Lush, just transferred ALL my CDs to my PC

Grabbed them all as Wavs (I'm a purist) and they consume 170GB. I'm going to take a USB external hard drive with them on to Canada and leave all the CDs behind. It's really cool to have them all categorised and playable at the touch of a button. At some point it will be part of a wireless home entertainment system.

Also amazing is the fact that I have 2x500GB drives so 1TB = 1,000,000,000Kb of storage and my first computer was a Spectrum 48K. Big difference! Yes I know 48K is strictly RAM so maybe I should compare to a PC with 4GB (approx. 4,000,000Kb RAM) as Spectrum 58K storage media was actually tapes!

...'purist' wasn't the word I was thinking of!

Difference between 320kbps MP3 and WAV would be unnoticable and the files would be 90% smaller. Better still if you use VBR-OGG format and install K-Lite so you can play it via WMP.

Why don't you just take your CD collection with you?

If you were dead set on a lossless format, why not use something like FLAC?

Although I guess it's a tad too late now. ;o)

I automatically thought about APE, but Yan is right.

It's not too late however as he can use a batch converter.

Storage is cheap. Leave them as WAV's.

FLAC and APE are great compressors, but they produce non-portable files. Ipods cannot play them, for instance. If (like happened to me) you suddenly find yourself owning an Ipod, you have to reconvert all your music.

So, not only have you expended effort in ripping your CD's, you've converted them to FLAC or APE, which costs quite a lot of energy. You've then converted them back to WAV to then convert them to MP3 or AAC. I know transcoders can go straight from APE to MP3, but they do internally convert back to WAV first.

You've then got two copies of your music files. Lossless compressed and MP3. If (like me) you go for quality, file sizes of the APE+MP3 are not too short of the original WAV.

So, keep them as WAV. Just about everything can play a WAV.

My toaster can't.

Nor can my cigarette lighter.

To be fair, it can't play MP3s either. :D

My biggest argument against WAVs is that they can't store tags.

WAV's might be able to be played on anything but they might not fit on any thing so your most likely going to end up re-encoding any way.

So really you might as well go for something like 'Flac' anyway and get the many advantages and just accept you might have to re-encode to something like mp3 for portable devices but still have lossless masters.

It so can! :P

You can do that?...Core, the wonders of modern science!

Wav will remain as my pure raw state and then I can (batch) convert to MP3 if I want to put some tracks onto a memory stick for my car or onto an Ipod for example. Anyway I'm sure that in time Ipods and other device will have enough memory to make use of my wavs, so I'll be laughing at all the low quality MP3 listeners muhahaha...

Besides the 170GB is on a 500GB drive that like cost £50, so it's only cost me £17 to store all my CDs in a lossless format. Mind you I have duplicated them on another drive as a backup. I want to have these for the rest of my life and not have to scan the CDs in again.

only 170gb of wav's?
i think ive got half of that as 320kbps mp3's
and as you can get the 160gb ipod (classic so no touch-ness) youve only just gone over its limit

ive moved most of my mp3's to my 320 external so my iPod is annorexic, but ive just been to fopp and spent £90ish on £3 and £5 albums and ive got a 1TB winging its way to me
ive got a storage unit full of boxes of DVD's and cd's
forbidden planets comic boxes make very good DVD storage boxes for moving etc, i got the long ones which hold just shy of 100 dvd's 47/48 to a row and ive got 7 full boxes (mostly from the 5 for £30 sale so im not going to rebuy on blu-ray unless i win the lottery)
and those folding bags from sainsburys and tesco's are handy and strong for carting a few dozzen disc's down when ive maxed out my wages and ripped for england

Wow you must be quite a music fan - glad to hear you've legally purchased them all. My 170GB is from 300 CDs.

Cool, may get one or and be a bit selective about what I put on it.

I've got a ton of Kung Fu DVDs too, like >200. If I had the time + space it would be cool to put them all on one media device.

200 kung fu dvd's ?!?

my external drive
116 GB
20,387 files (ok some will be album art and folder info files) some are 96kbps from when i had my old pc with tiny hard drive most are 320kbps the odd duplicate at both bit rates

99.9% are from CD's i own
the other's are either legal downloads (or free from the website) or stuff i got off my brother that i have yet to buy (not many there), but i have a little rule, if i dont have the cd it dont go on the ipod
so all the iron maiden and ac/dc mp3's have been barred till they are honest

also the iPod working as a usb external is great for backing up my zoom h2 and h4 wav files and both my digital camera's, so when im next oop norf to see my brother and if poss the other half of this 'band' im in, i can copy the latest tracks over for him to use instead of the m4a's ive been yahooing over

I can think of a suitable device for 200 kung fu DVDs.

Its about 4ft tall, green, 2 wheels, plastic, gets emptied onto the back of a lorry every Tuesday. :)

Yeah I'm a kung fu fan (ever since seeing a Jackie Chan film about 20 years ago). I like really crap ones too.

I've got all the Iron Maiden ones except one I sold in disgust when I was about 18 ("no prayer for the dying") and maybe the one after that (basically when Adrian Smith was no longer in the band). Got some classic AC/DC of course - Back in Black, Highway to Hell, For those about to Rock. Actually my collection spans Classical, Rock, Blues, Metal (tons), Synth, Retro Computer, Trance (all sorts), Drum and Bass, Chill Out, Folk, Jazz - it's nice to have a variety of great music.

That's the other thing that needs quite a lot of storage these days, Photos (+videos recorded on cameras). At 4GB a card, it's easy to fill up especially if you have kids and go on days out etc.

Lol, I could see what was coming...

aye it's eclectic even if some would say my collection is c**p
i say my collection spans from abba to zz top and all the letters inbetween and from scot to jannis joplin (most people i know dont know who jannis is let alone scot)

i got alot of those 100 hits 5 CD's a bit a go just to give it a boost as most of my cd's were boxed up unripped and some still shrinkwrapped, i dont like paying stupid money for cd's i got 3 nick cave albums for the price of one in hmv

Don't forget Linda Farnham.

aye still have THAT CD ... the shame of buying CD's on the strength of the cover cos you dont have your glasses on
nearly stabbed the speakers when i heard fog on the tyne :p

Never ceases to amaze me!


However, your taser could...
http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=82876&in_page_id=2

and lets not forget cd's are drm free :)

but some have anti rip technology :(

Wow that's crap. But I've never seen one yet.

most have known work arounds the ones that failed on the xbox were bmg discs with some cp logo, not tried em on pc cos they are in a box and probably at the bottom

just seen alot of 100 hits cd's in sainsburys in buy one get one half price, so ive got 600 new songs to be ripped
and ive got alot of their other sets, but if i took out the songs i WONT listen to i think id only have 200 songs sync'd from the 1200 i have

Hey well done, Grey. It's a bit of a slog, but worth it. I have around 300 gigs of lossless music (WMA). IMO, it would have been churlish to convert your collection to MP3s. For one, you can't convert back to lossless, and two, if MP3 ever becomes an unpopular format and you need to convert to another lossy format, you would be compounding the artifacts by converting lossy->lossy.

if i already had a 1tb hard drive to begin with i think i would have ripped at wav and only mp3'd (or in ipods case m4a'd) for ipod use

what i dont like is the "album name-track number-track title.mp3" with tags you dont need that much info, just album and number, but windows media wont let me take track title off, with wavs though it would be handy, but as the ipod internally renames everything to a 4 letter garble whats the point?

edit:
just got back from hmv after getting a few dirt cheap box set dvds and YET MORE 100 hits cd's
i swear if they released 100 hits: the sound of farting it would end up on my iPod :p

Loved him in The Cannonball Run :)

we got the bronze girls of shaolin [sp] on vhs years ago, i swear that film made more sence when under the influence

edit:
and if youve got a huge lp or vhs collection that you just cant track down on cd or dvd
pitty they dont do betamax i was on the roman edition of watch when i was in junior school (romans first and romans last, out of the present and into the past)

If you build a wireless home system, wavs will defeat bandwidth. I did the same and had to convert them to wav with internal ADPCM compression. loseless compressed formats are much more network friendly. Think on m4a or latest wma formats. but untill you create your home media system, wavs are the way to go if you want real high quality sound with high quality sound.

Now that you've done that, isn't it just delightful to think that evil corporations want to make format shifting illegal?

I have a related question: I'm kind of thinking of converting a huge music library (1000s of CDs) to digital format. I want them to be lossless, have all their album info, and be fully searchable. And this has to run over my home network, and stream to my PS3 (or 360, or any other of my dozens of components, and eventually some form of iPod). Bandwidth shouldn't be a problem, since I have a high-end gaming router. Neither is space, as 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day. But I'm not sure how to import them, as when I tried small scale tests ripping them with Windows Media Player, they didn't have their titles or anything. I want it to be as automated as possible, too. How could I do this?

You cheap lush!

(wanted to say that since you posted this thread)

afaik flac is tagged like an mp3 but is lossless like wavs (which have zero tagging info bar the file name), and i think itunes is iffy with them
you can get wma lossless but itunes spits out my normal wma and says "i must convert these first"
not sure bout the consoles
wavs have no tags and are HUGE

seems like you have alot of options that fail on one or more counts

if they thought of tags in the old days of wav files we wouldnt need to think about which compromise works best, but having said that with headphones (and sometimes the s**ty cheap ones) i cant tell the difference between the same song ripped at 96, 128 or 320kbps or wav, i guess if youve got a decent speaker set up you might hear the difference

@John Galt: Yeah exactly I've got them in a lossless standard format that I can convert to whatever is convenient.

Ziggy: Good point so if g standard wireless is not fast enough I may have to convert to another standard until such times as the wireless catches up. Hang on though, A wav is about 10MB a minute and wireless networks are way faster than that.

I'm still not sure what program to use to organize it all; especially one that runs on consoles. I thought about building a Media Center PC for the entertainment room (where the majority of music-listening goes on) and writing a massive database program to keep track of it all - and then I had the idea to add voice support , a la MS Sync ("Play 8-Bit Operators Track 4"). I doubt this will be feasible, since I'd have to reenter the data for each track. :-(
Don't mean to hijack the thread, I just had a related problem. :-)