Archiving Music CD's, any input?

and I thought deciphering Ken was hard...........

For what it's worth, my friend used Windows Media Player Rip. It created 12,000+ files. He's happy with it, but suggests a second portable hard drive to backup the original one.

alan, thanks!

I'm doing two rips. one of them will be what your friend did, using Windows Media Player to rip WMA lossless individual tracks.

I'll then have an additional backup of the whole CD compressed as a FLAC. I like redundancy.

anderson, the problem is that number of tunes 16GB holds depends on your compression standard. I don't want to use a lossy compression standard. A lossless standard will only put 600 songs/50 albums on a 16GB drive.

So like Life, they're always a catch

I packed up my CD's and VHS- liking the clean lines / nothing on the shelves (for now)

An update:

I finally had a beer with a computer expert friend of mine. He told me to rip the CD's using EAC in a FLAC standard, rip the CD's as a whole with a built CUE file.

It's what I had come up with and start doing. I'm very comfortable now. Slowly filling disk space. It is about 300 MB per CD, but I'm doing two separate rips, so it's 600 MB per CD. I'll be close to 400 GB for my files.

Deciphering Ken IS easier. Afterall, we get to help him think. . .


Back to the regularly scheduled thread.

I've got an update and a translation.

First, the update.
Bought a 2TB external hard drive to back-up all the files. During my first (large) transfer it died. A replacement is on its way. I ordered another (different company this time) so I have two back-ups.

The second issue is that I'm going to be getting rid of 600 CD's. Not sure how to do that. Looks like I might be giving them to my local library. They're not worth month. CD's don't sell on eBay much, it looks.

Translater of last post:
Talking to a computer expert friend, he said if I want to move my music CD's to the computer I should use the program called "Exact Audio Copy". If I want to save space I should use a space-saver format, and he suggested one that doesn't reduce the quality of the recording. The one he suggested is a standard called "FLAC" which is a free, publically available standard format. Finally, when I convert my CD's to the computer, I can break the CD's into separate songs or keep the CD whole, like it is on the CD itself. Only problem with the later, which is what you want, is that you don't know where the song breaks are, unless you have the program create an list of the songs (a CUE file). The advantage of the single file is two fold. First, have much fewer files to deal with (2 per CD instead of about a dozen). Second, if any song doesn't have a gap of silence (often found on live albums or artists who have one song prelude another), the computer will put a gap in between the two songs. It's annoying and not how the CD was. This way, if I ever want to go back and recreate the CD exactly, I can.