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Topic: Approximate Size of CD collection in GB (Read 12219 times) previous topic - next topic
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Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Hello.  I am thinking about encoding my CD's into FLAC.  I have about 170 CDs and some obscure stuff on mp3 that would take up space as well. I have 58GB free on my HDD of which ~20GB is in v1 LAME mp3, and can probably free up about 3 GB by uninstalling useless programs, etc. That leaves me with about 78GB of free space to encode a growing collection of about 170 CDs. Do I have enough space?

Thanks,
Joe

Edit: just want to know if it's worth it to start encoding if I don't yet have an external HDD to archive on.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #1 –
Well, it would be impossible to determine a narrowed down size simply because FLAC is VBR, offers different -q levels (the quality is all the same but you basically slow down FLAC's encoding rate so that it doesn't "waste" bits), and different albums are going to produce different bitrates.  It all depends on the -q level you are going to use and what type of music is in your collection.  Hard rock and metal are going to require a higher bitrate than "simpler" music such as pop, rap, techno, etc.

Just to give you an idea, the average album in my collection took up about 450MB when I was using FLAC at it's default setting.  I think it would be worth it for you to start archiving even if you do end up running out of space.  I think you are going to come in close but you can start archiving now and just move the files over to an external hard drive whenever you get it.  The prices of USB2.0 hard drives have drastically fallen.  In fact, Best Buy has a 1TB USB2.0 hard drive on sale for around $140 this week.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #2 –
Ok thanks. Would moving files over to the external drive in the future (dragging and dropping) result in a quality loss? Isn't that the case with mp3s when they are dragged/dropped, because they are copied in the process? I would imagine there might not be quality loss, because it's almost analogous to copying a zip file and then extracting that zip file.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #3 –
Copying files between two hard drives will never cause any quality loss in any format unless there is something horribly wrong with your hardware or OS.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #4 –
FLAC can quite often achieve 40% compression of the source lossless material at the default setting.

For a full 700 MB of WAV data representing almost 70 minutes of audio, that's about 420 MB to compress an entire CD to FLAC.  WAVs are typically about 10 MB per minute of audio.

78 GB is about 78,000 MB

78,000 divided by 420 is about 185 CD.

That is even if almost every audio CD approaches 70 minutes runtime you would still be able to fit all them in 78 GB with several GB to spare.  However, that is very unlikely that every audio CD you have would be 70 minutes long.  More likely would be them closer to 60 minutes on average.

For audio CDs that are an average of 60 minutes across the entire collection, that's an average of 360 MB to compress per CD to FLAC at the same 40% compression level.

360 MB * 170 = 61.25 GB at most


In fact, you should be able to fit about 210 FLAC compressed audio CDs (average 60 minutes each) in 78 GB of space.


Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #5 –
Similar average - 378MB / hour of audio (averaged over 761 hours).

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Sound-of-Muzak on
Ok thanks. Would moving files over to the external drive in the future (dragging and dropping) result in a quality loss? Isn't that the case with mp3s when they are dragged/dropped, because they are copied in the process? I would imagine there might not be quality loss, because it's almost analogous to copying a zip file and then extracting that zip file.


You got it right in the end. Re-encoding an mp3 (or any lossy file) involves a quality loss, because it goes through the whole throwing-bits-out thing again. Simply copying a file in the computer OS is lossless (assuming nothing is broken), whether the file is an mp3, a zip, or a Word document.

And if you're just a few gigs short of an archive, USB memory sticks are so cheap these days we'll probably be getting 4 GB as a promotion in the cornflakes.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #7 –
Thanks for the replies. I ended up getting a western digital 320 gb portable HDD. I am extracting my flac files to this drive now using EAC, but it seems to be a bit slower. Does anyone recommend ripping to my internal and then copying to my new external HDD? It's USB 2.0, but it's extracting at about 4.5x in eac using test and copy burst mode. Thanks for all the help.

Joe


Edit: and it was at about 7-8x with my internal drive.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #8 –
I guess it depends on how fast your USB2.0 hard drive is.  USB2.0 is limited to burst speeds of 480Mbps so you are set there.  However, a 4500RPM or 5400RPM hard drive may have slower read/write speeds if your internal hard drive is a 7200RPM (or faster) model.  I have a USB2.0 2TB 7200RPM hard drive that does not experience longer CD ripping speeds than if I were to rip directly to my internal hard drive.  In fact, ripping speeds are a little faster as my tablet's internal hard drive spins at 5400RPM.

What Western Digital hard drive do you have?  I tried to look up the specs of some of their portable hard drives and I couldn't really find anything regarding their speed.  One thing to think about is the copying process.  Is it really going to take you a shorter amount of time to rip a CD to your internal hard drive and copy/move it over to your external drive than it will just to rip to your external?  The CD ripping process might be a little quicker but factor that in with the amount of time it takes to copy ~450MB of information to your hard drive and the hassle of having to rip and move.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #9 –
Every external USB2.0 HD I have can easily keep up with my ripping duties.

External USB2.0 HD can sustain 20 MB/sec read transfer rates, and 8MB/sec write rates given a 7200rpm drive of 250GB or larger capacity.  I don't even know if 5400rpm normal (desktop internal) IDE/SATA drives are available any more.  My local computer stores certainly only carry the 7200rpm variety.  The only 5400rpm drives they have are 2.5" internal laptop drives.

Ripping a CD at 32x requires a read and write transfer rate of 4.8 MB/sec (32 * 150KB/sec) all the way to the destination HD.  That falls well within the minimum 8MB/sec sustained write rate of an external USB2.0 HD.

However, I limit EAC to ripping at 16x myself.  That seems to be the "sweet spot" for my DVD+/-RW drive, giving the highest percentage of AccurateRips and least amount of read errors while maintaining a good enough ripping speed.

As for the external HD available from Western Digital, they only use 7200rpm drives in the 3.5" size (the "My Book" brand), unless they are the smaller 2.5" portables (the "My Passport" brand) which would then be 5400rpm.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #10 –
Quote from: kornchild2002 on
I guess it depends on how fast your USB2.0 hard drive is.  USB2.0 is limited to burst speeds of 480Mbps so you are set there.  However, a 4500RPM or 5400RPM hard drive may have slower read/write speeds if your internal hard drive is a 7200RPM (or faster) model.  I have a USB2.0 2TB 7200RPM hard drive that does not experience longer CD ripping speeds than if I were to rip directly to my internal hard drive.  In fact, ripping speeds are a little faster as my tablet's internal hard drive spins at 5400RPM.

What Western Digital hard drive do you have?  I tried to look up the specs of some of their portable hard drives and I couldn't really find anything regarding their speed.  One thing to think about is the copying process.  Is it really going to take you a shorter amount of time to rip a CD to your internal hard drive and copy/move it over to your external drive than it will just to rip to your external?  The CD ripping process might be a little quicker but factor that in with the amount of time it takes to copy ~450MB of information to your hard drive and the hassle of having to rip and move.


Good point about the time it'll take to copy over. I'll just suffer the slight inconvenience. The drive, after doing a search for spindle speed, is 5400rpm. It's nice having a small one though and I got it $40 dollars off at staples.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #11 –
USB2.0 hard drives labeled as "portable" (though, technically speaking, all USB2.0 hard drive are portable) normally use 2.5" 5400RPM hard drives and the el-cheapo models (from no name brands) often use 2.5" 4500RPM hard drives.  That way they can be powered via a single USB2.0 connection instead of requiring a dual USB2.0 connection or a separate AC adapter.  I am also guessing that the cache has something to do with it.  I am no hard drive expert by any means but a 5400RPM hard drive and low amount of cache could lead to slower ripping speeds.

Either way I would still continue to rip solely to/on the USB2.0 hard drive as I think it would be a hassle to rip a CD (or a bunch of CDs), move the files, rip some more CDs, move the files, etc.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #12 –
Final size came in at only 55GB using -5

It's nice to never have to rip those CD's again. Size in v0 mp3 is only 16GB, transcoded overnight to mp3.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #13 –
Ah, the benefits of using lossless.  That is one of the main reasons why I have a lossless library.  I can re-encode them using newer lossy encoders/settings without having to stress my drive and re-rip all the CDs again.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #14 –
As someone who's been burned in the past, make sure you have a backup system after taking the time to rip, tag, store, etc all your music.  Re-ripping everything a second time is no fun. 

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #15 –
FWIW, my FLAC collection averages 753kbps. It's very classical-heavy though.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #16 –
Quote from: Peter_T on
As someone who's been burned in the past, make sure you have a backup system after taking the time to rip, tag, store, etc all your music.  Re-ripping everything a second time is no fun. 


What do you mean? Like buying a second HDD and copying my flac files over? I encoded to mp3 for listening and the files are on my laptops internal drive. flacs are sitting idle in my external hard drive.

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #17 –
Quote from: Sound-of-Muzak on
Quote from: Peter_T on
As someone who's been burned in the past, make sure you have a backup system after taking the time to rip, tag, store, etc all your music.  Re-ripping everything a second time is no fun. 


What do you mean? Like buying a second HDD and copying my flac files over? I encoded to mp3 for listening and the files are on my laptops internal drive. flacs are sitting idle in my external hard drive.


While not a frequent event, hard drives fail. After it happens to you you'll either congratulate yourself for buying the backup drive or curse yourself for not having it. If you're lucky like I was, Get Data Back for NTFS recovered nearly all the files on the disc. Obviously it wasn't a mechanical failure but a blown out boot sector so the data was still there. It took 12 hours to recover a 300 gig drive.

G²

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #18 –
Okay, but how likely is it my drive is going to fail. I'm not really going to be using it. It's purely an archive. I'll occasionally use it to back up important documents like research projects for school and the like, but other than that it's not getting much use.
 

Approximate Size of CD collection in GB

Reply #19 –
I wouldn't count on the level of use being an indicator of the probability of failure.  It's entirely possible for a brand new drive to fail the first time you turn it on, and it's also possible for a stored drive to fail after sitting dormant for any amount of time.  It's also possible for a drive to fail while in use.

What you can count on is that your drive WILL fail at some point.  I've been using computers since the mid 80s and have experienced 3 drive failure events in that time.  I count myself very lucky.
For the first, I had no backup, but was able to repair the drive and recover everything with software.  The second (same drive) left me with no data (still no backup).  The 3rd was at work and I had started backing up a few months prior.  Took me half a day to reinstall the system, software, and data, but that afternoon was like the failure never happened.

I still have data at home that isn't protected, but it's only data that I don't care about loosing (regenerate-able lossy audio and video).  Everything else is backed up, and I still feel wary that I don't have another off-site backup.

Take a tally of your data.  If there's anything that would be inconvenient or impossible to replace, you need a backup.  If there's nothing of either, you're probably fooling yourself.