Converting your music collection (well, all the damned CDs at least) to mp3: C/D, RFI

192 is very good. I wouldn't go below 128.

obviously you'd need a player and ripper that can handle ogg - i use db poweramp which is free and the quality is excellent (it's great for mp3 as well as it uses the Lame encoder)

if you really want to cut data cd-rs (cause you haven't got enough disk space or whatever) then you should be able to store around 10 albums worth on one cd-r. for archival purposes i use Mitsui silver - most of the pro web and digitial media sites seem to think these are the best.

i'm more concerned with getting my old rare vinyl into mp3 format tho

And yeah, it's me that's been selling back the odd Dead C albums back to Amoeba. I just don't listen to them as much anymore.

But in the meantime, away stuff goes. And AAC is very handy. You would know, Elvis -- what's your recommendation for a good hard drive in terms of price/storage size? I'm kinda tired of burning to CDRs (and have yet to break down and get a DVD-R drive).

The La Cie desktop drives are pretty good. I'm still archiving everything to DVD-R so I have another backup of everything but I'm thinking of getting another HD to mirror everything to.

--alt-present-standard is the product of a bunch of audio encoding geeks arguing on a web forum, if that helps you feel at home.

http://www.blacktree.com/apps/iTunes-LAME/index.php

so buy an extra computer and rip two at a time. geez, people, this isn't that complicated.

(i don't know why i care, i usually listen to my mp3s through an FM transmitter that makes everything sound like shit anyway. but there's always the chance that the dj will have a heart attack and i'll hvae to run to my car for the iPod...)

No offence, but that's really bad. For VBR mp3s at ~192kbs, just use --alt-preset standard with LAME 3.90.3, or -V 2 with 3.96.1. Download LAME at rarewares.org.

Wait for someone else to do it and post it on slsk and usenet.

Seriously, someone had done that with some vinyl I was going to digitize and they saved me the work.

Revive.

The accumulated stacks of burnt media can get tough to navigate. A modest organizing scheme and (hand-labeled) plain paper sleeves has served up to a point -- but keeping these formless, characterless discs together seems best handled be centralization.

Tech-wise good quality CDRs and DVD-Rs are roughly 25¢ apiece and DVD burners -- even externals -- can be had for less than 60 bucks. Hard drives have reliable and compact storage for less than 30¢ per gigabyte. I don't IPOD, but i do have three different CD/MP3 players (boombox, car, & home stereo) -- so, I archive most of my music to a hard drive and burn MP3-CDs for playback.

Format-wise, MP3s seem to have the edge in flexibility for me since that’s all my aforementioned players can decode. Rips and conversions are made between 192-320 kbps with the latest codec (LAME 3.98) -- and I still use CBR during the rip (once again, because of my players, and, since the conversion from CBR to VBR isn't that degradating).

To organize and label new tracks i use the free version of MediaMonkey which gets all the tags and album art together. If you copy the codec into the correct directory, you get unlimited ripping without having to upgrade to the "pay" version. The playback portion of MediaMonkey is fine (even though i probably use MediaPlayer just as often) so, for now, everything happens from this program.

I'm planning on building a LINUX media pc in the next year-or-so where terabyte-sized drives will offer plenty of elbow room for stax and back-ups. My thoughts are that this will serve as my primary digital archive, playback, and burning platform for the next decade.

How are you managing your digital stax?

So how many mp3-cdrs for playback do you have, and how do you organize those?

A couple hundred - oddly characterized; i have a "section" for complete discographies and the rest are pretty much categorized by genre -- the problem is that many of the most listenable discs have albums from several different musical styles on them. These, of, course, form a whole new section of their own. In fact, my "New Stuff" category gets a fresh burn every time i assemble another discs-worth of new material -- cattywompass on the best of days.

Sounds like a lot of work.

It can be - but the wealth of out-of-print and hard-to-find stuff available online is worth the effort.

i've been ripping to mp3 to a 500 gb hd (w/ no backup as of yet...haven't sold the cds yet but i know i'm being stupid), still have a lot of space, my whole collection will probably end up > 250 gb @ 320 kb for the most part (most of the dled stuff is 192 and up but it's not that much, still on my internal hd for the most part, i'll merge everything after i'm finished ripping. I use mediamonkey as a one stop shop & library so i paid for gold (need it for some of the file monitoring options in addition to ripping, although the codec thing is nice to know. you get 3 licenses anyway for 20 bucks so i think i'm set). got too much stuff for some of the online/hear-yr library-anywhere services which i don't need anyway, rhapsody, last fm et al following me around is more than enough. i tried ogg a few years ago but the ripping/burning/playback was spotty with whatever sw i was using so i gave up. I don't see an overriding reason for me to go there again but if i was starting out that or flac would look more appealing.

dumbass me is trying to do my whole collection before I move so I can store all my cds. Became clear today that I won't finish.

No back-up?!? That's what drives me crazy; what do you have to do a RAID, or DVD-Rs, or what? That's the biggest problem with digital stax, keeping the backup up to date -- and also, that instead of a single hard drive you really should be buying two.

...this really IS a lot of work.

my backup is called "praying the hard drive won't die"

I had once planned on converting my stax into MP3, but I never got around to it. With so much new stuff coming via download, I have enough trouble keeping up with those.

Today, however, I'm using some disc scanning software to "save" about 500GB of digital stax off an infected hard drive. It's crazy, the thought of losing those files was troubling, but not nearly as much as I thought - and certainly not as difficult as the specter of losing my albums.

I mean, I sure am proud that I have digital copies of all 40-some volumes of the Grateful Dead's Dick's Picks, but I don't approach listening to it with nearly the commitment I have when slipping in a disc.

lol 2003

Sick of m4a, itunes is so fast and easy to organize but I am tired of the dull spreadsheet like interface. I have to re-do everything as an mp3.

I don't understand... do you just want a more whiz-bang, colorful, flashy interface?