HydrogenAudio

Lossless Audio Compression => Lossless / Other Codecs => Topic started by: Zix on 2003-07-03 21:42:10

Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Zix on 2003-07-03 21:42:10
Like many of you, I was ripping and encoding Mp3's many years ago.
And although I never used Xing, I can't say my 128 bit Blade rips are making me happy today.

I have come to a crossroads, and am not sure which path to take. On one hand, I am really happy with how LAME -aps sounds, and of course like the size. (Of course, I remember saying the same thing 5 years ago. Will I say it again in 5?)

On the other hand, I can go the lossless route and be assured of a great archive.

My problem is that I have just over 10,000 cd's to convert. The storage requirements in going with something like FLAC is quite large. I estimate only getting about 380 albums on a single 120GB drive (around $90).  DVDR media actually comes close to the same cost. And CDR format was already out of hand for MP3 size (1200 CDR's stacked up).

To me, I feel like the only option is to wait until 1TB drives cost $99. (Not going to happen) or got with LAME -Aps.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: treech on 2003-07-03 21:59:26
10000 cd's .. wow..

aps seems to stack up pretty well, no complaints from me, wonder how much space it will take for that kind of data @ ~ 200 kbps .. prolly more that 120 gig, much more
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: sthayashi on 2003-07-03 22:05:24
MPC is a great middle ground for you that has quality arguably better than mp3, but with comparable sizes.  You might want to give that a try.

Just as a reference, you have over 10,000 CDs.  What are you, a DJ?  That's over $100,000 spent on CDs.  If you drop another $1000 or so, you could easily get a 1TB Raid-5 array for yourself. 

Also, as another reference, assuming they're all full-length music CDs, you have about a year's worth of music sitting in CD form.


Sorry, didn't mean to be offensive, but that's a LOT of CDs.  I have a hard time visualizing 10,000 of something like that.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Uosdwis R. Dewoh on 2003-07-03 22:07:07
By the time you'll be halfway through ripping, chances are the available HD space is tripled and the cost is a third of what it is today! 

My solution is letting Musepack shrink the vast bulk of the CD's that pass me by, and keep the most important ones (for any reason) losslessly compressed with FLAC. Every time I reevaluate my decision (which is sometimes too often) I end up being quite happy about it.

Cheers,
Uosdwis
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Audible! on 2003-07-03 22:20:27
I only have about 2500 CDs and I'm already in such a conundrum, but I'm not as bad off as you, of course  I just need to pick up a 250GB to hold all my LAME rips (aps) plus plenty of movie rips.

50minutes/album avg. * 60 seconds/min * 200kilobit/sec  /8 byte/bit  = ~75MByte/album
2500 albums at around 75MB per is roughly 187Gigs, and I have 80 non-OS, which is stuffed with the rips I haven't burned yet

You're looking at closer to three-quarters of a Terabyte with aps rips 

If archiving is your primary goal with ripping, and you're largely going to be playing the rips from your computer, it seems like MusePack/MPC would be the best option for quality and size.

  The ideal option is probably MPC on a large RAID 1 array just in case one of the Hard drives takes a dive. Which happened to my first 30Gigs of rips 
  Edit because I dont rip movies with alt-presets  and because RAID 0 is not redundant
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Jebus on 2003-07-03 23:35:42
To think I was getting rather proud of my 300 cd collection... sigh...

at least I can say they are all really good discs!
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: indybrett on 2003-07-03 23:53:47
yeah, I got interested in FLAC. Did a quick test. Some of my old Rush CD's came out around 250MB. OK, not so bad. That might work.

Vapor Trails came out around 500MB.  I figure the middle ground would be around 350MB. That just won't work when you're talking about archiving 1000 (or more) CD's.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Zix on 2003-07-04 06:36:54
Thanks for the nice comments, everyone. That's why this site is the best!

sthayashi, as Audible mentioned, a TB worth of storage will be needed just to house that much as simply MP3-aps. That is certainly affordable for me (although pushing it), although I'd probably wait until the next size up from 120GB breaks the $99 mark, and with Serial-ATA. But contemplating the cost of hard drives to hold the Lossless -- no way.

I think the only reason I was even thinking about lossless archiving as a solution was because when I did the math, it looked like 8 or 9 FLAC albums would fit on a DVDR.  This of course is close to the ratio of mp3 albums fitting on a CDR.  Which back in the day, I didn't have any complaints about! (I don't know if I'm alone in this, but discovering mp3's back in 1998 was kind of like having a childhood Christmas, a Birthday, and sex for the first time, all rolled into one!)

The 1200 CDR's I have stacked up in spindles doesn't bother me even now, so would 1200 DVDR's bother me? Not if the price was the same as CDR's are. That'll take a while, but can I get 4X DVDR for $1 each now? That seems affordable at staggered intervals (which luckily, this hobby takes a while to do)

I've recently started my education on MPC, so will have to ponder that.
My first mistake was looking at the main web site of it (all black background, millions of useless links)
Since computer playback is the main use here, MPC sounds like a sound fit. However, the popularity of MPC may hamper my style. Not that...*cough*....I'd ever trade these... *cough*... But if some other Slider's World I did, MPC might not be any good.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: ScorLibran on 2003-07-04 08:46:56
Concerning the cost of hard disk capacity, I thought I'd add something...

I bought my first *real* PC in college (not counting a Commodore VIC20 as a *real* PC, but it was fun!)  It was 1988, and the machine was one I bought the pieces for and assembled myself, component-by-component.

Here are the specs:

Intel 286 / 16 MHz
1 MB RAM --- 640 kB was pretty standard at the time, but I sprung for the *big* memory option 
40 MB HDD
5 1/4" floppy --- giant disks which stored 320 kB to 640 kB 

...well, you get the picture.

Anyway, that 40 MB hard disk cost me about $300!!!  That comes out to $7.50 per MB.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fast-forward to 2003.  Just for a comparison of new technology, my portable MP3 player takes Memory Sticks (flash memory) which are smaller than a stick of gum and hold 32 MB up to 1 GB.  The biggest I own are 128MB, which now run about $50 each (~$0.40 per MB).

As you stated, a 120 GB hard drive now costs about $90.  That's $0.00075 (75/1000 of one cent) per MB.

So we've seen a price drop of some 1,000,000%.  A ONE MILLION PERCENT price drop per MB of HD storage in 15 years...or an average of 66,667% per year.

Now, price fluctuations aren't consistant year-to-year, so if you made a realistic graph, the the curve would be pretty bumpy.  Hence, you couldn't apply the same formula to a small time frame (<5 years)...so instead...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fast forward to 2018...fifteen years in the future.

If the same formula applies over then next fifteen years, then HD storage space will cost 1/1,000,000% of what it does today.  That comes out to $0.000000075 per MB, or $0.000075 per GB...or $0.075 (seven-and-one-half cents) per TeraByte...or $75 per 1000TB.  (OK, so what do you call 1000TB???  A MegaGoogleByte?  Actually I think it's a "QuadraByte", but I'm just guessing.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, my point is that you can count on the cost of HD storage dropping DRAMATICALLY in the coming years, with the biggest price drops hitting an existing technology right when a new technology hits the market.

So whether that *next* technology will be holographic memory, or quantum laser static buffers, or Star Trek antimatter matrices...the effect will be the same, those spinning disks we call "hard drives" will become as cheap as dirt.

Just something to think about when you consider audio compression technologies going forward.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And BTW...that's a H*U*G*E collection you have...puts my ~350 CDs to shame 
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: bexx on 2003-07-04 21:39:27
10000 cds?
AVG ~45 minutes and 800bits/sec would mean 2.7TB which would need 12 250GB drives

Stay away from 120GB drives, might save a little with $/GB for the drives but you'll need more space, raid controllers, and just wiring is gonna be a mess .

250GB SATA drives, on 2 raid cards able to handle 8 drives.

You could just get 16 drives at once and leave alot of room for expansion, it'd be a fixed cost  just gotta go all out at once hehe.

I'd wait a litlte longer till 250GB sata drives drop below $200 (you can find pata ones under 200 but dunno bout sata)  and also check out sata raid cards, havn't looked into it much.  SATA supports hotswap and all and if a drive ever failed it'd be nice to have a card that supports it and would make it easy to rebuild the array.


Using MPC would save you alot of space / money but in it also costs you your time, if you ever rerip them all again to lossless in the future, cost of your time would pay to do it now


---edit---

"5 1/4" floppy --- giant disks which stored 320 kB to 640 kB "
hehe I dunno if its funny or sad that a 5.25 floppy needs an to be explained
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: RaWShadow on 2003-07-04 22:10:14
Its gonna be quicker encoding 10,000 cds as MPC instead of lame aps. 10,000 is ALOT of cds, you gonna rip these one by one? that would take forever !! 
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: kwanbis on 2003-07-04 22:47:46
Quote
My problem is that I have just over 10,000 cd's to convert.

10.000!?!?!?! didn't you mean 1000 ... 10.000 CDs is about 200.000 dollars on CDs only!
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Walkman on 2003-07-05 00:20:20
I've enjoyed reading this thread since I'm going through something similar but not on the same scale.

I just bought 4x120GB UDMA drives on sale for ~$80USD ea and built a cheap server using RAID 0+1 & a TB Santa Cruz (also on sale for $40) specifically so I could re-rip ~600 CDs. I'm about 200 CDs into it.

I mulled over this question for some time, lossless vs MPC or Ogg and finally decided on MP3 lame 3.90.3 -aps. While the others may be technically superior MP3 is good enough for my ears and I can play MP3s on HW devices such as my RioVolts, DVD player, and other players I'll prolly buy in the future.

What I underestimated was the time it takes to rip lotsa CDs if you want to be as accurate as possible w/ the tagging info. I'm a bit anal about that.

I haven't done it yet, but I'll prolly MP3Gain the whole collection when done. I'm hoping by the time I'm done SnelG will have included support for the more widely HW supported ID3V2 tag in MP3Gain vs the technically superior APE tag - but that's another topic  (No, I don't do silly things w/ ID3V2 like include album art - only the fields EAC fills in for me.)

Happy ripping...
Walkman
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: DaveSimmons on 2003-07-05 00:30:18
Quote
Using MPC would save you alot of space / money but in it also costs you your time, if you ever rerip them all again to lossless in the future, cost of your time would pay to do it now
Very good point.  FLAC is also fast, under 10 minutes per CD to rip and encode on my Celeron 1.3 music server using EAC + FLAC.

Quote
Vapor Trails came out around 500MB. I figure the middle ground would be around 350MB. That just won't work when you're talking about archiving 1000 (or more) CD's.
  Nope, at $1/GB you can FLAC 1,000 CDs for about $350 USD plus either a spindle of DVD-Rs or another $350 for backup drives.

I went the FLAC route (750 CDs so far, another 400 to go) so that I'd never have to rip again, and so that I could transcode to other formats as needed without taking a second drop in quality from lossy-to-lossy transcoding.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Audible! on 2003-07-05 00:59:08
Quote
I went the FLAC route (750 CDs so far, another 400 to go) so that I'd never have to rip again,


That's very nice and all, but are you making dupes of your burns, using (add'l) error correction, or just assuming that the burns will last forever?

My experiences with data archiving on CD-Rs have been spotty at best, even with only Taiyo Uden or Ricoh Platinum media, let alone some of the crap I've bought at electronics and computer stores.

  In fact, I'd go so far as to say that a dedicated RAID 1 array will probably result in significantly less data loss over 5 years. And, you don't have to spend the time burning a thousand or more CD's only to see some fail....
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Mac on 2003-07-05 01:38:17
Again, I'm one thinking of this on a smaller scale.  I've had enough CD-R's corrupt themselves on me to not even think of using DVD-R.

I think raid1 or 5 is the solution, as one drive failing doesn't mean any data is lost, so it saves time and effort

my 150cds = 90gb = not a problem

10000cds = 6TB!  (or 3.5TB as FLAC)

And the music industry sais people aren't buying enough cd's
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Audible! on 2003-07-05 01:55:52
Unfortunately for parity-based RAID schemes (like RAID 5), I believe you typically want to invest in an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) if you value your data. Other than that, RAID 5 would be absolutely ideal, assuming you can afford the drives and buy a decent controller.

  Mirroring (RAID 1) doesn't have this problem of course.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Mac on 2003-07-05 09:50:12
Why would Raid5 need UPS?  I thought you could recover your data with 1 drive dead as with raid1, never saw anything about power issues? :S
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: RaWShadow on 2003-07-05 11:21:46
Go with western digitals special edition drives with a 3 year warrenty. SCSI drives have 5 year warrentys.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: anishbenji on 2003-07-05 13:36:18
Here are some links that may be useful. I got them off Slickdeals.net (http://www.slickdeals.net). They are Western Digital 200GB for $115 (http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?Sku=A0080840&category_id=5683&c=us&l=en&cs=19) or if you prefer Maxtor 200GB for $130 (http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=298845&cm_ven=Performics&cm_cat=%2A%2ASlick%20Deals%2A%2A&cm_pla=General&cm_ite=Maxtor%20200GB&ref=performics). These prices are after large rebates, but they are the best prices for high capacity drives that I have ever seen. Both these drives are high performance 7200 rpm drives with 8mb cache. I know Western Digital provides 3 year warranties for their 8mb drives. Not sure about Maxtor though. The Maxtor drives are quieter than the Western Digital drives once you enable acoustic management.
Anish


Edit: To get the $115 on the Western Digital, see the SlickDeals website. With minimum effort, it is $270 - $120 mail-in rebate. The Maxtor is $300 - $50 instant rebate - $120 mail-in rebate.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: ScorLibran on 2003-07-05 13:47:03
Quote
10000 cds?
AVG ~45 minutes and 800bits/sec would mean 2.7TB which would need 12 250GB drives

Stay away from 120GB drives, might save a little with $/GB for the drives but you'll need more space, raid controllers, and just wiring is gonna be a mess .

250GB SATA drives, on 2 raid cards able to handle 8 drives.

You could just get 16 drives at once and leave alot of room for expansion, it'd be a fixed cost   just gotta go all out at once hehe.

I'd wait a litlte longer till 250GB sata drives drop below $200 (you can find pata ones under 200 but dunno bout sata)  and also check out sata raid cards, havn't looked into it much.  SATA supports hotswap and all and if a drive ever failed it'd be nice to have a card that supports it and would make it easy to rebuild the array.


Using MPC would save you alot of space / money but in it also costs you your time, if you ever rerip them all again to lossless in the future, cost of your time would pay to do it now


---edit---

"5 1/4" floppy --- giant disks which stored 320 kB to 640 kB "
hehe I dunno if its funny or sad that a 5.25 floppy needs an to be explained


Edit:  OK...I need help using the "Quote" feature...just ignore the quote above....that's not what I meant to grab.   

HERE'S what I meant to start with...
Quote
"5 1/4" floppy --- giant disks which stored 320 kB to 640 kB "
hehe I dunno if its funny or sad that a 5.25 floppy needs an to be explained


It's just amazing how fast the technology's moving, that's all.  I've met people recently who didn't know what a 5 1/4" floopy was.  In fact...3 1/2's are almost going away...when was the last time you put a floppy disk of any kind in your PC?

Quote
I mulled over this question for some time, lossless vs MPC or Ogg and finally decided on MP3 lame 3.90.3 -aps. While the others may be technically superior MP3 is good enough for my ears and I can play MP3s on HW devices such as my RioVolts, DVD player, and other players I'll prolly buy in the future.


I'm heading in that direction, too, I think.  When I first came to HA several days ago, I was of the state of mind that "FLAC or 320kbps MP3 are the only (compatible) compressed formats for me.  *I* can hear the difference with the lower stuff!"  But now, just a few days later, I' thinking that anything above --aps is placebo to my ears.  Gotta hand it to Dibrom for tweaking an MP3 encoder to the point where it's most basic setting is transparent for so many people.

And compatibility is what's keeping me away from other formats for now.  Until my portable device and the DMS in my car can do MPC or any lossy codec other than MP3, then all I can consider are the formats that I have players for (other than my PC).
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Freaky on 2003-07-05 15:15:47
Quote
If the same formula applies over then next fifteen years, then HD storage space will cost 1/1,000,000% of what it does today.  That comes out to $0.000000075 per MB, or $0.000075 per GB...or $0.075 (seven-and-one-half cents) per TeraByte...or $75 per 1000TB.  (OK, so what do you call 1000TB???  A MegaGoogleByte?  Actually I think it's a "QuadraByte", but I'm just guessing.)

To keep you going over the next few years:

Although of course when most people talk in these units they really mean TiB, PiB etc, meaning it's 1024.
Quote
Anyway, my point is that you can count on the cost of HD storage dropping DRAMATICALLY in the coming years, with the biggest price drops hitting an existing technology right when a new technology hits the market.

Well, maybe.  Depends on how much further areal densities can be pushed reliably and cheaply, and how long suitable replacements will take to develop.  We're seeing a nice drop at the moment because manufacturers are moving to 80GB platters, but we're also seeing access times going up as heads need to seek more precisely, and yields dropping as smaller and smaller defects become problematic.  Better keep our fingers crossed
Quote
And BTW...that's a H*U*G*E collection you have...puts my ~350 CDs to shame  

And my, er, ~5 CDs to shame.  *sob*
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: indybrett on 2003-07-05 17:35:45
Quote from: DaveSimmons,Jul 4 2003, 06:30 PM
  Nope, at $1/GB you can FLAC 1,000 CDs for about $350 USD plus either a spindle of DVD-Rs or another $350 for backup drives.

[/quote]
Exactly. That doesn't work for me.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: ExUser on 2003-07-05 19:44:29
Quote
To think I was getting rather proud of my 300 cd collection... sigh...

at least I can say they are all really good discs!

No kidding, eh? As a 19-year old, I think I've done okay in having ~100 CDs. Then, to hear someone come on here and have my collection size *SQUARED*(!!) just makes me feel small.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: DaveSimmons on 2003-07-05 20:11:20
Quote
> I went the FLAC route (750 CDs so far, another 400 to go) so that I'd never have to rip again,

That's very nice and all, but are you making dupes of your burns, using (add'l) error correction, or just assuming that the burns will last forever?
  No, my FLACs are on 2 Maxtor 250 GB drives, and I have a couple of WD drives to use for backing them up (with the WDs kept separately from the server).

I figure I can keep copying drives with a very low chance of 2 drives (primary + backup) failing at the same time.  Current cost for this scheme ("manual RAID 1"?) is about $0.60 USD per disc, but within 2 years it will probably drop to 0.30, then 0.15, etc.

Comparing to real RAID-1:
Pro - Simpler to setup and maintain, use motherboard IDE or cheap non-RAID card
Pro - backup drives are not in PC, safer from theft, power problems, infection, or other catastrophic server failures.
Con - must remember to do manual backups.  I use my 120 GB OS drive as a temporary backup before copying to the real backup drive.
Con - must periodically test the backup drives to make sure none have failed.

$0.60 per CD is reasonable to me to have all of my CDs online (a super CD changer), in true CD quality, and both transcodable and "clonable" as needed.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: compie on 2003-07-05 20:25:59
Quote
I haven't done it yet, but I'll prolly MP3Gain the whole collection when done. I'm hoping by the time I'm done SnelG will have included support for the more widely HW supported ID3V2 tag in MP3Gain vs the technically superior APE tag - but that's another topic  (No, I don't do silly things w/ ID3V2 like include album art - only the fields EAC fills in for me.)

You should consider using replaygain instead of mp3gain.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: SometimesWarrior on 2003-07-05 21:17:00
Quote
You should consider using replaygain instead of mp3gain.

MP3Gain is the MP3 implementation of Replaygain. So basically, it is Replaygain.

Back on topic: I have no idea how you plan on ripping 10,000 CD's. First of all, if I bought 1 CD an hour for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, it would take me over five years to reach a collection that size. Have you listened to all that music, or are you just a packrat?

If you rip the CD's one at a time, assuming you can get a CD done in 10 minutes, that's another 3/4ths of a year of constantly switching CD's during the 8-hour work day, and probably much longer, unless you plan to sit attentively in front of the drive the whole time. If you're serious about archiving this music, you'll need a better solution, such as a CD tower and a cluster of machines to do the encoding. That already costs $5000, probably.

And after investing all that time in encoding, you'll want a good way to back it up. Since time = money, (let's say you're worth $30 an hour, for argument's sake), that means you've spent $50,000 of your time if you copied the CD's one by one, or $6250 if you used an 8-CD ripping tower. Hell, even if you were worth minimum wage, it would cost you less to buy a ripping tower and encoding cluster than to do the job one-at-a-time. Anyway, the time investment justifies a real storage and backup solution.

If FLAC gives 350MB per album and MP3 gives 75MB, that means the initial storage costs for hard drives are either 3,500GB or 750GB. With a nice round number of $1/GB, you save about $3000 by going with MP3, but you lose the ability to transcode or do any real signal processing on the audio, you don't get guaranteed transparency, and you don't get gapless playback. However, you can run 750GB off a standard IDE card, whereas a 3.5TB array will need some dedicated hardware, probably a RAID 5 with multiple redundant hot-swappable drives, just because you'll have drives dying on a semi-regular basis. Still, with the amount of money you already spent on the task, it seems silly to save a few grand and give up so much sound quality and flexibility.

Then, you will also want a good backup system for this. RAID 1 is out of the question, since as DaveSimmons pointed out, you're still vulnerable to natural disasters, power surges, theft, and viruses. You'll need off-site backup. Since your data won't be changing that quickly, you don't need a light-speed backup solution, but you will probably need a whole lot of tapes on a tape drive that costs several thousand dollars. There have been some discussions on 2cpu.com about backup solutions for large arrays of data, but I'm sure there have been better discussions elsewhere as well. Anyway, you'd need a huge pile of tapes, a fast, reliable tape drive, an auto-loader, and a company that will store, test, and protect the tapes. Now, the cost of using FLAC is much greater than using MP3, but I'd still recommend it because locking yourself into a single lossy format limits you so much.

Archiving 10,000 CD's is a huge undertaking that probably isn't worth it for you, especially since you've mentioned your reluctance to spend money (which makes me wonder how you collected so many CD's in the first place). You can't sell the music online because you don't have a license to do so, and 10-to-1 odds says the RIAA will have you in court by the end of the week if you try to share all the albums on a file-trading network. If you're DJ'ing, you don't want MP3 because you can't do any karaoke or extreme equalization efffects to it without making it sound like crap. That leaves you with personal listening (and public performance, if use use FLAC) as your only practical uses for your music. In that case, you might as well save the money spent on ripping all the music, buy an excellent amp and speakers, and just put the CD in a CD player. With all the time you saved by not archiving all your CD's, you'll have plenty of opportunities to sit back, relax, and listen.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: ScorLibran on 2003-07-05 22:35:10
Quote
I have no idea how you plan on ripping 10,000 CD's. First of all, if I bought 1 CD an hour for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, it would take me over five years to reach a collection that size. Have you listened to all that music, or are you just a packrat?

I'm sure that instead of buying one CD at a time, he did a MUCH more extreme version of what I do (and what many people do).  I budget myself to about 10 CDs per month, and generally buy them all in one trip.  This guy probably buys 100 a month (or more, especially if he's a DJ or VERY serious music collector).

As for being a packrat, I agree that that's an *exorbinant* number of CDs, but then again, everybody has different priorities and different interests.  Maybe he has 10000 CDs for the same reason I have 8 hand-signed photos of Sarah Michelle Gellar and 5 of Xenia Seeburg.  If you love something, be it memorabilia or music, sometimes you just can't get enough.

Or then again...maybe he just typed one "0" too many in his original post...  B)

And the work estimates make a valid point...you'd never have the time to archive nearly that many CDs without a *lot* of help and a *lot* of equipment.  Hopefully, those are things he's already arranged for...
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Mac on 2003-07-05 22:46:00
I don't get why most people insist on sitting still and watching the progress meter while ripping each and every cd?  You stick it in - go away and do some work or whatever, come back and check the logs, and then stick in the next!

It cuts maybe 5 minutes out of every hour, if you have a redudant PC at work with you, which many techie jobbed people do, then you can rip 25 cd's a day or something..  it'd take a long time but won't cost $50'000 of your time
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Audible! on 2003-07-05 23:06:51
Quote
Why would Raid5 need UPS? I thought you could recover your data with 1 drive dead as with raid1, never saw anything about power issues?

I think I'm actually confusing centrally cached parity (RAID 7) with typical one-dimensional parity (RAID 5), so you might be right. If the ECC info. isn't cached in volatile memory during a power outage, it should be okay I think.
  RAID 5 should survive a single drive failure very well, but will be a bigger PIA to rebuild than a mirroring (1) array.
  Given that we're talking about RAID for data integrity and not performance, a RAID 1 (or 0+1) array should be the cheapest and easiest to implement, build, and fix if a drive dies.
Quote
However, you can run 750GB off a standard IDE card, whereas a 3.5TB array will need some dedicated hardware, probably a RAID 5 with multiple redundant hot-swappable drives, just because you'll have drives dying on a semi-regular basis. Still, with the amount of money you already spent on the task, it seems silly to save a few grand and give up so much sound quality and flexibility.

It seems strange to me that you'd propose a RAID 5 array with redundant backup swap-outs and then exclude such a possibility with RAID 1, where it would be faster and probably cheaper (RAID 1 controller = cheap) to do.

A 3.5TB array is very cost-prohibitive, and it's an open question whether the poster has the cash necessary to maintain such a system, let alone implement it. It's also questionable whether lossless is called for in this situation.
  It's certainly the ideal case, but the cost differential is enormous here, making the hardware cost rise dramatically (Maxtor 7200 rpm 250GB drives = $265). Possession of many thousands of CD's does not directly imply tremendous current financial means - I acquired my collection over about 18 years and currently drive a used car
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: rsp22 on 2003-07-05 23:37:16
This thread has been helpful for me, as I too am about to embark on a similar project (although on a MUCH smaller scale).  In fact, I'm facing about 1/10 the effort that Audible! is going thru right now- I've got around 250 CDs I'm planning on ripping.  Of course, I expect my collection to expand over time, and therefore am cognizant of starting with a storage solution that gives me room to grow.  Which brings me to my question...

I've got a entry-level hi-fi system that I ultimately plan on playing my music on.  (Hale Design Group Rev3 speakers, Bryston B60 integrated amp).  For quality and obsolescence reasons, I've decided to rip and store all my music as WAV files (no desire to EVER rip my collection again, and plan to rip each new purchase as it is made).  But I also plan to encode a subset of my music as MP3s for use on my iPOD.  I noticed Maxtor and Western Digital both have 250 GB hard drives out, at both 5,400 rpm and 7,200 rpm I believe.  These seem to offer the lowest cost/MB.  From my preliminary reading, it seems that higher rpm is good for access times, but bad for noise.  Does anyone have any view on the trade-off here?  Also, I've read that anything higher than 60GB requires another plate and therefore increases noise.  How much should I be concerned about noise if I'm running my WAVs through an external DAC and then through my Bryston (off-topic: any advice on external DACs with either Firewire or USB connectivity for this purpose?).

Finally, any things I should watch out for before I start this?  I've used EAC and RazorLAME in the past, and have occasionally had trouble with tagging and batch encoding (but that was around a year ago).  Ideally, I'd like to systematically rip my CDs, then batch encode the ones I want to transfer to my iPOD.  Tips on the best way to do this (or pitfalls to avoid) would be much appreciated.

Btw- sorry if this should be the start of a new thread or if some of the q's belong in other categories.  I'm a newbie (first post) and am still trying to figure out proper etiquette, protocol, etc.  Please trust that I HAVE spent a considerable amount of time searching around this forum before posting these questions.  Anyway, feel free to suggest other places I should post this or threads I should check out to get answers.  Thx.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Audible! on 2003-07-06 00:07:22
Quote
I've got a entry-level hi-fi system that I ultimately plan on playing my music on. (Hale Design Group Rev3 speakers, Bryston B60 integrated amp). For quality and obsolescence reasons, I've decided to rip and store all my music as WAV files (no desire to EVER rip my collection again, and plan to rip each new purchase as it is made). But I also plan to encode a subset of my music as MP3s for use on my iPOD. I noticed Maxtor and Western Digital both have 250 GB hard drives out, at both 5,400 rpm and 7,200 rpm I believe. These seem to offer the lowest cost/MB. From my preliminary reading, it seems that higher rpm is good for access times, but bad for noise. Does anyone have any view on the trade-off here? Also, I've read that anything higher than 60GB requires another plate and therefore increases noise.

If you're storing your CDs losslessly on disc for quality purposes, you might as well use lossless compression like FLAC and save space. Encoding from a FLAC will result in identical files as encoding from the uncompressed Wav, and you can always turn the FLAC encode into the original Wave with a minimum of fuss.

If you have an iPod, AAC would be a good choice

All else being equal, a 5400rpm drive will be quieter than a 7200 rpm drive, but often the noise difference isn't all that substantial, and the price difference is tiny. Most 250GB models these days use three 80GB+ platters, and come in around 240GB when formatted. The main advantage of the 7200 rpm drives is that the warranty period of the drive is longer- the $255 250GB 5400 rpm Maxtor IDE drive has a 1 year warranty while the $265 250GB 7200 rpm version has a three year warranty.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: SometimesWarrior on 2003-07-06 06:30:06
@rsp22 if you want a quiet hard drive (or a quiet anything computer-related), Silent PC Review (http://www.silentpcreview.com) is the place to do your research. Some of the quieting technology available for 7200RPM drives is making them quieter than their older 5400RPM predecesors. Some models to look for (quietest first, the rest roughly in order): Seagate Barracuda IV, Samsung Spinpoint 1204N/1614N (or some derivative of those model numbers), Barracuda V, Barracuda 7200.7, Hitachi 180GXP, Maxtor DM+9. That's from my second-hand experience, and it's also what the site admin recommends (http://www.silentpcreview.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=29&page=1) from his in-depth experience. The WD drives are screamers, I've heard, and so are the ball-bearing Maxtor drives, which I can claim from personal experience. I heard a fluid-dynamic-bearing Maxtor drive recently, and it was much, much quieter.

@Audible!: it sounds like you know more about this RAID stuff than I do, so I'll accept your judgement that RAID 1 would be more appropriate than RAID 5 for this situation. My reasoning was that, with 3.5TB (about 20 drives), it's cheaper to tack on a few extra drives in RAID 5 (it is possible to have, say, three redundant drives in a 23-drive RAID 5 array, correct?) than to buy 40 drives and use RAID 1.

@Mac: Okay, I'll re-do my calculations. Let's say 12 minutes per CD, because he won't be attentive at the ripping station, and 5/60ths of $30 an hour. It will take a year of 40-hour work-weeks to finish the job, and still be worth $5000 of one's time.

Edit: Audible!, I think your comment is a result of my poor use of terminology; I should have said "multiple parity drives" or something along those lines, rather than "redundant" which suggests duplicate drives ("RAID 5+1"?). Does my suggestion now sound reasonable?
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: SometimesWarrior on 2003-07-06 06:41:57
I thought of a good solution. Hire a team of high-school or college computer geeks to do the job for you. Tell them that they can keep copies of whatever they want, and they'll do it for free. Pay them a nominal sum to keep copies of everything, and you'll have a backup solution. Let's say they copy a CD every 15 minutes for four hours after school on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. If you hire 20, you'll have the job done in 2 1/2 months.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Audible! on 2003-07-06 23:44:22
Quote
@Audible!: it sounds like you know more about this RAID stuff than I do, so I'll accept your judgement that RAID 1 would be more appropriate than RAID 5 for this situation. My reasoning was that, with 3.5TB (about 20 drives), it's cheaper to tack on a few extra drives in RAID 5 (it is possible to have, say, three redundant drives in a 23-drive RAID 5 array, correct?) than to buy 40 drives and use RAID 1.


I believe the ratio in RAID 5 is usually 1:2, meaning one allowable failure per three total drives (and ~2/3 capacity of total drives), but I'm unsure about very large arrays. Edit: Actually, I'm pretty sure this is wrong - the minimum amount of drives for a RAID 5 array is three, and this can withstand a single drive failure, but I'm unsure how this scales.
This doesnt make RAID 5 more resistant to surges or failure though, and an array will take longer to rebuild in the event of disk failure.
My concern was primarily with price - 20+ large hard drives just isn't cheap! This is why lossless seems untenable to me for someone with a very large collection. MPC can sound really excellent, and it's small enough to be usable here.
I'd use MPC primarily if my portable and car players supported it. What I was suggesting was a small mirroring array for lossy compression because a lossless array would be both huge and expensive in comparison.
  He could use a RAID 1 or 5 array with 5-6 250GB drives and it shouldnt cost more than ~$1900, controller included, and he wouldnt have to fear much assuming the host computer is on a surge protector. He could even pull the mirrored drives and rebuild, then store a set in a safety deposit box if he felt like it.
 
  For a lossless array, you're talking closer to $6500 on drives alone, and good luck finding a controller that supports more than 16 drives for even that much by itself!
  $1,900 vs. $10,000+ is a big difference, especially for a matter like this.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: clintb on 2003-07-07 01:29:02
Here's a cheap solution to the 10K CD dilemna:

Sort through them and sell what you don't listen to.  Or, just rip what you do listen to and when the mood strikes, the rip the next in line.  10,000 CD's is a number that's just not possible to listen to in any reasonable length of time.  I'm inclined to say you'd be wasting time and money in trying to rip/encode all of them.

I'll go hide now.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: phelix on 2003-07-07 02:31:47
Quote
  For a lossless array, you're talking closer to $6500 on drives alone, and good luck finding a controller that supports more than 16 drives for even that much by itself!
  $1,900 vs. $10,000+ is a big difference, especially for a matter like this.

Prices have come down a bit.  Here's a real world pricelist of what you'd need:

3WARE Escalade 7500-12             $519.00 x 2    = $1038.00
Hitachi Deskstar 180GXP 180GB   $155 x 24   = $3720

That's $4758 for two RAID5 arrays of 12 drives each.  Total capacity is 3960GB (3600GB if we use 2 drives as hot spares).  Add $1500 for a proper case/ps/mainboard/etc.

Grand total:  $6258

Not bad for roughly 4TB of storage.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: sshd on 2003-07-07 07:48:20
It will take years to rip listen to those 10,000 discs. Why Not upgrade harddisks over the next couple of years and rip some 400 at at time
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: ScorLibran on 2003-07-07 09:22:29
Quote
It will take years to rip listen to those 10,000 discs. Why Not upgrade harddisks over the next couple of years and rip some 400 at at time

I think he's more interested in archival than just listening.  I.e., to avoid losing part of his music investment if CDs get lost, scratched, etc.  10,000 CDs is a LOT to keep up with and take care of...I can't find CDs in my collection half the time, and I have less than 400!

But I agree with your point on pacing the project over time mainly because of  storage technology prices dropping in the months and years to come (per my post about ten or twelve back in this thread).

I'd have to have a pretty compelling reason to spend thousands on hard drives, controllers and supporting components all at once, and then in 18 months (or less)find that equivalent storage capacity costs a small fraction of what I paid.   

I'm looking forward to 50 GB Memory Sticks, myself...   

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2005:  10 GB Memory Sticks.  50 GB flashcards.  Hard drives at 500 GB per platter (after a kid in a garage discovers a hot new magnetic-media indexing algorithm).

2007:  Hard drives at 2 TB per platter (the kid's a billionaire by now).  500 GB flashcards.

2010:  10 TB on a standard home PC.  2 TB flashcards.  Garage-kid from five years ago invents a 100 GB experimental, upgradable cranial implant with integrated neural interface (but anyone who has one will be considered a freak).  Digital media compression still needed to store 20TB-worth of high-definition media on your 10TB PC.

2015:  500 TB on a standard home PC.  No more spinning disks: 100 TB per flashcard, with 5  to 10 flashcard slots on an affordable computer.  ALL PCs are portable now.  10 TB now available for the no-longer-experimental cranial implants (anyone who DOESN'T have one will be considered a freak).  Cranial media storage coupled with thought-controlled satellite-commlink implant device...cell phones are obsolete.  Digital media compression is a thing of the past...now the catch phrase is *throughput optimization*.  Brain surgeons become digital storage media gurus.

2020:  100 Exabytes (100,000,000 TB) on a chip hanging from your keychain (with a built-in headphone port, of course, for those times you don't want to use the 500 TB chip in your head to listen to music from).  "Storage media wars" have given way to "bandwidth wars" as the atmosphere is permeated with radio and microwave communications over every available frequency range, with people fighting over a little more bandwidth for themselves...

...and the march goes on...
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: rjamorim on 2003-07-07 09:26:25
Is the 10000 CDs guy still reading this thread even?
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Dex4now on 2003-07-07 10:55:48
Sidebar:  Why am I getting the impression that people like playing with their computers more than listening to their music?   

Dex
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: ScorLibran on 2003-07-07 11:27:04
Quote
Sidebar:  Why am I getting the impression that people like playing with their computers more than listening to their music? 

Actually, right now I'm:

1.  Ripping a CD.
2.  Encoding four files at a time with LAME.
3.  Running MP3Gain on another album.
4.  Writing a document.
5.  Using the internet (obviously).
6.  "Playing with" some other things on my computer.
7.  AND listening to Milla Jovovich...

...all at the same time.  Ya gotta love multi-tasking... 
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: sld on 2003-07-07 12:32:02
Quote
No kidding, eh? As a 19-year old, I think I've done okay in having ~100 CDs. Then, to hear someone come on here and have my collection size *SQUARED*(!!) just makes me feel small.

lol. I'm your age, and my collection size is SQUARE-ROOT yours.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: DonP on 2003-07-07 13:10:12
re cost, If the guy has (had) between $100,000 and $200,000 to spend on the CD's in the first place, then several thousand for hard drives shouldn't break his bank.

OTOH, the people I know with large collections of original (vs pirate copies) music get a lot
at garage sales, estate sales, etc.  One guy I rented a room from had at the time around
7,000 hours worth of records (before CD's came out).  Imagine encoding all that with the
added labor of splitting out and tagging the tracks.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: rsp22 on 2003-07-07 17:47:12
Given the enormity of the task, the original poster (to the extent he/she is still following this) may want to consider outsourcing the job.  The AudioRequest people offer a Music Loading service, though it's unclear how much it would cost or if it's available if you don't purchase one of their (arguably overpriced) systems.  Also, they sell RipStations for people with similar needs.  Not sure if this is what SometimesWarrior was referring to when he talks about "ripping tower and encoding cluster".  Neither solution is cheap, but more than one post has already demonstrated that cheap (in absolute terms) isn't an option and instead the key is to find a solution that is RELATIVELY cost/time-efficient given the requirements.  Still not sure if AudioRequest qualifies, but if you wanted to learn more: http://www.request.com/us/ (http://www.request.com/us/)

Regarding the future, I don't know if I agree with the ScorLibran's timeline for cranial implants, but the holographic storage that he/she speaks of IS just around the corner:  http://www.inphase-technologies.com (http://www.inphase-technologies.com).
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: rsp22 on 2003-07-07 18:33:01
Audible!: Lossless would seem like the best answer for me (FLAC seems to be getting the most support- see [overpriced] AudioRequest device).  A quesiton on lossless: Is there any decoding time required in playing lossless files that is not an issue for WAV files?  If not, is there ANY advantage to WAV whatsoever?
Regarding AAC, I've got the "old" iPod for Windows- I bought a 20GB windows-compatible iPod last september straight from the first run of the assembly-line only to see it made obsolete with the 2003 iPod!!  It's my understanding that mine doesn't support AAC.  Even if a software upgrade could fix this, I'm worried about ubiquity of AAC vs. MP3 and also just don't feel like going through the hassle of educating myself on optimal AAC bitrates, etc. (I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time researching the optimal lame settings for MP3).  That said, I'd be interested in people's thoughts on this decision point.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: zver on 2003-07-07 18:49:59
Well,if you got a 10000++ cds..Even if you bought a blanks and burned-copyed from friends??its a  considerable cost......So what is a hd space compared to??On the other side,back to your question i would go with a mpc(q5) for a majority of them,and for cds you really like go with q6-7 or losless for those--in case you need to convert them in mp3s..like for portable mp3 player and such.....
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Freaky on 2003-07-07 19:03:26
Quote
A quesiton on lossless: Is there any decoding time required in playing lossless files that is not an issue for WAV files?  If not, is there ANY advantage to WAV whatsoever?

Of course there's more decoding time for encoded music vs wav.  That's kind of the point

e.g. Annie Lennox - Bare - The Hurting Time, timed using foobar2k's speed meter (foo_null.dll):

MP3, 224kbps: decoding took 8632 milliseconds, speed 52.38x
APE, high: decoding took 18246 milliseconds, speed 24.77x
FLAC level 5: decoding took 7030 milliseconds, speed 64.30x
WAV, 16 bit undithered: decoding took 872 milliseconds, speed 518.44x

Depends if 10x the CPU's worth ~60% the space to you.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: RaWShadow on 2003-07-07 19:05:55
How about this http://mittelhauser.org/pdms/products.html (http://mittelhauser.org/pdms/products.html)
or this http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ (http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/)
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Kent Wang on 2003-07-07 19:33:59
The deal with RAID-5 is that only one drive in an array can fail and the array still survive. And the minimum number of drives is three. Yes, you could have a huge 20 drive array (you'd have to use software RAID) and you would only lose one drive to parity. If you just had 7 3-drive arrays, you'd lose 7 drives to parity. Then again, this is a direct trade-off to the fact that it's much more likely that two or more drives will fail in a 20 drive array then it wil in a 3-drive array. Most people find 4-8 to be the optimal number, but this is also probably related to limitations with hardware RAID.

I currently have half a terabyte in my fileserver and in the next month or so will be upgrading to a full terabyte. I will be using Samsung 5400RPM 160GB drives managed by Linux software RAID. I don't care how slow it is since I'm mostly concerned with just the amount of storage I can get for my budget.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: rsp22 on 2003-07-07 20:14:20
Freaky: Thanks for the specifics on this.  After further reflection, I guess I came to a few conclusions on my own about WAV vs. lossless compression.  Decoding speed, frankly, is not a big concern of mine.  But using a format that will be accepted by any device in the future with certainty IS a big deal to me.  For this reason alone, I hesitate to spend the time compressing WAVs if it only means I'll have to spend more time decompressing them in a few years (assuming some great hi-fi device only accepts WAV, or some lossless codec I didn't use).  My long-term plan is to go the hi-fi route when prices for integrated digital audio receivers specifically designed for hi-fi systems become more reasonable.  Also, the thought of simply ripping my 300 odd CDs turns my stomach.  In the past, tagging snafus alone have consumed more of my time than I planned, nevermind encoding.  Of course, I will (hopefully batch) encode a subset of my most relevant files for use on my iPod.  But basically, given the relatively modest size of my CD library, I'd rather spend extra money on storage and save time and heartache with the ripping/encoding process.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: vangelisv on 2003-07-07 20:53:16
Hi to everyone,

what a great forum this one is. Some serious stuff going on.

I feel that any encoding is just an obstacle to true audiophilia.

In any case someone could buy 500Gb drives or cheaper 320Gb all at 5400rpm.

I personally prefer to copy my CDs (I also have a few thousand) with Nero and store them as CD images on a set of IDE drives that I connect extrenally to my server through a SATA controller with a lonf 1m lead. The beauty of SATA is that you can attach and detach drives at will same as using USB2 drives.

In any case I would like to ask everyone if they know of any program that can deliver the following functionality.

I want a program to queue Nero CD images (.nrg or .iso files) to Nero ImageDrive for continous non-stop playing of my CD collection.
Basically I would like to automate the proccess of loading CD images to Nero ImageDrive like in a real jukebox.

If there is not such program do you know of a guru that could write such a program. I have lots of ideas on this front and I am looking for someone to help me get them to the web community.

Thanks to RaWShadow who directed me to this forum from the CDfreaks forum.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Kent Wang on 2003-07-07 21:04:35
Why don't you just use FLAC? Smaller, totallly loseless and no funky images to deal with.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: vangelisv on 2003-07-07 21:30:05
Sounds like a good idea, however it is not an option for me for the following reasons.

My colection consists of 7436 CDs. It has taken me more than 2.5 years to copy them in the form of CD images. Encoding the CDs with FLAC would be a sizeable project for me and I do not see the point since disk space is not my concern. All my CDs are already stored on hard disks.

I want my CDs to be a single file when stored electronically, since it makes my life easier when I have to copy them on my notebook to take them around with me.

Can I play FLAC files through say WMP9?

Plus when I need to copy CDs to take with me on my notebook is easy because I only have one file to copy.

I have developed a very sophisticated multiroom system and this is the only functionality missing. Being able to play my CD images like having a giant jukebox.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Audible! on 2003-07-07 22:45:04
Quote
Audible!: Lossless would seem like the best answer for me (FLAC seems to be getting the most support- see [overpriced] AudioRequest device).  If not, is there ANY advantage to WAV whatsoever? Regarding AAC, I've got the "old" iPod for Windows- I bought a 20GB windows-compatible iPod last september straight from the first run of the assembly-line only to see it made obsolete with the 2003 iPod!! It's my understanding that mine doesn't support AAC. Even if a software upgrade could fix this, I'm worried about ubiquity of AAC vs. MP3 and also just don't feel like going through the hassle of educating myself on optimal AAC bitrates, etc. (I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time researching the optimal lame settings for MP3). That said, I'd be interested in people's thoughts on this decision point.

I believe firmware should be availible for your IPod (sounds like a v2) that will allow for AAC playback - and by virtue of being supported by the iPod (and being the format of iTunes), AAC should become significantly more popular over the next year or so.
And AAC sounds pretty darn good at 192kbps, though my experience is limited.
Quote
I currently have half a terabyte in my fileserver and in the next month or so will be upgrading to a full terabyte. I will be using Samsung 5400RPM 160GB drives managed by Linux software RAID. I don't care how slow it is since I'm mostly concerned with just the amount of storage I can get for my budget.

Software RAID is probably the way to go for the absolute lowest possible price.
  Do the newer Samsung 5400's still carry the 3 year warranty? I almost picked up a Samsung 1203N OEM until I saw they also reduced their warranty period.
   
Quote
Grand total: $6258 Not bad for roughly 4TB of storage.

I suppose you can reduce the price either way by buying the most cost effective per GB drives, if you like, or using a particular controller. I personally would purchase the Samsung 1203N 120GB drives at ~$0.78 per GB over the IBM/HGS 180GXP at ~$0.86 per GB even given the IBM's longer warranty. But who has $6000+ for an array? Edit: In fact, who has enough drive bays to accomodate 24+ 3.5" HDDs?
You would likely need to buy external enclosures that translate to SCSI, or perhaps a large file server case.
  I have 2500 CDs, but I didnt buy them in a single year, and I didnt pay $15 on average for them (closer to $8). The original poster may be more into garage sales and used CD stores than I am, or (s)he may be into ***** or something like it...though that would probably exclude a lot of lossless files.
 
Quote
My colection consists of 7436 CDs. It has taken me more than 2.5 years to copy them in the form of CD images. Encoding the CDs with FLAC would be a sizeable project for me and I do not see the point since disk space is not my concern. All my CDs are already stored on hard disks.
I want my CDs to be a single file when stored electronically, since it makes my life easier when I have to copy them on my notebook to take them around with me.
Can I play FLAC files through say WMP9?

That's A Lot of storage!
    FLAC is lossless compression, meaning the data when decoded is identical to the parent Wav file so no quality loss is possible. WMP9 does not AFAIK have a FLAC plugin, but winamp does.
    Is your storage system redundant in any way? I hope so

MOD.: no links to or names of sharing groups, thank you.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: vangelisv on 2003-07-07 23:27:57
My storage system is not redundant. I do not need a redundant system since I still have the original CDs around and my CD images are spread over a number of disks. I am using 6.8 Tb storage space but not all of it is online. My hard disk drives are categorised on a gerne basis to make it easy to select the appropriate disk bank of CD images for playback. I do not have all 6.8Tb online. Only bring online stuff I want to play back. Simple and effective both from a cost and quality point of view.

My problem still remains. Any way to automate loading of Nero CD images to Nero ImageDrive or Daemon Tools, or whatever virtual CD drive technology.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: vangelisv on 2003-07-08 00:04:57
I will attempt to explain why I do not need redundancy.

First of all modern drives are quite reliable (even older ones are) and especially if they are not powered up 24x7. A modern desktop drive, especially the ones using fluid bearing motors should last virtually forever if they are not used continously.

I decided to use 200Gb drives. On a 200Gb drive you can fit approx. 300 CD images (this is uncompressed images that are an exact replica of the original, meaning no encoding, lossless or otherwise, of any sort).

Now, all my CD images are copies of my original CDs, which means I can re-image any CD at any time.

If I loose say one of the hard disks (i.e. 300 CDs) my worst case scenario is to re-image 300 CDs, which would take me approx. 3.5 days or 75 hours (assuming 10 minutes for the CD imaging process and 5 minutes to locate load and unload the CD for imaging purposes).

Since a RAID5 solution will not only be more expensive but also I will have to run the disks 24x7, I think I can forgo absolute redundancy (which by the way does not exist in the real world, remember fire, flood or just simply loosing two drives at the same time on a RAID5 array, etc.) and gain in costs and convenience.

I can plug these 200Gb drives on any of my systems being at home or away say in a friend's house using for e.g. IDE to USB or IDE to SATA conversion.

A RAID5 system is a very good option but quite monolithic in my opinion and I have setup huge SANs for clients in the past in the order of Pb.

Simple in my opinion is beautiful. This is why I am only after a solution to batch load my CD images in Nero ImageDrive/whatever virtual CD loader. Simple but quite effective.

If the right guru comes along to make this dream come true I have lots more ideas on this front. I believe that once people experience the simplicity of what I am after they will never want to go back to using encoding or whatever other technique (pure jukebox functionality is unsurpassed). Think again. Why has the jukebox technology survived for so many years? Simplicity, convenience and usability is the secret.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Kent Wang on 2003-07-08 00:08:26
Eh, those images are still about 40% bigger than FLAC's. You might not care about storage space, but a lot of us do, especially considering those sizes. Also, with just images you don't have tags and consequently, no ReplayGain.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: RaWShadow on 2003-07-08 00:17:18
vangelisv

Use Exact Audio Copy to make a wave file + cue sheet. You could compress the wave with monkeys audio to make it smaller. Play the wave or monkeys audio file in winamp with mp3cue. This way you will have just two files, a cue file and the audio. Name the audio and cue file to the name of the album and put it in its own folder. Then just add all the wav or ape files to winamps playlist. 

Thats the only way i can see you doing it although you would need to convert all your cds and images to this though, and you can tell EAC to use online cddb to name all the tracks for you.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Audible! on 2003-07-08 00:45:20
Quote
First of all modern drives are quite reliable (even older ones are) and especially if they are not powered up 24x7. A modern desktop drive, especially the ones using fluid bearing motors should last virtually forever if they are not used continously.

Modern SCSI drives are extremely reliable and modern IDE/ATA drives are also very good. There was (perhaps still is) some debate on the role that constant powering up and down will have on the MTBF of modern drives relative to constant idling.
  Counting on modern hard drives being "so damn good" that none of them ever fails is IMHO, courting disaster, especially if one is using the IBM 75GXP series
I've had many modern hard drives fail on me from a variety of different brands, and I am quite anal about proper HDD cooling.
    Edit: I should also point out that the failure rate of hard drives is somewhat related to the number of platters a particular drive has - any ATA drive over 80GB in capacity is using at least two platters.
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I decided to use 200Gb drives. On a 200Gb drive you can fit approx. 300 CD images (this is uncompressed images that are an exact replica of the original, meaning no encoding, lossless or otherwise, of any sort).

Again, lossless compression is in fact truly lossless - the data you get out is indeed an exact replica of what you put in. And you have more space per unit storage, meaning potentially fewer storage units, meaning a reduction in the potential for failure (and a concomitant increase in amount of data lost per possible failure).
  In fact, if absolute bit-for-bit accuracy is your goal, you really might consider a different ripping program like EAC or CDex with paranoia.

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(which by the way does not exist in the real world, remember fire, flood or just simply loosing two drives at the same time on a RAID5 array, etc.)

Of course. But using a redundant array minimizes your potential losses from hard disk failure, and I bet you don't believe your HDD's are immortal
    I was recommending a full RAID 1 (mirroring) system for the first poster and the best quality lossy compression availible, which is extremely transparent, especially if not played through very very very expensive equipment (like, for instance, the sound card of a typical laptop). This minimizes cost and maximizes redundancy for an almost negligible loss of fidelity.
    In fact I should point out that the ideal case here is to store your CD's, or a backup hard disk copy of your rips, or both, in a safe deposit box in a high altitude bank surrounded by a four mile cushion of asbestos  edit for some syntax
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Freaky on 2003-07-08 00:49:48
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Use Exact Audio Copy to make a wave file + cue sheet. You could compress the wave with monkeys audio to make it smaller.

Hasn't Monkeys Audio been known to break compatibility with older version files with new releases? If you're worried about long term archival, maybe the well defined open format would be a better choice, despite the slight increase in size that you'll likely see.  Especially when you can embed a cuesheet directly into the file metadata
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: RaWShadow on 2003-07-08 00:55:48
you can embed a cuesheet directly into the file metadata with FLAC ???
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: bexx on 2003-07-08 08:21:24
"First of all modern drives are quite reliable (even older ones are) and especially if they are not powered up 24x7. A modern desktop drive, especially the ones using fluid bearing motors should last virtually forever if they are not used continously."

...  at least you have the orignal cds

"I suppose you can reduce the price either way by buying the most cost effective per GB drives, if you like, or using a particular controller. I personally would purchase the Samsung 1203N 120GB drives at ~$0.78 per GB over the IBM/HGS 180GXP at ~$0.86 per GB even given the IBM's longer warranty. But who has $6000+ for an array? Edit: In fact, who has enough drive bays to accomodate 24+ 3.5" HDDs?"

WD 200GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache HD $299 - 10% - $35 - $120 rebate = $114 shipped free. Item A0080840 from dell  $.57  (just saw it on techbargins)

Also you don't even need to have them all on 1 computer, 2 small file servers...  really do you want to listen to music on a computer wtih 18 harddrives whining? I dunno how well NFS works in winxp, linux can run the server pretty well tho.  The 2 file servers themselves could be made for <$300/fs (tho i don't mind using cardboard boxes as cases hehe)  If you didn't have any redundancy (yea it woudl be stupid but to see how cheap you could do it)  you could make a 3.6TB array for <$3000  And no i dunno who has money for building this type of array for real, but then again i dunno who has money for buying 10,000 cds  but i'm guessing they'd be the same person.

Okay I forgot why i was gonna post...  this is always fun to think about.  A friend of mine works at a compnay that just builds linux clusters, they sell them mostly to the govt and colleges, but he gets to play with them while setting them up.  He always teases me with them hehe.  They got some order ofr 800 nodes...  dual xeon systems... shit even with 20GB HDs thats 16TBs  hehe but they don't get to do anything fun tho  weather modeling and crap.  Too bad they dont' put cdrom drives in them all or else it'd make easy work of a 10,000 cds to rip
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: ScorLibran on 2003-07-08 10:28:28
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I dunno how well NFS works in winxp, linux can run the server pretty well tho.

Geez...all the tech gurus just come out of the woodwork!   

(Just kidding, I'm one myself...12 years in IT.)

Something I can add here concerning NFS...I have many times successfully configured NFS for cross-platform enablement on several flavors of UNIX and Windows 2000.  It's my understanding that WinXP and Win2K are both very similar platforms, with very similar kernels for the most part, both having been derived mostly from NT.  I have not implemented NFS on Linux, though.  The product I have specifically used the most is Hummingbird NFS Maestro on Win2K, and simply configured an nfsmap file and an NFS daemon on the UNIX side (I've done Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX so far).

So there is a good chance that NFS would indeed work on XP as well for either Win-to-Win or Win-to-UNIX situations.  (Needs confirmation, though.)

>>>>>
vangelisv:

It sounds like you have a massive setup...is it all local, or partly distributed?  I agree with the concept of only settling for lossless archival once storage space is not an issue, and if you already have over 7000 CDs imaged on hard disks, then encoding all of them with even a lossless codec like FLAC would likely be an unmanageable and unreasonable pursuit.

But for someone not in that situation, I have to agree with Freaky...the most open, compressed, lossless solution is currently the best one in most cases...i.e., FLAC.  The codec is absolutely free, it's encode and decode speeds are unsurpassed among lossless codecs, there is a plethora of freeware (and growing licensed) support for it, and more and more devices nowadays can speak "FLAC".  For example, although Windows Media Player on my PC can't (yet), the Phatbox in my car can, as can it's associated PC-based music library management software.  Not that other lossless compression codecs are not very highly rated as well, such as Monkey's Audio, WavPack and La.  Most performance differences between them are subtle, with the most important consideration being the same as the most important one in the world of lossy as well...*compatibility*.

And where device compatiblity is not an issue, there are many other products (WinAMP, dBpowerAMP, etc.) that can take a plug-in for almost any codec.

As for the reliability of hard disks being powered down and up over time being higher than reliability of drives running 24x7, I'd have to say that's a debatable point (as others here have already said).  In my experience, even with superior bearings and other moving parts, the surge of a disk being powered up takes a toll on it in just a few seconds equal to perhaps several hours of continuous running time.  Hence reliability gained by letting the bearings and all other drive components "rest" for any period of time shorter than several days would likely be lost at each power-up.  Then again, wear is only one consideration for the proper care of so many units...there is also the consideration of heat management, alarm monitering for active drive units, increased power requirements for continual running, etc.  So I guess in the end, it's a toss up concerning continuous running vs. periodic shutdown when all of those aspects are taken into account.

>>>>>
As for our original poster, Zix,  I noticed that he had only two posts in his stats, the one that started this thread on July 3rd, and the "thanks for the info" post the next morning.  He was probably just passing through, and never expected his question to garner 62+ responses.  But if he's gone for good, I think he's missing out on a good in-depth discussion about how to manage the archival of very large CD collections.

I'm considering saving a copy of this thread as a reference manual... 
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: vangelisv on 2003-07-08 10:57:32
ScorLibran has hit the point with his excellent post. I agree with him 100%. For most people FLAC is possibly the only reasonable option.

For whatever is worth I have the following two points to make.

When I create CD images I like the image to be a single file. Having to manage a few thousand files is I think better than having to manage hundreds of thousands.

If there wes an application that could produce single file compressed images without loss of sound quality I would move my collection tomorrow, provided I could recreate the image on an actual CD without loss of sound quality (exact replica of original).

Being able to mount a CD image as an actual CD in my system is of paramount importance.

My perfect application would be say a player like WMP9, but being able to:

1. Play any number of CD images from a queue, with no need for encoding etc. Being able to say add this CD image then this, etc. and then clicking on play is a dream come true, I hope soon with your help guys.
2. Create playlists that do not depend on encoded tracks, but rather being references to actual tracks on my CD images. Imagine having a library of CD images and being able to say create this playlist from tracks on this CD image then that CD image, etc. without having to extract the tracks.

I cannot understand why we have to go in such pain today to encode our CDs. Surely someone can overlay a virtual file system on top of say a huge collection of single file CD images. Simplicity, convenience and a time saver.

Now this is what I call a true Media Player. What I cannot understand is why no software publisher has come up with such a solution so far.

Do you guys think that such functionality is not worth pursuing?

I am willing to pay for such functionality and I am able to market such a product as well. It has been some time since I last programmed at a low level, this is why I am looking for a guru on media programming stuff. Lets elevate ourselves to the next level. Free your time for other more important things. Or am I totally wrong... I hope not.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: RaWShadow on 2003-07-08 11:46:39
vangelisv

Like i said you can use EAC to make a WAVE + cue image and play them with winamp + mp3cue plugin.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: vangelisv on 2003-07-08 11:52:45
RawShadow

Is my understanding correct that this process (EAC, etc.) involves the creation of multiple files per CD, which is NOT what I want. A single file image is my goal, which the Nero Imaging process currently gives me.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: 2Bdecided on 2003-07-08 11:58:06
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With all the time you saved by not archiving all your CD's, you'll have plenty of opportunities to sit back, relax, and listen.

I haven't ripped my CDs yet (still!), and I don't have time to sit back, relax, and listen!

Well, OK, I listened to a Beatles LP last night - but that's the first propper listening in weeks!


You have to prioratise your life, and decide how seriously you want to take each part of it. It would be a shame to die, having never seen the world or your friends because you were too busy looking after the 2nd redundant back-up of your music collection. The illusion of certainty that everyone is looking at in this thread ignores the general pattern of life - that you can't predict tomorrow. You might not have the money to buy a new PC, or the time to listen. Or you might become so rich that you pay your favourite artists to perform live for you.  If you enjoy ripping, encoding, audio etc that's one thing, but if you want to archive xx thousand CDs, there must be a library or national archive in your country - go and work there!

Cheers,
David.
P.S. don't take this post too seriously - I fully intend to encode my collection one day. But I'll try and only back-up the meta data - the original CDs are the primary back up.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: RaWShadow on 2003-07-08 11:59:18
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RawShadow

Is my understanding correct that this process (EAC, etc.) involves the creation of multiple files per CD, which is NOT what I want. A single file image is my goal, which the Nero Imaging process currently gives me.

It only makes two files !! And EAC can use offset correction which nero does not have.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: DonP on 2003-07-08 12:05:41
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RawShadow

Is my understanding correct that this process (EAC, etc.) involves the creation of multiple files per CD, which is NOT what I want. A single file image is my goal, which the Nero Imaging process currently gives me.

WIth just an image file, you get no information about the CD other than what you can divine from the file name.  WIth track tags you have a lot more choices in searching.  THis is especially useful with CD's that have different artists on each track, or with collections of,
say,  10,000 CD's.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: vangelisv on 2003-07-08 12:20:05
I might be mistaken, but I think we are missing the point.

The extra track information is of no use to me, since if I play my CD say in WMP9 the CD information is overlayed with no problems.

Secondly to someone a bit out of touch with technology like myself. Why is offset correction useful? I have never had any problems with any of my Nero images (please remember I have a collection of 7000+ CDs).

I love my music and the only thing I want is to listen non-stop. My opinion is the technology should be there to help me not hinder me which is the case now.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: DonP on 2003-07-08 12:31:53
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The extra track information is of no use to me, since if I play my CD say in WMP9 the CD information is overlayed with no problems.

The CD information is displayed once you have selected the CD, but what if you want to
find, say, 1950's rock & roll, or anything sung by Pavarotti, or a particular song title?
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: RaWShadow on 2003-07-08 12:37:21
You would need to make a program to do this. There is alot of developers on these forums that might be able to help make one? Seeing as there is easier and better ways to store your music already, so thats why sumthin like this has not been made? Maybe you can make a wmp 9 plugin so that wmp 9 can directly load and play from your cd images instead of using nero image drive.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: bawjaws on 2003-07-08 12:52:03
First, here is a post to the flac developers mailing list from someone who is actually using flac to back up 40,000 audio CD's - http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.p...9&forum_id=6312 (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=2649469&forum_id=6312)

Now, my comment on this thread is that the best way to back up your metadata is to make use of MusicBrainz.org as it provides redundant, off-site storage as well as thousands of people to help you out with filling in and correcting the data. A definite time (and therefore money) saver.

Even if it's not in the exact format you want and none of the tagging options suit you, it's far easier to massage data coming out of an honest-to-goodness database, than it is to muck around with flat files, cddb info and Perl, or whatever.

My own CD ripping adventure is about to start, having been held up by a lack of secure rippers for the Mac and waiting for a few other technical stars to come into alignment. With a need to have both mp3 and AAC/mp4 versions of my tunes (and to keep my options open), flac was an easy choice.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: ScorLibran on 2003-07-08 14:05:50
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I might be mistaken, but I think we are missing the point.

The extra track information is of no use to me, since if I play my CD say in WMP9 the CD information is overlayed with no problems.

Secondly to someone a bit out of touch with technology like myself. Why is offset correction useful? I have never had any problems with any of my Nero images (please remember I have a collection of 7000+ CDs).

I love my music and the only thing I want is to listen non-stop. My opinion is the technology should be there to help me not hinder me which is the case now.

The extra track info also serves to tell WinAMP how to view the single WAV file containing all tracks on the entire CD as separate tracks for the purposes of playback or playlist management.  It does this by using the MP3cue plugin to look at the cuesheet file generated by Exact Audio Copy (EAC) upon ripping.  Any data in the cue file that you don't want, just ignore.  The whole cue file takes less than a kilobyte in most cases.  The two files RaWShadow is referring to is (1)  the cuesheet file and (2) the one WAV file which comprises the CD image.

CD Read Offsets in a Nutshell----------

Almost every CD/DVD drive in the world doesn't start reading a track on a disc at exactly the first sample of that track.  Most drives start reading a few hundred samples earlier than the actual beginning of a track.  Those drives have a negative offset.  A few drives start reading a little later than the beginning of a track.  Those drives have a positive offset.

A sample is the smallest bit of music data on an audio track.  A sample is to digital music what an atom is to matter.  You've seen that the standard CD sampling frequency is 44,100 Hz, or 44.1kHz, right?  And keep in mind that one hertz = one cycle per second.  What this means is that the music is "sampled", or defined as, 44,100 units of data per second of audio.  And since one second equals 44,100 samples, don't sweat it if your drive is reading a few hundred "off center"...they all do that.  Well, almost all do that, as a few drives in the world may have a read offset of "0", but this is unlikely, and since the read offset of your drive can be compensated for by good ripping software, it's also irrelevant.

A full description of the concept of CD read offsets can be found here (http://www.ping.be/satcp/eacoffsets00.htm#-).  Also, if you end up using Exact Audio Copy, use that site's tutorial index at the top of the page for a complete walk-through of EAC, including recommended configuration settings.  It's considered one of the best tutorials for that product.

You basically want to have an accurate read offset correction so that you can ensure the error-free copying of a CD.  Offset correction combined with error-checking and verification is what "secure mode" ripping means.  Not that if your drive's offset is not compensated for that you'll have "bad copies"...you'll likely never even hear any discrepencies, with a few extreme exceptions.  A good "secure mode" ripping tool can even compensate for moderately scratched CDs, making the digital copy sound as though it came from a perfect (unscratched) CD.

So, if it's important to you to have *perfectly* accurate copies of your CDs, and be able to even compensate for scratches on a CD, then you'll want to use a ripping tool with error-correction and offset correction capabilities.  Offset correction is not as complex as it sounds.  All you do is grab a couple of CDs from your collection that match the correct pressing of the same CDs in the ripping product's "key CD database", and the product will automatically calculate your drive's read offset.  The offset correction number is the negative of the offset.  I.e., a read offset of -116 samples = an offset correction of +116 samples.  Plug the resulting correction number into a configuration window of the ripping software, and you're good to go.

Either of the following products can rip with error-correction and a read offset correction to provide perfectly accurate copies:

Exact Audio Copy (http://exactaudiocopy.de/)
dBpowerAMP Music Converter with AccurateRip (http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=2261)

CDex may also provide "secure mode" ripping, but I haven't used it, so I don't know if it does or not.

Hope this helps clarify things...


[Edit: Added a reference to The Coaster Factory's EAC tutorial.]
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: jcoalson on 2003-07-08 18:33:16
Quote
Is my understanding correct that this process (EAC, etc.) involves the creation of multiple files per CD, which is NOT what I want. A single file image is my goal, which the Nero Imaging process currently gives me.

EAC is pretty flexible: you can create one file per CD *OR* one file per track.

You can use EAC to rip an entire CD to a single WAVE file plus a cue sheet, then compress that single wave file losslessy to a single FLAC file and import the cuesheet (which essentially stores the CD's table of contents in the FLAC metadata).  Then you will have a single FLAC file that can be used for playback in Foobar2000.  If you also are OK with keeping the separate cue sheet file you can play the single FLAC file back with winamp + mp3cue.  There are a few threads here on how to do this, I would try searching for "+eac +flac" to find them.

You can also burn a CD directly from the FLAC file with several compatible tools; see the FLAC download page (http://flac.sourceforge.net/download.html/) for some options.  The CD will be the same as the original, same audio data, same track and index points, same lead-in/lead-out, the resulting disc will yield the same CDDB id in players, etc.

Josh
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Zix on 2003-07-08 19:46:29
Yes, I am still around. We did just have a long holiday weekend, so I'm sorry for lack of response. However, in a discussion this large I am hardly needed!

In fact, after reading everything very carefully, I still don't have much to say really. I'm sorry if you think "Thanks for all the info" is a lame response. But it's true: Thanks for all the info. There are other forums where I hang out that I am more of an expert in the subject, where I proceed to divulge facts all day long to those asking. But in this situation, I am the one asking. So I will continue to mostly read and digest all the great info here. Thanks.

There have been some questions about cost of the original collection, ability & time to encode, or listen to, or enjoy life, or a sanity check. I could go into those, but I think it would be off topic, and we wouldn't get to focus on the storage question.

I will mention however that the quantity wasn't a typo. It's actually even a little more than that, but math works out better with that number. Also, the collection can grow at any time. Also, there is always the potential for encoding DVD's and shows I own in the future... although I'll admit that queuing up all the Sopranos and putting it on shuffle doesn't have the same necessity as 5 minute songs.

Also, there is a home-made automated system I've built that can handle the CD's without my intervention. So the encoding process isn't as scary as it would be manually. (That may sound impressive, but think tinker-toys & gears).

Vangelisv, thanks for finding the thread. Your real world example is interesting. Good luck with your problem/solution. I have also thought about making sure all my hard drives are encased in removable caddies. This would provide easy swapping between machines, easy RAID swapping due to failed drives, and most importantly: for offline storage. Having 1TB online and 2TB offline actually solves some of the logistic concerns that I've been trying to work out. I also agree that spinning up drives can be as much wear and tear as letting it run for many days. However, the larger the collection, I suppose the less need there is to have everything online. I would hazard to say that having a drive sit on a shelf for a month at a time _would_ easily prolong its life.

I guess I had more to say than I thought
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: SometimesWarrior on 2003-07-09 04:34:26
I've read about problems with using typical CD image programs to backup audio CD's--they don't do the double-checking that EAC does to make sure the audio is copied properly. They use something akin to burst mode, from what I've heard, which should work well for pristine CD's, but won't notice some errors that EAC can detect and correct. For CD's with some scratches, a burst-mode copy can be fraught with pops and clicks. There's a bit of talk about the subject in this thread (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=5023), and if you search around more, you might find some other good threads. I'm pretty sure the other threads exist, but I'm having an awful time trying to sqeeze relevant results from the new forum search engine.

vangelisv, if you haven't experienced any popping in your ripped audio, then either you have well-maintained CD's or Nero's CD copier has decent error correction for audio CD's. But just to be sure, you might try ripping a heavily scratched CD with Nero just to see how it handles the errors.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: vangelisv on 2003-07-09 06:43:24
SometimesWarrior,

I undertand what people are saying about scratched CDs. All my CDs are in pristine condition with no scratches, not even a single fingerprint.

I will try to image a CD that is scratched and report back. However it might be difficult to find such a CD, since I never borrow nor lend CDs.
Title: Converting a HUGE collection
Post by: Zix on 2003-07-13 06:33:23
I've come to a decision, and am going to go with lossless archiving.

After looking at the prices of DVD burners, I realized that a 50-pak spindle of Princo 4X DVD-R's costs $60. That comes to about 215GB ($0.27/GB). Much more affordable than hard drives at the moment.

Considering how long it will take to encode all the albums, the cost of these spindles can be spread over time, driving the cost down to a perceived zero (well, at least down to affordable hobby expenses)

Maybe by the time the project is finished, the cost of hard drives will be more reasonable, and I can start buying them, transferring the collection to them.  And since the files will already be on DVD-R, that means I have an instant backup. This means I wouldn't need to mirror the hard drives, infact maybe go with RAID 0 for speed.

As previously mentioned, the amount of time to do the archiving will be immense. Might as well do it correctly.