still have the original CDs as do I and I have never needed to convert to anything else except to replace everything after losing a hard drive or two, hence now, double backups. It's a lot faster to copy a drive then re-ripping all the CDs.

IMO, if you're satisfied with mp3s, sign up for (legal) Napster.  I did, and it has opened my eyes.  For $10/month I doubled my library.

Napster's music files are WMAs at 128 kbs (at 99c/ea) and there is a big difference between that and mp3s at 256-320 kbs.

12,000 albums?  You spent serious money on them, unless they're punch-outs.  Today that 1800 gigs costs less than a grand to double your capacity, and you spent a LOT more than a grand on your music.

The money for about 75% of those didn't come out my personal funds (rather the company I worked for at the timehttp://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=28775.0), many were promos and samplers and some cutouts. I also don't make the kind of money I did then, (I'm semi-retired), so long term budgetary considerations are important. By the time I've caught up with my backlog, I'll probably have tripled the memory I have now.
Not everyone has a grand (or 3 if doing it all in WAV). My computer and music are also not my only expenses.

[brossmac]

I'd say my hearing is pretty decent (though as I approach 40 it can only get worse).  And though I'm not an audiophile by any stretch of the imagination, I did work briefly as an audio engineer for NPR, so I have an ear for sound quality.

When I've done a bunch of A/B test with WAV/MP3/FLAC/OGG, etc. I don't personally (based on my listening habits) hear much loss until I really go down in bitrate (I'd say less than 160 or so).  So I'm pretty comfortable saving the money and space and going with HI-Q VBR MP3s.

I pay $5/month for Yahoo Music Unlimited, which is pretty much like Napster-to-Go.  I LOVE it and definitely see it as a big part of my music mix.

I also realize that I listen to certain music differently.  There is the whole Jazz/Classical issue that was mentioned.  I am also very fond of ambient space music, and since there tends to be lots of quiet passages I will do my best to make sure those sound as good as possible.  But there are some albums that I enjoy on a fairly superficial level that I will probably rip at a lower bitrate (maybe 128 or 160).  These are some of the ablums that have faded from my interest as my tastes have changed but still have sentimental value to me.

We'll see how it goes.

I think I'm gonna start with this little external drive:

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10404066&SearchEngine=DealTime&SearchTerm=10404066&Type=PE&Category=Comp&Gad=0&dcaid=15891

Thanks for the input...

[hit_ny]

Another hands-up for directory structure. I take it a step further

Genre/Artist/Album ( if Artist has more than 3 albums) else
Genre/Artist-Album

I moved to MC form the winamp world where if you dont have any notion of dir strucutre you will get lost fast. In fact i did once i crossed a large amt of albums. Thats where MC comes in. I still stick with the dir structure tho. Its generic enough to work with any player out there. MC just handles the view.

Most of my collecition is 192K+ or LAME Aps. I'm not into orchestral/classical music so for the remaining 95% of genres out there it works great. Space savings are good but i still run out of space. So as others have said i use a redundant set of drives to backup to every fortnight.

[Click Cardo]

IMO, if you're satisfied with mp3s, sign up for (legal) Napster.  I did, and it has opened my eyes.  For $10/month I doubled my library.  Let's go back to that 500-cd collection costing $7500.  You're going to take the time and effort to rip all those to mp3, when you could just download them over 3 or 4 nights?  Fully tagged and in  proper directory structure?  Oh, and the cost?  At $10/month, it would take you 62.5 years to pay off the 500 cds.  At my age, I like my odds with Napster.

I had been using Napster download for the past 9 months and there is a lot to like about it.  But I just quit.  Everytime my hard drive went bad or I just wanted to re-install XP I'd have to download all the files again.  Also, even though I have Kplisch THX speakers, I really prefer hearing my music on my stereo.  Finally, even though they have a great selection there are still too many albums they do not have completely or where you cannot download all the tracks.

[dpippel]

I ripped my entire 400+ disc collection to FLAC several months ago and seldom go back to the source Redbook CDs. Sometimes I do merely because I enjoy the DACs in my Denon 2900, but bit-perfect playback via MC or Foobar through my Chaintech AV710 and then via optical to my Aragon Soundstage is wonderful as well. It's a very convenient way to listen to music with little or no degradation of audio quality as long as you're using a good DAC.

In my opinion though, ripping your CDs to a lossy format like MP3 is a losing game (no pun intended). Lossless codecs like FLAC and APE preserve ALL of the information in the original audio data. MP3 obviously does not. With 200GB hard drives selling for $99 these days there is just no good financial reason to use lossy encoding. If you do rip to MP3 you're not truly *archiving* your audio data anyway because you're altering it. Once it's done you can never go back without re-ripping the original CD again. It's better to preserve the integrity of the original data, then re-encode to MP3 or WMA when you move files to your DAP. This is the methodology I use and it works like a charm. I've got CD-quality audio from PC to my home system and convenient access to my entire audio collection for my DAP as well. It's a win-win situation.

Good luck!

[Michael Horton]

Thinking of doing the same thing.

Can someone confirm that image and lyrics can be stored internally in ape files?

Thanks

Mike

[Nolonemo]

With 200GB hard drives selling for $99 these days there is just no good financial reason to use lossy encoding.

Actually, I use 3 drives for my collection: A drive holding the music files; a drive on a networked computer to which I mirror the main drive when I add or change files to it; and a third backup drive that is stored off-site (at my office).  So 200GB really costs me $300. 

I don't care about keeping lossless "originals."  I can't hear the difference at 256VRB encoding, and my aging ears sure aren't going to get any better...

[Michael Horton]

[I can't hear the difference at 256VRB encoding, and my aging ears sure aren't going to get any better...

256 kbs sounds alright on my bose computer speakers most of the time, and sounds ok on cd-r's that I make to listen to in the car. 

When you really notice how bad an idea mp3's are is when you make a cd-r music cd from mp3's to play on a real stereo where the cd-r is in a mix with factory CDs. This is one situation in which I am failed by mp3 sound quality.

I'm going back to ape, as I find myself in a situation where I'm playing music on a real stereo for the first time in years, rather than on the computer/car stereo. Making mixed CDs via MC11 is still part of the plan though

[modelmaker]

From dpipple:

If you do rip to MP3 you're not truly *archiving* your audio data anyway because you're altering it. Once it's done you can never go back without re-ripping the original CD again. It's better to preserve the integrity of the original data, then re-encode to MP3 or WMA when you move files to your DAP.

I don't need to archive my audio data, that's what the CDs are for, that is the archive, the integrity is also there and all preserved.

MC is my DAP, my Jukebox.

From mhorton:

256 kbs sounds alright on my bose computer speakers most of the time, and sounds ok on cd-r's that I make to listen to in the car.

I haven't had speakers connected to my computer in over two years, all my listening is done thru my relatively higher end audio system. I rarely mix the two formats (CD/mp3) in a listening session. I don't make mix CDs - that's what MC's playlists and random play are for.

I joke about my ears getting older, but I do still have quite excellent hearing and if I wanted to really hear true high fidelity, I wouldn't be grabbing a CD, I'd be putting a direct cut or half speed master LP on the turntable and cranking that up! And I do from time to time.

For me, MC (and the HTPC), is my jukebox. It gives me convenient, efficient, economical access to most of my music and video collection thruout my house.

With a few tweaks of the audio system, the mp3 256 sound, while not bit for bit perfect, is quite excellent.

[Magicland]

What's a CD? Oh, yeah, that archival backup that the music used to be delivered on. I've long since ripped my entire collection to high bitrate MP3's, which reside on a MediaPC (along with hundreds of music videos). When I want to change music for the car, I just download from the MediaPC to my 20 gig OmniFi (running the Linux OpenFi replacement for the crappy software which originally controlled the Rockford-Fosgate OminFi). Never have to put music on an archaic medium such as a CD...

[hit_ny]

Trite point but i don't think we will be abandoning the CD for a while yet.

It's the preferred medium to receive music that you can then rip to store on the PC.You get better quality (from the masses point of view) from a CD than any of the (legal) download options available.

The day they offer lossless downloads (prolly never), is when we might think of abandonding the CD. Even then i think ppl will still prefer to have that plastic disc if for anything as the master backup as well as the artwork too.

[NickM]

Probably not the right place to post this... BUT, I was in Chatuchak last weekend and they had DVD's, each with 4Gig of VBR MP3's complete with ALL the tagging information (startlingly correct) for a few Dollars.  Now, I didn't buy any, but on my return I went to the local CD shop and asked them if they would do a CD ripping service (presuming I bought the CD's from them).  And, low & behold, they said yes.  For an extra SGD1 (that's about 30 British pence), I can take my external hard drive to the shop & get the music - along with my CD.  The CD will go straight to the cupboard...

The CD is DEAD

nick

[NickM]

Sorry - forgot to add this.... Whilst we're at it, let's abandon the DVD too!  Once you can get a DVD ripped with all the menu & chapter stuff, then we're home & dry. 
nick

[sonicbox]

There is one vendor that has lossless content: http://www.musicgiants.com -- 4 major labels only, though.

[dpippel]

Actually, I use 3 drives for my collection: A drive holding the music files; a drive on a networked computer to which I mirror the main drive when I add or change files to it; and a third backup drive that is stored off-site (at my office).  So 200GB really costs me $300.

No offense, but you're probably being more careful about redundancy than most people would be for their ripped music collections. Even so, $1.33 a gigabyte is still dirt cheap for the kind of backup integrity you have in place.

[dpippel]

I don't need to archive my audio data, that's what the CDs are for, that is the archive, the integrity is also there and all preserved.

Until they get scratched, or cracked, or warped, or lost, or develop CD rot, etc. Ripping to lossless gives you two copies of the same data - *always* better than one. Lossless also gives you the flexibility to convert directly to any lossy format/bitrate instantly. If you rip everything to, say, 256K VBR MP3 and decide later that you want higher or lower bitrate lossy files, you're stuck with ripping from the CDs again - a slow and time-consuming process compared to converting from a FLAC or APE file that's already on your hard drive.

But, whatever. Different strokes for different folks. Ripping to lossless works best for me for the reasons I mentioned in my original post.