300CD’s?
Frankly since that many CD’s will fit with room to spare on a 250gb HDD don’t bother storing them (Archive) in any losless compression codec, store them as what they are… WAV
FLAC is to save space… spoace that is now far less precious than it was even 2-3 years ago.
With retail HDD space selling for <$0.10/gb why bother?
I doubt your entire collection as wav would take up more than 200gb of space (I’ll personaly bet 185gb)
But also don’t go running out to buy a PAIR of 250gb HDDs to store them on… 500gb drives actually cheaper most days, they are often on sale for $40 each plus shipping.
buy TWO because any data you have only ONE copy of WILL get lost
USE EAC to do your ripping.
From the EAC window press F9 then choose the tab for “File Names” in the left hand block enterthe following:
"%D%C\0%N %T"
this will, automatically create a directory (Folder/subfolder/file) tree structure.
Example AC/DC’s song " Hells Bells" off the album "Back in Black"
be saved as “C:\AC-DC\Back in Black\001 Hells Bells.wav”
(C: being an example, on my computer it’s actually “H:”
Now click the tab for “Directories” and choose where (which drive) you want your computer to
save these wav files to… on my Computer it is “H:\WAV Archive”
preset this way (assuming that your discs are all in good condition and you have everything else in EAC set correctly) all you’ll need to do is sit there soing something else and feed your computer another disc when it finishes extraction.
If you use EAC V1.0 Beta you’ll get to choose which album art jpg to save with the WAV files.
As a note though a music CD has a capacity of 702Mb you’ll discover that 1000music CD’s don’t require anywhere near 700gb of storage space, because most Music CD’s aren’t anywhere near full, on average they’ll have slightly less than 500gb of actual data on them…
My 1000Cd collection takes up a bit less than 600Gb
If you have a WAV you can make ANY OTHER KIND of codec now in exsistance or that someone will create later… later in one step.
Now for “accessability” mp3’s seem pretty universal for listening…
I have mp3 copies of ALL my music, because having my entire collection take up slightly less than 100gb is a bit easier to keep on my laptop than 600gb would be…
Compression rate? I personally use 160Kbit/sec for any “portable” application and 320K for "home/desktop use.
Is there a difference in audio quality with the higher bitrate? Not as much as you’d think
but at home storage space isn’t an issue.
I compress enough to make it fit where I want to store it.
70-ish Gb on my notebook’s 500gb drive is OK, at home having my music playback library take
up ALL of a mirrored pair (it’s actually a mrrored trio but only two are physically connected
at any given time) of 160gb HDDs is a “so what?”
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