Archiving My Music
 

Here is the situation...

I have around 1000 cds I want to archive on a 500Gb external hard drive I just purchased. I would like to maintain as much of the cd quality as possible and Im willing to purchase another 500Gb HD if necessary.

I have an 8Gb nano that I will be transferring the music to and from as I want to listen to it.

Any suggestions on the format, bit rate, software I should use would be greatly appreciated.

PC or Mac???

You might have better luck getting good suggestions in the computer forum (Tilted Computers). PM a mod, he'll move your thread.


As for suggestions, I find that Easy CD Da Extractor is very good for ripping CDs and encoding them in various formats.
MP3's are often what's most used because they're read by most(virtually all) portable music players.

If you're an audio lover, and want to know what bitrate to encode in, my suggestion is to take a track that has very well-defined audio (most stuff by Pink Floyd, etc is good in my book) encode it several times at different bitrates.

Start at 124 Kbit/s. Work your way up from there. I usually encode at 168 Kbit/s or 192. Past that is, for 99% of people, just a waste of bits, as you most likely will not be able to hear a difference.

If you're using Mac, I have no idea. A lot of people use iTunes, which is free. Tell us a bit more about your machine.

I use CDex to rip music from my CDs. I encode at 192kbps. The new rage is VBR, though. 320kbps is good and all, but worth it only if you're the audiophile that the guy at the record store is afraid of. I personally notice a difference in 128k vs 192k, but I live around too much background noise to really tell the difference in higher bitrates. Also consider that if you fall in love with 320kbps, you're not gonna be able to fit many albums on your iPod.

CDex doesn't go so far as to archive a CD cover image along with the tracks, but it is quick, no-nonsense, and easy (once you have all the settings the way you want). All I really need is accurate ID3 tags and a good directory structure.

I'm a PC user, so I can only give advice from that perspective.

It really depends on how important preserving quality is to you. If you're a person who just likes to listen to their music and doesn't care about having perfect quality, then I would recommend using EAC and LAME to rip to mp3. Setting it up for the first time can be a bit daunting, but a google search should turn up lots of tutorials. Bitrate is subjective, but I would recommend ripping them as V0 vbr mp3s, which I find to be the best compromise between sound quality and file size.

If, on the other hand, if you are an extreme audiophile and having a perfect 1:1 copy is important to you, then you'll need to look into the various lossless codecs. My personal favorite is FLAC, but because you mentioned playing it on an ipod your best choice would be Apple's own lossless codec.

i second CDex, rip at 320 kbps since you have plenty of space. i use the program 'the godfather' to organize my mp3's, but cdex should already organize them for you, it can usually get the ID3 tags from the online databases of cd's.

windows media player actually does a pretty good job of ripping cd's. unless you have a veeerrryyy sensitive ear, ripping mp3 at 192 should be more than fine to preserve quality.

If you're very serious about preserving as much audio quality as possible (while obviously not storing the album in WAV format!), then you should use Exact Audio Copy to rip the CDs to FLAC (CDex is nice, but doesn't match the accuracy EAC allows for). No question about it. And don't worry, the iPod supports FLAC.

To set up EAC to be able to encode in FLAC, you'll need to first download the FLAC encoder, then use this tutorial to set up EAC to use it. When choosing an additional command line option to use (the tutorial gives you three to pick from), remember that more compression = less audio quality. Although, even the highest compression option will be much better than a 320kbps mp3.

This is assuming you're a PC user. If you're a Mac user, I unfortunately don't know which applications are best. FLAC is still the codec I'd recommend though.

I use CDex and encode at 192kbps. CDex if free, so download and give it a try on a couple of albums. If 192 isn't good enough, go higher.

Big audiophiles tend to use FLAC instead of MP3 like Secret Agent mentioned, and I do have a few FLAC audio files. It does sound nice. I stick with MP3 because of greater flexibility with media players.