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Big Task
Here is a most of my CD collection. It may not look that bad, until you notice the stacks of CDs on spindles in the back. As much of a mess as this looks, the state of my digital archive of this music is worse. (Yes, I know CDs are "digital" but that's not what I mean).
Some of those CDs are ripped to a digital archive, some are not. Of the ones that are ripped, I have used different encoding bitrates over the years, anywhere from 128 (yikes) to 256kbps. Most of the ripped music exists on a network share drive, but there are a few CDs that might be only on one particular computer where I ripped it for convenience. Also, among my digital music are a few albums for which I no longer have a physical copy (the CD was lost or damaged, etc). Also, I have a moderate collection of DRM music that I've purchased from the iTunes store (sorry Jamie).
Every time I look at this mess, I realize that I should do something to clean it up. Also, I find CDs that I'd like to be listening to but get forgotten in the pile and haven't yet been ripped. The state of my current digital archive is so bad I probably need to just start over.
This seems like a common problem, so I'm going to blog about the task. I want to be able to play the audio on iTunes and un-hacked iPods, but I don't want Apple lock-in (yes, I know I bought Apple DRM locked-in music, but please allow me to be inconsistent here). I also want to be able to access the music from multiple computers, and not only while connected to my home network. This presents a bit of a challenge as the music collection will only grow over time and my laptop hard drive space is always a premium.
Right now, I'm thinking about ripping the CDs to FLAC format for my "archive" copy, and then converting to a medium-bitrate mp3 for day-to-day playback (160kbps stereo?). That way, I can have a pristine digital copy, but still fit large amounts of music on portable devices and laptops. The only problem is that this becomes a multi-step process for adding new music to the system.
I would also love to hear advice from you guys out there. How have you done it? What do you like or dislike about your system? Please share any thoughts in the comments!
Jamie says:
- March 5, 2008 11:22 AM
Jamie says:
I forgot to address the copying to laptop issue. So I only need songs on my laptop when I travel and I only bring along the things that are in my current playlist. Winamp has a plugin that allows you to query the playlist info via http, so I wrote a program that will query the playlist and copy the entries (files) to a network share folder that my laptop references as offline files. As long as I sync my offline files before taking my laptop off the network I have access to all the music in my current playlist.
- March 5, 2008 11:28 AM
JVP says:
Good thoughts Jamie. I hadn't yet thought about what program I would use to do the ripping. I've also read that there can be a big difference in mp3 quality depending on the encoder, so I need to look into the different options there.
- March 5, 2008 12:14 PM
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I'm doing something similar to what you describe. I have a linux server with RAID 1 (mirroring) where I keep all of my music. The first thing I do when I buy a new CD is rip it to FLAC. I use Winamp for my ripper ($20 for the pro version), and I have been very happy with it. I intended to build an automated process to convert the FLAC files to MP3, but Winamp makes transcoding easy enough that I never got around to it.
If you want to automate it, I believe ffmpeg could do the transcoding. I don't believe it would pull the tags over, but there are libraries that make reading/writing tags easy to handle. So building an automated converter shouldn't be too difficult.