Who's archiving their CD collections?

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TS | Thomas

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Out of interest. I've started this about a week ago.
Ripping CDs to lossless Wav
Then encoding them to loseless FLAC - http://flac.sourceforge.net/ - being that it's Open Source (Unlike WMA or ALAC) & has other neat features, e.g. streaming support, good software compatibility.
Then use foobar2000 to Replaygain & Freedb the tags.

foobar2000's built-in "Convert" feature they can be easily transcoded into other formats as required, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, etc. for taking to work on my MP3 player. No need for me to keep CDs at arms length ;)
About 14GB used up so far.
 
I do believe Papeh (LNCPapa for the newcomers) was doing the same thing a while ago. I believe he's got a few hundreds of gigs of space eaten up in that process.

XServeRAID.jpg


That's a pic of the FLAC hog. :p
 
I myself encode them with LAME in VBR (variable bit rate for the newcomers :p ). I set it to 128-min & 320-max. I've tried encoding an album in this quality & FLAC & unless I'm using very high quality sound systems (of which I don't have in my room), I can't really notice the difference.

It's different in the living room of course but then all my CDs are in the living room. :p
 
Yeah, I figure I'd future proof em though. I mean I can now easily transcode them to MP3, ogg or whatever this way.
 
That's it exactly Thomas - plus I'm in the process of building my media box for my living room entertainment unit which will pull all my flac files from my fileserver. I intend to put a pretty decent sound card, probably something in the Envy24 series of chips, into that machine so audio fidelity is kind of important. I'm actually doing research right now on high fidelity sound cards (don't need EAX or any other fancy sound imaging etc.) under $300 US. Get's kinda confusing in this area because all the reviews I read say that whichever card they bought is absolutely wonderful and there is no comparison to any other sound card.
 
Well, I think my method is slightly different. I'm just ripping CDs to MP3s with Roxio 7.5.

2 of my system's 4 250GB drives are designated for music storage in this manor. I've had the PC for a little over 2 weeks and am 255 CDs in with 1832 to go. Very boring project but it will be well worth it when I can hide away all the huge binders that eat up precious space.

Highly recommended method. Pick what you want to hear in the car, burn a disc, take it with. Never any worries about losing an original. But then again, I've been burning copies of my CDs for 5 years so that I never have to use the original after I first buy it.
 
That's part of the reason I've gone flac Noyz - in case I want to burn CDs from my machine without having to find the CDs. I try to never burn CDs from MP3s or any other lossy format. With flac I don't have to worry about any difference in quality between my files on my fileserver or the original CDs, as long as I have a good rip. I now do all my rips with EAC (I admit I didn't start that way) and I may go back and re-rip my first 200+ CDs with it instead of cdparanoia in linux. Before moving to flac I was compressing everything to 320kbps MP3 - but even that is still lossy. With a TB of space I would definitely stop where you're at and give flac a try for a few albums. If you ever need to transcode your flac files to MP3 for any reason (like a portable that doesn't support flac...ahemiPodcough) then you can do it quickly and in batch from your flac files via several tools such as foobar2000. Believe me, I went from a few hundred albums at 320kbps MP3 to deleting all those files and re-ripping/encoding to flac.
 
You I'm using EAX as well. I used Audiograbber initially but I noticed when playing a few files they've got some pops on them. Re-ripping to WAV with EAC then re-encoding the FLAC & these pops were gone. Funny thing is I never noticed it with the Audigy 2 ZS, ahh well. Before noticing now then later :)
 
What kind of functionality are you looking for? Will creating mountable ISOs work for you? Not exactly sure how the CD+G layout looks but if it's the audio tracks followed by a data track you could still use flac, as long as you don't need to use the lyrics while in that format. Take a look at this plugin for winamp also - allows you to play mp3 files while displaying the graphic info. Costs $25 US though - but there is a demo version that you can use to see if it works. There is also this one http://pages.infinit.net/belier/cdgplugin.exe for free but I don't know anything about either of these.

If he has a linux machine or access to one for the purpose of ripping he may want to look at this link: http://www.kibosh.org/cdgtools/index.php - and it's free :)
 
He basically wants to be able to downloads his existing CD+G's onto a laptop and be able to play them back at parties etc. Without having to haul around all 300 disc and the player.

He has no access to linux. I will check out those links.

Thanks for the recommendations.....
 
LNC, I downloaded that WinAmp plugin the other night at home. I never could get the free/trial version to work. Kept on saying it must be registered. I never could get past that point. But I think that IS what he is looking for.

I will try http://pages.infinit.net/belier/cdgplugin.exe tonight when I get home.

Thanks again....
 
LNCPapa- You are the man! Thats exactly what he was looking for. Bought a Plextor drive the other day and he is off and running.....


Thanks again...
 
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