Dear LJ, What Storage Method Do I Want?

[dr4b]

Okay, so like, I have somewhere on the order of 800 CDs or so, and unlike most of the world, I haven't really ripped any of them to mp3.

Suddenly I am feeling like it would be a really good idea to rip many of them. I don't intend to get rid of the CDs themselves, but it would be nice to have them all in digital format.

However, I don't really have room for all of them on my hard drive. I estimate on an average what, 50-100MB per album, depending on quality... I'd need around 80 GB if I actually ripped the entire collection.

So, I've figured the following are my options:

1) Rip them, burn them to DVDs. It'd take like 20 DVDs. I don't like this plan, it feels like they'd still take up a lot of space and it'd be easy to lose one and there goes 40 of my CDs or whatever.

2) Get an external hard drive. I went to Best Buy and could have gotten one of these (160 GB Western Digital "My Book") for example, for $80. It'd certainly do the trick, though it's sort of big and clunky, and part of the point is that I'd like to make my music collection transportable.

3) Get an external itsy-bitsy hard drive -- like this 120 GB SimpleTech drive, which is barely bigger than my cellphone, no joke. The only reason I didn't just go ahead and get this one in the store was that I was sad that when we were there a month ago, it was $99, and now it's $150, so I wanted to think about it a bit and shop online to see if there was a better deal somewhere.

4) Get an 80GB iPod. There's a good chance I should probably do that anyway, and I'd hopefully be able to talk one of my friends at Apple into getting me a discount. BUT -- I'm not sure it'd suffice for what I want solely, and I bet I'd be tempted to do something stupid like erase half of my music to put some TV shows on it and then where would I be?

The more I think about it the more I'm mentally tending towards 3) and 4) combined... but I guess I was curious what the rest of the world thinks I should do, since I know a lot of you also have tons of CDs.

Comments

[lifeofmendel.livejournal.com]

do you have a laptop or a desktop?

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

I have not found a way to run iTunes to use the iPod without it wanting to "sync" from the hard drive to the iPod. Therefore, you have to have the hard drive space as well as the iPod space. So if you do #4, you might be doing #2 or #3 as well.

I would avoid #1, you'll probably hate it.

[alibash.livejournal.com]

you can run iTunes without doing the "sync" thing, the option is under the "iPod" tab in preferences I think.

But either way, you will need a good chunk of hard drive space to do all that ripping (unless you want to rip 1 cd, copy it to ipod, erase from hard drive, rinse, repeat. and that could take a very long time).

If you're crafty, you could rip directly to the iPod...I don't think iTunes would do it eloquently for you, but the first 50% should be ok. After that you'd have to start doing "rip, import, erase, repeat" again...

[alibash.livejournal.com]

My recommendation is to buy a big hard drive, and just rip all your cds to that. Since all your options have been external stuff I'm guessing you're dealing with a laptop, but keep in mind you can also buy any internal drive and stick it in a usb enclosure yourself cheaper than buying the prepackaged external drives from Lacie and stuff (i hate lacie). There's also a bunch of massive drives and "RAID5-array-in-a-box" products that have been becoming popular. You can get 1tb for $450. I'm a fan of the "if you're going to buy storage, buy way more than you need. you'll find ways to use it" philosophy. Also the price per gb drops dramatically when you buy in bulk.

If you're willing to pay a premium for convenience, you could also use ripping services. There's a bunch. Most of them would do stuff like return the ripped tracks to you on DVD. But for 800 cds, I think they're going to be expensive.

[montykins.livejournal.com]

It's a good idea to get an external hard drive anyway and use it to back up your computer. So if you get an enormous one, it could hold all that music too.

[genericman.livejournal.com]

RipDigital will rip 500 CDs for $500 plus the cost of storage media (usually a hard drive).

If you've got the time to commit, I'd say go for a big external hard drive -- 250 GB is affordable and Hitachi just announced a 1 TB drive for $400 (!!!). You can use a program like Ghost to back up your hard drive to the excess space. NewEgg has a ton of enclosures.

[dr4b]

desktop, though for various reasons I'm thinking I might want to move towards laptop-with-monitor. Sigh.

[lifeofmendel.livejournal.com]

if you stick with the desktop, get an internal IDE drive. much cheaper for more room.

you could still do that if you switch to a lappy by getting an enclosure later on, but that might not be cost-effective.

as far as bulkiness - that's really your call. personally, i hate having to pay more for electronics just because of the size, so i'd go for more storage for less dollars, but if portability is a concern, especially if you do decide to go laptop and want to be able to move it around easily, it's a more valid concern.

[damienroc.livejournal.com]

I think you might be estimating the size on the high side, a bit, but that will depend on your ripping quality. I'm not quite sure how many CD equivalents I have, but it's probably around 800-1000, and I think I'm at about 60 GB.

Even so, I'm rather partial to the idea of an external HD. It's really convenient to carry things around and to easily move stuff between computers. I'd suggest just about anything by Fantom Drives. I got my 200 GB for about $100 on NewEgg. It should be even less for you, since you won't have to pay CA state tax.

[gomezticator.livejournal.com]

I suggest being selective with what songs you rip. Unless an album as a whole is really good, I'll pick and choose songs from each one to rip from CDs and leave the rest.

[cedear.livejournal.com]

You can get a 500GB drive for $120 or so (or 250 $80) and an external enclosure for $30... storage is cheap. I don't find most of the drive enclosures clunky at all.

[cellio]

I haven't ripped a lot of my music either, but the model I follow is: hard drive for permanent storage, iPod for what I feel like listening to right now. (I have an itty-bitty iPod so it wouldn't hold my collection anyway, but even if it would, I wouldn't want something that portable and potentially fragile to be the sole repository of my entire music collection.)

If you do this, by the way, the portability of the hard drive isn't a factor.

[nlanza.livejournal.com]

This sounds about right -- iTunes tells me I have ~600 albums in my library, and it's taking up about 40GB.

And yeah, I really like having a large external drive for portability. It makes backing up my laptop a lot easier, too.

[nlanza.livejournal.com]

I'd hopefully be able to talk one of my friends at Apple into getting me a discount.

Most likely, yes. Our discount limits are all calendar-year-based, so all your Apple friends should have plenty of available discounts right now.

And yeah, external hard drive + iPod is probably the best solution -- then you don't have to worry about losing all your music if you drop the iPod, and you can clear a ton of space off of it for TV or whatever.

We have a bunch of the tiny little bus-powered drives floating around the office as utility boot/backup disks, and they're really incredibly useful.

[jacquilynne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have between 800 and a 1000 albums (9552 tracks) and that's a little less than 50GB.

FWIW, I went with an external hard drive. I primarily use my desktop, but if I want to move my music to another computer or take it to a friend's place, it's a whole lot easier with an external drive.

Of course, now I have an iPod, so that's a moot point, but it was the original idea.

[jacquilynne.livejournal.com]

This is probably a personal style thing. For me, that would be an absolutely terrible thing. For one, I still like albums, and still listen to them, which I want to be able to do without finding the actual CD. And for the other, when you're ripping 800+ CDs, it takes forever and a day (and I had only about 600 when I was actually ripping them all) adding 'have to think about it' to the mix and I'd never had got it done. The only way to do it is to pop them in, set them to load and do something else for five minutes.

[zaph.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd go for larger storage and lossless compression. 800 CDs ripped raw will take an absolute max of 625GB (and that's only if they're all completely full, which I find unlikely), so you could rip them all lossless on a 500GB drive easily, with room to spare (in fact, probably enough room to also keep mp3 versions around, too). And then you can convert to mp3 the ones you want on an iPod, anytime.

Plus, if you rip everything directly to mp3 and then you're unhappy with the bit rate, you then have to rerip things. At least this way, you can selectively redo any mp3 compression without having to juggle discs.

[csg87.livejournal.com]

I'm really just mostly repeating what other people have said, but: I would strongly recommend a combination of #2 and #4 rather than #3 and #4.

Big external hard drives (or regular internal hard drives and a USB-enclosure) are cheap. Don't just buy a disk big enough for your music collection, as you will likely have good use for the extra space (for backing up your computer, or maybe eventually for video, etc). Right now a 160GB disk costs around $80 (or 50 cents per gig) while a 500GB disk costs about $130 (or 33 cents per gig).

Also, I personally wouldn't worry about the physical size of the hard drive or its portability. Almost all external drives are small enough that you can easily carry it in a backpack with other things. If you're leaning toward getting an IPod anyway, it will take care of your portability needs.

And finally, something that I don't think anyone else has commented upon: Hard drives are fragile -- even the portable ones used in laptops and the big hard-drive-based IPods. I think I take good care of my personal property, and I still drop my cell phone once or twice per year. If you buy and regularly use an IPod, you are likely to eventually drop it, too. Your IPod will last a lot longer if it doesn't have a fragile portable hard drive in it. Do you need to carry your full music collection with you all the time, or would a big flash-drive-based IPod be sufficient? The Nanos are currently 8 GB, I expect 16 GB Nanos soon, and they last a lot longer than anything with a hard drive.

[msde.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the original number sounds high to me as well, if you have many singles in your collection.

Still, 60 GB is big enough that the choices would probably be the same.

[msde.livejournal.com]

When I last tried to convert to MP3, I would rip all of the tracks, but the ones I was skipping over regularly would disappear over time.

[msde.livejournal.com]

You could also look into a big networked hard drive instead of a big external hard drive. Whether that involves just installing it in your desktop, building a low power consumption machine for that and other uses, or a network storage toy link the ones linksys makes would be up to you.

[gomezticator.livejournal.com]

I'd agree if she had the HD space, which she doesn't.

[dr4b]

I disagree, there's no way in hell I'm taking the time to rip selectively, first of all (part of this is a time issue), and secondly, the entire point is that I want to go get enough space to rip the entire collection anyway, so whether I *currently* have enough space on my drive isn't the issue here.

[dr4b]

I don't need to carry it all the time, nor do I need a fragile hard drive in the iPod per se -- but yes, part of the point is that I want to get a storage solution that will fit in my laptop backpack. So some of the external drives are simply too big, see.

[dr4b]

ack, I somehow didn't even know you were at Apple. I suck. I was going to bug Jay or Ralph or someone.

tiny bus powered drives -- do you mean like the small SimpleTech thing I linked, or tiny like the 4-8GB USB flash thingies?

[dr4b]

That actually looks like a nice little one. Is it as small as the dimensions would actually claim to be? And does it require extra power or runs on power from the computer?

Song server?

[alicelee.livejournal.com]

It looks like everyone's in agreement so I'm not hijacking this too much :) but I wonder if anyone has advice on combining CD collections. I ripped mine to my laptop; my husband ripped his to his desktop.

I keep buying tracks on iTunes only to find out he already owns the CD. Duh.

It seems like a central server that we can both play music from, and synch iPods to, would be ideal. I can scare up a spare HD and probably hang it off an iLamp over firewire. Has anyone done something like this? How well did it work? Tips, tricks, traps, software advice?

I'd hate to take the time to slam everything over only to find I wanted to do something subtly different. Thanks!

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

Apple is the new Google.

[nlanza.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I joined the collective last year at the Pttsburgh office. Ralph's one hallway over from me.

Like the SimpleTech stuff -- we have a couple 60GB ones. They're convenient except for how they're so small that people keep losing them.

[ohhim.livejournal.com]

I did 1 & 4. I got about 350 albums of music on 6DVDs, so I'd think it would be closer to 15 DVDs.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

The old rule of thumb I remember is that one minute at 128 is about one meg. So, a four minute song, 4 megs. 70 minute album, 70 megs. You'll probably want to go for a somewhat higher bitrate (though if you're doing this for ordinary listening and keeping the originals, 196 should suffice, and only adds about half-again ... 4 minute song, 6 megs).

No advice on your actual question, alas.