CD Storage serious down sizing
 

Dealing with down sizing for the past two years. I'm now in 1/3 of the size home I used to live in. 4 car garage is now 2. Ect.

I found a great solution to my large CD collection, bags unlimited SCDGF4.

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Rip 'em all to high bitrate mp3, store multiple copies on external hard drives (or a NAS with a RAID 5 array) and sell the CDs ... Not exactly legal per copyright, but what the heck...

Go lossless with FLAC conversion using EAC (free app) or dbpoweramp. Put them on a hard drive and stream whenever you want. I did that a few years ago and have some 57,000 songs available at any time.

I have most of these burned, about 80 gigs, but I know there is compression and some loss of quality. Also, hard drives fail so I want to keep these around.

So far, i'm up to the letter "e" in my alphabetical system.

Hey Doug.....thanks for the post and info. I have so many CD's it's out of control around here! Over 1K I think. I would love to gain a little extra space while still retaining the original CD documentation. I may have to get some of these.

It's interesting that you alphabetize by first name. I never would have thought of that.

Not so, there is lossless compression FLAC (free lossless audio codec) for one....no loss in quality at all. That is why I recommend it. I still have my CDs in a tote or three. Having all that catalog of music readily available and controlled by an app on any device on my network means not having to get up and hunt for a disk. It changed my music listening drastically.

Oh, and hard drives are cheap...I have three loaded in case one craps, but none of mine have in my 30 years of computer use.

Something to think about anyway.

Mike, I will check out the lossless FLAC, I am admittedly not familiar with that. I suppose that means I need to rerip the collection.

It's a blended system, not necessarily consistent. If I refer to Bowie instead of David, I'll go B.

CDs

Thats funny

But what do I do with my 8-tracks?

That may be why I haven't bought any in the past several years. The only physical music I'm now buying is vinyl again.

I like having 'em around me in all their jewel-cased glory!

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Can someone recommend a step-by-step system to burn these to a hard drive, organize them, and then replay them? Most of my old CDs are in my iTunes library, but iTunes is so flaky that I've kept the old CDs. I'd like a trustworthy system.
Speaking of iTunes, why/how does it copy music I've never listened to and have no interest in to my library? I've heard this is a ploy to bulk up your stored data so if you back up on iCloud you have to buy more space. Sounds plausible, but really??

I just stuck all of mine in large notebooks containing CD sleeves, 8 CDs per page, 4 per side. Works fine. Kinda like this:

Case Logic, Inc CDW-208 - Best Buy

I threw out litterally hundreds of pounds of jewel cases about 8 years ago. I saved the art and was breaking out the cases for the back art as well, but I gave up on that about half way through.

I have kids that screw with things so I store them in DJ cases. I have this one that holds 1000 CDS, though probably more like 800-900 if single stuffed in sleeves.

Robot Check


Now I have started to rip all my CDs 10 different times in the last couple decades, but it is a crap ton of work. I am actually glad I never got far earlier because I believe now is about the right time to do it. Mass storage is cheap so lossless is the way to go. Id be pretty bummed if I spent alot of time ripping 128k mp3s in tha 90s for example. I have a huge collection of low bit rate mp3 and it makes me sad to listen to them on my home stereo.

Im not sure why my link is funky looking not spam for sure

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easy to store many hundred or even thousands of cds in these guys

I have followed these threads and like the idea of burning all my CD's... but honestly I just don't have the time.

Im not an expert on this, you quite litterally have thousands of options on this these days.


Ill tell you how I am doing it. I am ripping all my cds in high resolution to a giant external hard drive. I am using a free program that is popular called EAC and ripping them in lossless FLAC format. I am plugging the usb drive into my oppo 103 cd player which will allow me to surf through the directories from the remote.


Ironically, the way I am doing it is pretty old school I think. There are lots of options to do this over the network and use fancy phone operated streamers.