Frzninvt Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 I am thinking of dumping my entire CD collection onto a hard drive, I will painstakingly title each one, track by track. How big a hard drive would I need to do this? I have about 1000 CD's or more that I would like to commit to the HD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Griffinator Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 That's a lot of disc space, dude. 16 bit 44.1K is approximately 10 megs per minute. Average disc 50 minutes = 500MB times 1000 = 500GB. You ready to install half a terabyte worth of hard drive in your 'puter (plus boot disk, don't forget) Not too hard to do, but you'll want to get an IDE RAID controller (or a motherboard with an onboard RAID like mine), so you can just chain four 160GB drives as a single array and have the OS see it as a single drive (which you would then partition by genre, for example, to keep the overhead down) (edit) come to think of it, you'll probably want to do 200G drives, not 160. Better to have the extra space (unless you plan on never buying another CD or never adding to the archive) Probably want to have some sort of external back-up system as well, in case of drive failure. I'd hate to have to "painstakingly title each one" all over again because of a bum drive... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Frzninvt Posted April 9, 2004 Author Share Posted April 9, 2004 Thanks Griff, ddddaaaaaammmmmnnnnn that is going to require a huge amount of disc space. I think I may just scrub that idea as it would not be financially feasible - sounds pricey. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohnA Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 What's wrong with a CD changer? Maybe even 2? If they have digital out, the sound quality should be pretty good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Griffinator Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 I would do 320K mp3's. That's where you're going to acheive pretty much lossless (as in indistinguishable from the source material with a good encoder) compression. Instead of 10MB per minute, you'd be looking at more like 2MB. Cuts your space requirements down to a much more managable 2-300GB, although I'd still go to the RAID idea if I were you. And really no sacrifice in the quality department, as long as you use a good stout soundcard with a stable S/PDIF coaxial output (not the chintzy headphone jack variety as seen on the low-end Soundblasters and clones) and internal shielding (to prevent clock jitter from EMI emitted by the CPU) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
toddvj Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 That is a very impressive CD collection!!! You shouldn't have to "painstakingly title each one, track by track," though, you can use ripping software that gets the information from the internet and rip the CDs to your hard drive in wav format. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colin Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 instaed of a RAID motherboard, which I like, you can also get a second external HD that uses USB 2 to make a duplicate of everything on the original drive as a back-up... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eq_shadimar Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 ---------------- On 4/9/2004 11:04:57 AM Griffinator wrote: That's a lot of disc space, dude. 16 bit 44.1K is approximately 10 megs per minute. Average disc 50 minutes = 500MB times 1000 = 500GB. snip ---------------- An even easier way to figure it out is that a purchased CD (music or data) can only hold 650 MB of information so the maximum size would be 650MB*1000 = 650GB Of course that is assuming that every CD is holding the maximum of 74 mins of music. WMA Lossless compression can cut that in about half which would save you some space. Laters, Jeff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
minn_male42 Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 you could cut down on the need space if you don't record every track.... i know in my collection (only about 400 cd's) there are a ton of tracks that i could easily live without..... just a thought! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tenorman Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 Another option you might want to look into is using a lossless codec like FLAC or Monkey Audio. Although they do not compress the files as much as MP3's there is no loss in quality. Usually you can reduce the file size to a about 50% of the original. I have been playing around with FLAC and have been averaging about 4 CDs per GB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shoe11 Posted April 9, 2004 Share Posted April 9, 2004 Frzninvt, I actually am almost through the process of doing exactly what your considering. I have over 1000 CD's and I'm around 750 copied so far. Figuring 650MB per CD at least, I lucked out and purchased 3 250GB Maxtor External HD's at around $279 a piece if memory serves (I managed to catch a sale on them at 20% off). They are all hooked up to DLink USB 7 port hub which plugs directly into my laptop. I'm using Win XP Pro with iTunes. I formatted each drive into 4 partitions formatted as FAT32 with non-default block sizes given the large files. NTFS formatted drives fragmented like crazy in my experience. While buying 3/4 a terabyte of disk space seems crazy, given what some supposed MP3's based devices sell for these days, I thought it reasonable investment. I'm ripping each CD as an AIFF file. As far as storage space goes, even with 3 drives I was figuring I'd have a fair amount of free space for future expansion. My experience is that many CD's fall well short of the 650MB per disc I was using as a reference and so I'll have a good bit more expansion room than I first expected. The biggest impediment in the project is the sheer amount of time it takes to transfer each disc. Even with my high speed Plextor drive, it's taken a significant amount of time, but having my entire CD collection cataloged and able to be played back randomly without needed to swap discs is really worth the investment in money and time. My final piece to this project will be in next week. I'm building a new desktop computer to which the drive collection will be attached. Sound will be output from an M-Audio Audiophile USB connected to the PC which will be connected via .5m Kimber Kable Silver Streak interconnects to a custom made Ray Samuels XP-7 amp which will power my Etymotic ER4-S canalphones. If you plan to do it and have any questions, let me know I'd be happy to help. ~shoe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Griffinator Posted April 10, 2004 Share Posted April 10, 2004 ---------------- On 4/9/2004 10:28:53 PM shoe11 wrote: I'm building a new desktop computer to which the drive collection will be attached. Sound will be output from an M-Audio Audiophile USB connected to the PC which will be connected via .5m Kimber Kable Silver Streak interconnects to a custom made Ray Samuels XP-7 amp which will power my Etymotic ER4-S canalphones. If you plan to do it and have any questions, let me know I'd be happy to help. ~shoe ---------------- I would strongly recommend you don't use that M-Audio box, if you wish to maintain maximum fidelity. There are a lot of much better options out there for DAC's than M-Audio. After trying a number of budget (<$300) outboard 2-channel DAC's, I always kept coming back to my Terratec EWS88/D digital I/O card and Alesis AI3 8x8 AD/DA box. Total cost, $600. Sound quality vs. several M-Audio and other outboard DAC's is like night and day. Frankly, even my AI3 pales in comparison to what you can get out of something like a Lucid, Benchmark, or other higher end DAC systems. If you're going to put that much into the playback system, you really need to consider putting more into the front end. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bdc Posted April 10, 2004 Share Posted April 10, 2004 Does that include the Audiophile 24/96 (since it's onboard)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marvel Posted April 10, 2004 Share Posted April 10, 2004 The Audiophile 24/96 is very good for the money, but I'm sure the Griff will disagree. The reality is that the m-audio product line is all over the map. Thee is a company in Europe which uses the M-Audio Super DAC in part of its process of creating music samples of symphonic instruments. The samples are incredible, with the whole list running in the thousands of dollars. You buy it already loaded onto a huge hard drive. If this sounds like a high cost, our own small symphony in Chattanooga could cost about $8k just for a rehearsal night. For someone doing symphonic soundtracks, the samples would be a mere drop in the bucket. The Digital Audio Labs Card Delux is a good card, but runs $350-400. THere are lots of cards you could get. Many will be overkill. Marvel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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