Digital Music Collections

tonybro · 08-07-2008, 09:08 PM

Quantify 'large amounts'....

4GB is a large amount - its over 1000 mp3 tracks....

I reckon most of my DiVX films are less than 300Mb too so I could carry six of them and still have in excess of 500 mp3s....

If I need large amounts (>4GB) I have my iPod anyway.....

Edit: This developed into a discussion about keeping music digitally, so I've separated it out of the thread discussing the merits of the HTC Diamond.

Bassey · 08-07-2008, 09:36 PM

Well, I don't have a particularly large music collection but it still stretches to about 18GB. I have about 3.5GB of photos and about the same of video. As I say, I don't consider that to be particularly large. I have friends with 80GB iPods that are nearly full.

In these days of huge dedicated media players and Multimedia Phones with 8 or 16GB I just think 4GB is far too small. Yes, it will be enough for some people. But the majority are going to look at the 3 bullet points next to the phone in the shop and then go for the 16GB iPhone or the 16GB Nokia N96 for the same or less money.

windows · 08-07-2008, 11:43 PM

18Gb... yee gods, even my music collection on the PC is not that big!

cyclist · 09-07-2008, 09:13 PM

Amateurs all of you - I've just bought 750Gb of storage so I can rip more of my collection. 80Gb on the PC didn't cover more than a small proportion of my CDs. And one of these days I need to digitise my vinyl too.
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windows · 09-07-2008, 11:12 PM

Yee gods (again) how many songs in total Cyc?

Bassey · 10-07-2008, 09:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyclist

Amateurs all of you - I've just bought 750Gb of storage so I can rip more of my collection. 80Gb on the PC didn't cover more than a small proportion of my CDs. And one of these days I need to digitise my vinyl too.
Posted via Mobile Device

Yep, that sounds a bit more like it. I know plenty of people with music collections around that size. Then start throwing in family photos and videos and you're talking serious volumes of data.

neilm · 10-07-2008, 11:16 AM

Of course a lot depends on how you encode the music collection

Using lossless WMA, and other high bitrate codecs can mean you only get 2 albums per GB, and if you rip vinyl albums, the resulting archive file can be rather large! I've just started a couple of test rips of vinyl, and intend to go through a few a week if I can

Bassey · 10-07-2008, 11:36 AM

I got a load of CD's over the weekend and ripped them all. As I was copying them over I noticed that each album was around 500MB in size. It was about then I remembered ripping a CD a few weeks ago into lossless WAV format in order to make a copy. I hadn't switched the rip settings back so all the new CD's were huge!

I normally use 320kbps though, so the files are still quite large. Plus, a lot of my CD's run to well over an hour so the usually quoted 24 albums per gig certainly doesn't apply. I get just over half of that.

tonybro · 10-07-2008, 01:04 PM

I've been doing the vinyl rip as well recently. Once the WAV is recorded, cleaned, balanced, normalised and filtered I just save to lossless FLAC format. Compresses down to about 40% of original size.

I then keep my Flac Library on an external HDD with a backup on the Windows Home Server (WHS). TVersity on the WHS means I can access it from the XBOX360/Wii as well as when away (not that I've done that yet!).

waveydavey · 10-07-2008, 01:54 PM

I'm not hardcore like you guys, I only rip to 192 and I still use MP3 as it's the only format I know will play on everything now and in the near future. I've still got my physical media though, so I can always re-rip should I find the need. I don't do digital downloads either. I like to get something for my money I can hold in my hands.