Digitising your music collection

[Tiger]

ok i admit it i'm a technophobe who likes techno

anyway some advice from some of you technology savvy peeps out there would be greatly appreciated.

i have probably about 400 cds at home, numerous mp3s on an external hard drive mainly essential mixes and the like. thinking of getting an mp3 player (ipod) to put virtually everything on.

see apple do an ipod with 160GB which looks more than enough space, but i'm wondering what alternatives there are. i remember when ipods first came out then had huge issues with mix cds and put a gap between songs which kind of defeats the object of a mix cd.

also heard some mumblings that itunes doesn't particularly like unlicensed music like mp3 mixes (essential mixes) or friends tracks. also does itunes take up large hard drive space on your computer and make it run slow? thats why i keep all my mixes in an external hard drive.

i know the biggest hassle is going to be actually loading all my cds onto itunes & ipod; and wondered how safely its stored? for example if my computer or ipod gets lost/stolen am i back to square one?

any advice/tips/etc would be graetly appreciated, thanks

[matt]

My wife got a brand new 32GB iPhone 3GS a couple of months ago so I'm now using her old classic 80GB iPod as there was never enough room on my own 8GB iPod nano.

I've put tons of essential mixes and beats in space shows on there and there's been no problem. iTunes is a fucking pain in the arse but I only ever use it for transferring stuff to my iPods.

If you're worried about losing data it's probably worth getting another external hard drive on which you back everything up. They're quite cheap these days and I got a 1TB one for about £60 a few months ago.

Also if you're looking to complete your Essential Mix selection then check this page out as it has rapidshare links to almost every EM since the very beginning and there's loads of great early ones from the likes of Billy Nasty, Dave Clarke, Laurent Garnier and Dave Angel

[Mike]

Originally Posted by matt

If you're worried about losing data it's probably worth getting another external hard drive on which you back everything up. They're quite cheap these days and I got a 1TB one for about £60 a few months ago.

did you get that in tesco up in western avenue? i got one too

[King of Snake]

Originally Posted by Tiger

ok i admit it i'm a technophobe who likes techno

anyway some advice from some of you technology savvy peeps out there would be greatly appreciated.

i have probably about 400 cds at home, numerous mp3s on an external hard drive mainly essential mixes and the like. thinking of getting an mp3 player (ipod) to put virtually everything on.

see apple do an ipod with 160GB which looks more than enough space, but i'm wondering what alternatives there are. i remember when ipods first came out then had huge issues with mix cds and put a gap between songs which kind of defeats the object of a mix cd.

well iTunes has an option to add a "gapless" album entry to the metadata of your music which should eliminate the gap. In my experience you can still hear the transition between tracks but it's not a gap anymore, just a tiny sort of skip.
Nut sure how iPods deal with it but I'm guessing they should be able to do the same.

also heard some mumblings that itunes doesn't particularly like unlicensed music like mp3 mixes (essential mixes) or friends tracks. also does itunes take up large hard drive space on your computer and make it run slow? thats why i keep all my mixes in an external hard drive.

this seems far fetched. I've never heard of it and have never had any problems playing mp3 mixes or my own or friends' tracks.
iTunes app itself is 159 Mb here (that's on a Mac at work, I use a pc at home and use winamp there instead). I don't think there's any reason it should make your computer run slow, unless maybe you have an older system with very little (less than 1GB) of RAM.

I don't know how iTunes runs on windows these days but I remember it was a bit of a pig initially compared to the mac version.

i know the biggest hassle is going to be actually loading all my cds onto itunes & ipod; and wondered how safely its stored? for example if my computer or ipod gets lost/stolen am i back to square one?

well that's always gonna be something to consider when working with important data. You should definitely choose some sort of backup method and preferably store it someplace else than at your house. Harddrives are insanely cheap these days so you can easily buy an external 500 gig drive and put all your important data on it, then store that at a friends place, or at work and update it once a month or so.
There's also various online backup services that should work ok if you've got a speedy connection and can deal with the long initial upload.

[negative1]

if you use windows,
you could probably get a ZUNE 120G player..

the software works a lot better than itunes,
i've always had problems with itunes..

they've discontinued zunes because of the new zuneHD,
but you can get these older models pretty cheap..

i think you can even buy bigger replacement drives, if you
need more space.

be seeing you
+1

[kagenaki koe]

the only reason you won't be able to play your friends' mp3s is if it has DRM (re: it's licensed to one account or copy protected). itunes does slow down (not the drive but the app itself) if you have a fairly large collection (in my case 17,000 songs). it isn't the app that takes up a lot of space, it's your own actual record collection and how it has been encoded ex. a song encoded as 320 kbps mp3 is about a 15 mb file (lossless is about 20 to 30 mb), but encoded as 192 or lower the file size is about half that. so if someone had a record collection encoded at 192 or lower, he won't use as much hard drive space as someone whose collection is 320 kbps (or lossless)

[Tiger]

Originally Posted by kagenaki koe

it isn't the app that takes up a lot of space, it's your own actual record collection and how it has been encoded ex.

thanks, and do u get a choice when u encode a cd as to what MB it will be stored at?

[Leon]

Cowon iAudio D2.

[King of Snake]

good choice mr Leon. I'm still enjoying my Cowon M5L.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by King of Snake

good choice mr Leon. I'm still enjoying my Cowon M5L.

The D2 is like a dream. 16GB capacity, expandable with SD-card (which go up to 32GB). When you charge the battery (won't take more than a few hours) you can enjoy about 50 HOURS of music before you have to recharge again. The LCD-screen is nice and the touch-screen works like it should, quick, responsive and no loading times. It supports different file formats (one of them being .flac, which is important for me) and you can just copy & paste your collection to the D2 without using some shitty program. You can play movies and pictures on it as well, although that is no priority to me. The D2 player has everything I want from an mp3-player and it works great. It never freezes or anything. It's really cheap as well.

I know this is completely off-topic and I sound like a Cowon salesman, but that's what the D2 does to me.