Up to my Ears
August 17th, 2007We have successfully avoided touching the large stack of boxes in our garage that held the CD collection for all the months we’ve lived here. Imagine two people, both who spent time at a music magazine and have a problem with music. I still think our collection is conservative compared to a few of our friends, especially one who is still actively DJing and purchased a file system that can hold 3,000 CDs. It’s not that bad here, but still, we’ve dreaded opening those boxes. I’m estimating around 750 CDs.
The main problem is that we don’t listen to CDs for our music anymore. It’s iPods in speakers and computers streaming using iTunes. It’s all about researching and buying online. iTunes and eMusic have been the main music stores for us for the past three or four years. We still get music sent to us on CD and we give it a listen, but it’s faster to be able to hit a website and download a sample track or two or seven than it is to deal with a CD. If we like a CD we get sent, it gets ripped and the CD goes into random unstorage where we fight it for months. Back when eMusic was unlimited downloads a month, I grabbed about 35 albums and was instantly overloaded with the weight of trying to listen to all that music. We’ve calmed it a little bit, but the music collection is only growing and having our old stuff to play for Leta is becoming more important. Like Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind and Fire. The kid needs to know the value of a good horn section. From there, we’ll talk about John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Bill Evans. Which will open up the mention of improvisation and then we’ll go back a bit further if she’s interested. I still remember my dad playing Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea late at night (the piano solo on I’ll Remember April is off the hook) and talking about how jazz works, even though my dad didn’t play. I want Leta to have memories like Saturday mornings with Sly and the Family Stone, the E Street Band and bad parental dancing.
Aside from my general procrastination, I’ve been waiting for the operating system and ripping software to catch up so that I can be productive on my ripping machine while doing it all in the background. iTunes seems to have gotten there and I’m able to rip and work. I also wanted a machine strong enough to rip at a high enough rate that I won’t have to do it again. I’m ripping MP3s at 320 kbps, VBR (Medium setting in iTunes). MP3s seem to be the universally accepted file type that will play on the largest range of devices and computers. I’m doing this on an external drive that is portable and has multiple ways to connect to computers. I’ll be buying a backup drive or two to do regular backups so that our music collection has redundancy and if we suffer a crash, will be recoverable.
After one day of intermittent, not even full-time ripping, I’m in 31 albums and about 4 gigabytes. And the range of music we have is still mind blowing after all these years. I remember in late 2001, sitting down to merge the two collections and alphabetize (it’s the only way to find things after you double your CD collection). It was definitely one of those moments where you realize you are in a committed relationship. We still discuss pre-merge and post-merge as a major milestone in the relationship.
We finally opened the boxes and I started the process. It’s been kind of fun to hear random tracks from the past. I’m kind of laughing at a few of the discs… Chaka Khan’s Epiphany: The Best of Chaka Khan and Heather’s mid-90s Britpoppers bis, her cherished copy of Cameo’s Word Up and my Blue Nile collection. If you see a whole bunch of older music in my Last.fm feed, this project is why.
If any of you have done this already and have tips, please share them in the comments. I’d love to hear tips, strategies, techniques and post-mortem (post-morta? Is there a plural of post-mortem?). o
August 17th, 2007 at 11:11 am
I have zero to say on this, since I have a pretty sucky musical collection and I’m not ashamed about that, but I will say this:
320 kbs?!
You are psychotic. And I mean that in a good way.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:19 am
I did the same thing with a much smaller collection (150-200 CDs) a few years ago. I was ripping at 192 kbs when everyone else was ripping at 64, it seemed. I plan on re-ripping someday, but when I do it will be with some lossless format (probably FLAC, maybe Windows Media Lossless). I’m surprised you didn’t go lossless (not even Apple lossless?), though. Is there that much of a difference in space between 320 k and lossless?
The only technique advice I can offer is to set up for auto-eject on completion (can iTunes do this?). Keep a stack of de-jeweled CDs waiting so you can pop one in as soon as the last one is ejected.
I bought some of those awful CD wallets (photo-album-style) to keep my CDs. I knew I would someday re-rip, so I wanted to keep them, but I still think it’s worth keeping for my kids. I still remember going through my parents’ records and finding stuff I liked. Since they never listened to them, I took my parents’ LPs and the turntable. Though I can’t set it up in a childproof manner, I am still looking to the day I can.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:26 am
holy shit…you mentioned Cameo’s Word Up and Blue Nile in the same sentence….I thought I was alone in the world. You are now my God. How do you prefer your sacrifice’s?
Walk Across the Rooftops still gets booted up ..often.
My Killing Joke cd’s…not often.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Throw out the jewel cases and store originals in three-ring binders. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 CDs in about twenty binders, taking up only two cubic feet of space on our shelves.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:43 am
I have yet to dip into my older, 400+ CD collection and start a rip fest. Mostly because I find so much new music I love that I’m not sure there are enough listening hours in the day to even keep up with it all.
Hard drive space seems like a non issue as prices have dropped and external dives are quite large. But I have an issue with iTunes being too full of music that it becomes bogged down. iTunes should create features to help manage extra large libraries.
For the past three years, I’ve been ripping my new music at 192 kbps AAC. I know that AAC is not as universal as MP3, but it will be eventually and in the research I have done, it’s better quality than MP3. The file size saved is useful when fitting more songs on an iPod.
I doubt most people could tell the difference in quality from a 192 compared to anything higher, even uncompressed.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:45 am
Wow, *bis*. I totally enjoyed that sticky sublayer of Britpop, all of those nineties NME sidebar darlings, Sleeper, Shed Seven, etc. Now I’ll be humming Bluetones songs for the rest of the day.
I’m trying to convince The Husband that life would be better if we got rid of the CDs and made everything digital, though I don’t think he’s ready to take the leap yet. This is probably because he has the better musical taste, still shops in proper record stores, and isn’t embarrassed to display his purchases in the apartment.
I, on the other hand, should have no problem parting with my hidden hard copies of Northside and Ocean Colour Scene.
August 17th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Just finished. I have a “media server” in the living room (headless old Dell) that holds it all.
I just transferred ~1000 albums (high VBR mp3s) to my laptop to backup to DVD. Trying to weigh the pros/cons of double-backing up onto removable HDs right now…
August 17th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
We just did the same as well, probably 400+ CDs. But still can’t bring myself to get rid of actual discs, no matter how much back up we have. We transferred them to photo album style CD wallets. Only problem is also wanted to keep CD books/liner notes. Makes storage bulky.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
I’m in the same boat as far as the mothballed physical media. I haven’t ripped my whole collection (since come of it is still in another city), but when I ripped the stuff I ‘needed’, it wasn’t at 320. I did all mine at 192 VBR Highest after listening tests, trying to balance sound quality and file size. Of my 26,000+ MP3s, a good chunk were already 256 and 320, and I was running out of HD space. Now that drives are cheaper (I just picked up a 500 GB for my newly-built desktop for $100 Cdn), I’d likely rip at 256, but like you, I buy very few actual CDs now.
I’ve been shopping for external storage, and am looking at two-drive NAS enclosures like the D-Link DNS-323 that I can drop a couple 500s (1 TBs when the price comes down) into and access from anywhere that has a Internet connection. Now that I’m shooting hundreds of RAW images at a time, I’m eating up space like crazy, so it’d be nice to have storage accessible from both laptop and desktop. I don’t know how your Macs handle that kind of thing, or whether or not NAS is required (maybe OSX works with external shares a little friendlier).
August 17th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Well this is timely…we’re moving and in the midst of packing I realized that I really wanted to get rid of the space taken up by CDs. We also listen pretty exclusively to music downloaded onto our iPods, so it seems there’s no need for them.
This conversation has made me realize though that I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. VBRs, lossless, 320kbs? I have no idea what that all means. Anyone know of any good online guides to this sort of thing? You’re all freaking me out.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
1) Spend the money on the disk space and rip them all to some lossless format. AAC or FLAC doesn’t matter. This will be your reference copy.
2) Make a backup of the drive(s) from #1.
3) Go to ULine and buy their CD shipping/storage boxes and file those puppies away someplace safe. With one of the disk sets from steps 1 and 2.
4) Script something to cross-encode from the ACC/FLAC files to MP3/Ogg or whatever you want to use to listen with.
5) When you get new CDs, rip and add them to the lossless library and sync the two drives.
6) Copy your digital-only stuff to a separate directory on this same pair of drive sets. This will make it easier to re-do step 4 when the next darling format comes around.
Oh how I wish I had done this in the first place with my collection of 2000 CDs and growing.
Originally I ripped them all to 160K MP3, thinking it was the best combination of quality and disk usage. Three years later I’m regretting that decision. Now that I have better audio gear and with disk space so affordable I wouldn’t find myself in the middle of a massive re-ripping project just to get something that doesn’t sound like crap. And believe me, 160K is crap if you listen to it instead of a higher quality file.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I recently did this with about a 400 disc collection. I opted for mp3 for the same reason you mentioned, but went with a lower bitrate for two reasons. First, I could throw it all on a single iPod that I already owned. Second, I listen to music streamed over itunes to a variety of speakers (both crappy and not) and sometimes headphones (both crappy and not) or in a car. I figure that if I *could* notice a difference in file audio quality by listening to the better speakers/headphones, it would end up driving me batshit when I listened again on the downgraded kit.
Ideally, I would rip a second time to AAC or even better without compression at all, but I’m lazy.
What I’ve found after doing this is that the random play is a fun experience again. That, and I’m about to embark on the music marathon of listening to everything I have from the beginning of the playlist. It’s a solid month’s worth of music.
Next step: ripping all the DVD’s to h.264 and getting an apple TV.
August 17th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
As Kayhan said, set it up for Auto-Import and Eject. I ripped over 1000 cds in a little over a week or so in this way….I’d put one in, confirm that the titles were correct (the IDDB is not always perfect, especially for more obscure discs) and let it do its thing. When it finishes, it spits it out and you just shove another one in there. It becomes pretty mindless, after the first few - I was able to rip as I did some fairly brain-intensive work without a problem. From there, as some have said above, I either shoved them into binders or boxes for long-term, never-to-be-seen-again attic storage.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
rip using a sharable format!
Make a decision about naming convension early on, and think through the logic and variables before you commit to it.
Once the first input is complete, adding new music is a breeze. And having evering digital, means you listen to all your music much more.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
VBR = Lossless. Lossless does not equal VBR.
Your Mp3 high bit rate VBR is probably the best way to go. It’s portable and it sounds good.
If you select 256kbs VBR it means that it will detect how low a bit rate can go for an individual frame of a song. If you have a chunky guitar sound, it may dip to 11kbps. The setting of 256k means that it will not go any higher than 256kbps regardless of what the frame is asking for… essentially, it caps it at the setting you request.
Apple Lossless is simply VBR with an unlimited cap to how high the kbps is. The drawback to this is that it is in AAC, not the most universal of standards…. certainly less than mp3.
Your choice of 320kbps may seem a little on the high side for today, but it will last longer and will seem more appropriate as storage prices come down. I think it’s a good choice.
As for more information about the codecs… wikipedia.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
I’m young enough that most of my collection has been MP3 from the get go. Unfortunately, I was also young enough not to have had the foresight to think about using higher than 128k mp3, so I’ve done the same thing about twelve times. I don’t plan on leaving iTunes or my iPod, so I went with AAC at 256k the last time. My fianceé says I’m stupid, but I swear a good drummer just don’t sound right at any lower bitrate.
Oh, and great choices for teaching Leta about improvisation. Don’t forget Thelonious Monk, though. Dude changed my life. Oh and the Flecktones.
August 17th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
I wonder… would you be able to hook up a CD-burner (or another Mac, in Target Disc Mode) and rip twice as fast?
August 17th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
I did this about four or five years ago with an old 300mhz slot load imac. I ripped to Mp3 at 192k, using the auto import and auto export features in itunes. It took us about three weeks to get our 400-500 cd’s in, but hey it was only ripping at like 4-5x. When we were around and it spit one disk out, we stuck another in. It was really nice to have them all in a soft case, as far as loading each CD, But I have also just used an empty CDR spindle to stack music onto once it came out of the iMac, when I found another pile of CD’s I never imported. I have keep all my CD’s around ever since, But have never looked back to them. The music has moved across multiple machines; I think we are at the 3rd one now, a newer Imac that is used as the media server.
The big secret is auto import and auto burn, but I’m sure if you have spent a day of it you already know that!
August 17th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
I found a folder of CD’s the other day that kind of amazed me. I was very happy, for example, to re-discover my forgotten Jack Bruce CD… Now if I could only remember to dump it into iTunes, I’d be groovin.
August 17th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Once you’ve ripped all of the CDs, take them to Graywhale and sell them. Then you will have money to buy new cds! Some people like to hold on to the actual physical copies, but not me.
August 17th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
I did what some of the other folks on here did, I took all however many boxes worth of cds (was a college radio DJ in a former life) and put them into three ring binders. I, too, wanted to keep the liner notes for some reason. I’m holding onto whatever past I can, I guess. It took forever but has totally been worth the time and effort. Now, I’m just really pissed off at myself that I paid to move so many boxes worth of cds across the country - not once, but twice - instead of doing this a long time ago.
It’s amazing how much room you save when doing so. Now, my cd collection (including Tobyjoe’s) fits on a bookshelf. :]
As far as our files/music goes, we have two hard drives and a daily archive. Redundancy is key for sure. You lose one drive and its contents and you’re going to do whatever it takes to make sure you don’t lose another. Sounds to me like you guys have this covered.
August 17th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
It’s definitely a worthwhile project. We have almost our entire music collection on iTunes (there are still some things on vinyl which have yet to be transferred to CD), which amounts to 60GB and 16,050 songs.
August 17th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Oh, and I could never get rid of the CDs themselves as someone else suggested.
August 17th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
My husband and I also knew that we were really committed when we merged our cds. We are at about the 6000 range (yes, we’re crazy….) and I just recently bought plastic sleeves and have been getting rid of jewel boxes (just to the basement….my husband is too obsessive to get rid of them completely). I think we’ll have more than twice the space as before–I haven’t been able to give up the “product, artwork” aspect of the cd–though ripping is a constant quandary…what to put on the pod? Anyway, sleevecity.com –if you want to minimize the space the cds take up on your shelves, but can’t get into that “photoalbum” storage that some people have.
August 17th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Sorry, it’s called “sleeve city” but is actually http://www. sleevetown.com….which of course, is different from sleevehamlet.com….
August 17th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
I ripped my entire collection about five years ago or so. Since then, ALL music I’ve bought has gone into iTunes. As of now, I have 8,103 tracks.
One thing I suggest is to fill out all relevant data in each track. Artist, title, etc. Don’t let those “Untitled” labels pile up. Label them NOW and you’ll save time later.
And if you’re anal like me, you’ll want to standardize your capitalization and make sure you have album art for every track.
One thing I do is delete info from the “Genre” section. Is Miles Davis “bebop” or “jazz” or “cool” or “big band” or “electronic” or “fusion” or “rock” or something else? I don’t know and don’t care. Those are all just meaningless labels to me, so I put nothing in that field.
Lastly, I’m a bass player and I want to know who plays bass on every track I own. Whenever possible, I include the bassist’s name in the “Comments” field and that way I can easily find all tracks by a particular bassist. Works great!
Good luck!
August 17th, 2007 at 8:55 pm
I’m nearing the home stretch of ripping all of our CDs, too. I rip to Apple Lossless — I don’t want to do this again! Dale’s right about the standardization of spellings, and especially so about the album art. This script will embed the album art with the tracks, so if you’ve gotten the art from iTunes, it will follow the song, not the iTunes library.
When I’m all done, that drive will be the syncing library for the AppleTV, and we’ll have eight square feet of wall space back!
August 17th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Ripping with EAC in Windows, LAME to do the conversion to mp3 at 320 CBR (I’m anal like that). Tag & Rename is the single best and most used piece of software I’ve ever owned to tag the collection. I’ve got it down to a science with Genre/Year/Artist/Title/Album/Art/Track# and, where applicable Disc# on all files. For music downloaded FlashRenamer has been a savior for getting rid of the horrid naming system most people seem to use. ## Title.mp3 for albums, Artist - Title.mp3 for “singles”. Every album folder also has the year in it, ala “Artist - [YEAR] Album” to help properly order albums by release. Seeing the OCD yet?
Over 200 albums done, and between that and other sources, over 400gb of music. My only complaint is that itunes needs “Live Watching” of folders so you dont have to drag each new album in to the library manually. (No, I don’t let iTunes organise/name/etc my music either. iTunes only sees the library from a read only share).
Any questions on surviving music OCD, let me know
August 17th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
I took on this project last spring. We have ~1,100 CDs (post-merge-and-purge), and 56% were un-ripped when I started. Took me two weeks. Now we have 112gb; 20,387 tracks. iTunes can hardly keep up, and accessing the shared library from another machine takes forever. Now I’m warily eyeing 500+ pieces of vinyl and a USB turntable…
Here’s a photo if you’re curious about how much wall space 1,100 CDs take up.
iTunes Registry lets you do fun crunching with your iTunes library data.
August 18th, 2007 at 9:05 am
First, the plural of “postmortem” is “postmorta”
Second, I hear you, I hear you, I hear you about the music. Music is love. No question. And all the specific artists you mentioned, worthy of multiple listenings and examinations.
Third, my iPod holds about three-fourths of my entire collection, and it has 11,863 songs on it. Some are short, like dialog excerpts from the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack and musical tracks like “I’s A Muggin’” from Joni Mitchell’s “Mingus” - and some are long, like one of DJ Riko’s Merry Mixmas tracks, or Gondwana by Miles Davis or Hell’s Angel’s Cracker Factory by The Flaming Lips. Lord, I miss free-form radio.
Fourth, you’re a good parent to Leta, you and Heather. You both understand certain fundamentals that she is absorbing and will take with her to the Moon or Tibet or wherever her soul carries her.
Fifth, thanks for sharing.
August 18th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
i don’t have any suggestions but it’s just that i can’t help but be reminded of high fidelity, one of my all time favorite movies because duh, i have a crush on one john cusack.
anyway, just where he’s reorganizing his vinyl and his quiet nerdy coworker asks to help but can’t figure out what system he’s going by - alphabetically? no. chronologically? hm. no.
autobiographically.
August 18th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Consider not automatically importing the *whole* CD. It does mean you have to look (and maybe listen) a little at the start of some discs, but you get that time back with less to import (and that adds up).
Plus, you’ll really love never hearing or having to skip the occasional unappealing track on a bunch of those CDs again. Especially if you hand things over to the shuffle gods now and then.
Basically, I’d suggest letting this opportunity trump the “gotta have it ALL in one place” impulse that many of us start with.
August 19th, 2007 at 10:03 am
My husband and I (of 10 yrs) never ‘merged’ collections. of course I had no collection before we got married but our music tastes are different enough that there’s always his and mine and the few that we both claim as our own - for the most part, we like eachother’s music, but not enough to go out and purchase it ourselves (and then, there’s always the “if one of your buddies tries to throw out my cds out of an alphabetized wooden box of only music cds on the premise that I should have taken care of it, by golly he and you are going to have to hear the same cds, full blast, on your wonderfully loud stereo system”)
August 20th, 2007 at 1:02 am
Just to add to the pack: I also ripped about 1500+ cds at 192bps VBR. I’ve converted all of my jewelcases to plastic sleeves from univenture. Their jewelpak is the same width & height as a jewelcase but you can fit 4-5 jewelpaks into the space of one jewelcase. It made my collection so much easier to store. The jewelpaks have a section for the artwork & an area for the spine. My collection is like a card catalog now. I love it.
http://www.univenture.com (look for single disc sleeves - available in poly or vinyl)
August 20th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Well, I am in a different boat than the rest of you. I am an IT-guy. I run a smallish data-center. So my music was ripped @ home and sync’d with a copy I have in the data center. To listen @ work, I installed Jinzora (www.jinzora.com). It is a great program, I recommend it. Like Itunes, it will grab cover-art, but it will also grab artist pictures, and descriptions of the artists and albums.
August 20th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Jon,
Do you miss the album covers/liner notes at all? I am trying to start buying everything on emusic and bleep but I am having physical withdrawal. Especially with some of my Impulse reissues and stuff on the Touch label.
My collection is probably about 600-700 cds so I am dealing with the space issues as well.
I am curious to know how you managed the virtual transition.
August 20th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
hey blurb,
like many on this blurb, i did the same. when i was working freelance, I just sat and worked and ripped all day. it was the easiest way to break the monotony. after much research, i found that burning at 320kbps on med to high setting VBR is the best achievement of sound quality to file size as well.
here is my tip:
With all those disks left over after the rip, you can buy those big CD suitcases. they take up a significantly smaller space than all those jewel cases in your cd boxes with felt lining. I have over two suitcases filled with music plus another est. 40 CDs still laying around with no home yet. this also is a preventative measure in case of flood, fire, or tornado - along with your storage device, grab those suitcases and out the door you go.
August 20th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
Seconding the CD-sleeve binder suggestions above. Holy Mary, Mother of God, what did we do before the days of CD binders? Lug around multiple heavy boxes of useless plastic from apartment to apartment, that’s what.
I’d recommend finding an old $50 iMac (1st gen-I’ve had several 2nd gen fanless models die on me) and swap in a big drive, then use that with the auto-import feature to rip and serve music. We have one in the spare room that boots itself up every morning, opens iTunes automatically, and shares out the collection, then turns itself off at night. Sounds like you’re around the same encoding/bitrate I used, although in several years I’ll have to do it all over again.
The only thing I haven’t been able to find is a decent OS X-based syncing program that is smart enough to recognize duplicates and be able to process them in an intelligent way so that I can sync up the new stuff on my laptop, the workstation, and the remote music server. THAT is the nightmare.
August 20th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I recently invested in a 1TB Buffalo NAS.
Dude. Screw portable drives, and irregular backups. It gives me RAID 5, and 750GB of usable fault-tolerant storage on my network (with multiple computers and iTunes hitting it). All for ~$600.
Plenty of storage for music and all my photo work. They also make a 2TB for storage hogs.
Definitely the way to go.
August 20th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Thanks for all these tips!!
I’ll probably move the library to an NAS once it has been completely imported.
August 21st, 2007 at 9:53 am
Is it weird that I think that sounds like SO MUCH FUN?
August 21st, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I’m moving to Australia and have been purging, well, everything. My CD collection is about 70% scratched to the point it won’t rip, so that’s a relief, just pitch it and move on ’cause most of it’s readily available on-line. But I have boxes of cassettes, boxes and boxes but no tape player. Going through them I found stuff that I’ll never find again but I can’t take them with me. I’ve been photographing each layer of titles in the boxes so I don’t forget about some of these bands. The plan is to check on-line once a year or so when I’m feeling nostalgic.
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:48 am
FWIW Coelecanth, I ripped a bunch of cassettes a while back using an old tape player, a $5 cord (earphone jack to microphone jack–the name escapes me at the moment) I picked up at Radio Shack and a freeware program called Audacity. It was a great pile o’ cumbersome to get done, but I was able to preserve audio files that I couldn’t replace any other way.
August 23rd, 2007 at 12:27 pm
jhp: thanks! I was sure there was a way but haven’t had the time to look into it. Mind you, now I’m going to have to find a way to explain to my wife why I’ve got five more boxes to put into storage. Sigh.
November 8th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
after going through a divorce the unmerging was one of the hardest things.