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Topic: Yet another "which is the best way?" question (Read 4029 times) previous topic - next topic
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Yet another "which is the best way?" question

Hello all! Here's the thing, I've been scouring this forum for a few weeks now and am blown away at the amount of technical expertise buried in these threads! I've read enough to only scratch the surface, when it comes to transferring my CD collection onto my computer, which is what I want to do. Where I'm at right now with my knowledge is nowhere near where I'll be after another six or so months of reading the information here, but I'm an impatient person and I'd like to get on with archiving my CD's. On the other hand, I don't want to go through all the time and work of saving them, only to start over after finding out, I could have done it a better way!

I've done some searching and there are still a few basic questions I'd really like answers to. Thought about starting a new poll with my questions but I read somewhere that there's only so many options a person can include and I'd like to get a wide range of answers so I’ll just ask for the input like this....

First of all, if money wasn't an option how would you all go about storing your CD's onto your computer? This might be a stupid question, but isn't there a way to place .CDA's directly onto the hard drive? Isn't a .WAV file very similar to the .CDA? (I’ve herd they're identical, is this true?) Like everyone, my CD collection is continually growing and I only have so many hard drives in my computer. Most motherboards will only allow 6-8 hard drives(if lucky). I personally have three that I've amassed throughout the years. Two parallel ATA's at 30G and 80G and one 160G Serial ATA.. So what is the average number of CD's a person could fit onto 100G's of space if the songs are uncompressed?....If  we say the average CD has, say 12 songs on it and lets just say the average song in WAV(or CDA?) form is 0.035 Gig(35meg), if my math and these assumptions are correct, I come out with about 2800 songs which is about 230 cd's per 100G hard drive…Wow, can this be correct?... The reason I consider all this is because I don't know what I want to do with the songs in the future and after reading here awhile it seems a few things apparent. Number one is that cd's are a given standard, everyone here is using CD's to start with for the most part. Second is we would like to transfer them to our computers( I have a few reasons for this, but mainly to listen to them)The third standard is we want to be able to transfer the songs to another player other than our computers. Fourth standard here is we want our music to sound as close to the first standard as we can get on multiple sources....In my particular case, what I want to be able to transfer to is my car, walkman or cell phone. I haven't settled on what type file the second two will play and my car will only accept CDA right now. Hence my need to be able to convert my music to a format determined later on. I realize we can take the original CD and convert it to any and all the other formats but, from what I've gathered, it's best to use the original and not any form of lossy copy to transfer? So if I were to transfer my collection of cd's onto my computer using EAC and MPC's would I be at a disadvantage when transferring them vs if I had used EAC and LAME vs if I had just let EAC keep them as WAV's? If I just placed an original CD in the tray and selected that drive would Windows let me "drag-n-drop" the file list into any directory of my choosing?...If so, would the copied file have the .cda extension on it or would it be .wav? I tried this a long time ago and something makes me think it DID have the .wav extension after it copied it?

I guess these are all the questions I have up until now, excuse any ignorant comments I let slip? Any and all information you guys can shed is much appreciated and thank you much in advance!

Yet another "which is the best way?" question

Reply #1 –
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...how would you all go about storing your CD's onto your computer?
I used EAC to rip my CDs into a lossless codec (FLAC).  There's no need to store the files in WAV format when a lossless codec can retain all of the original data in a significantly smaller file.  FLAC, APE, WavePack, and Shorten are all designed for just this purpose.

Once you have ripped the CDs into a lossless format, it's very easy to transcode them to MP3, OggVorbis, MPC, or any other lossy codec.

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So what is the average number of CD's a person could fit onto 100G's of space if the songs are uncompressed?
Using FLAC, I have ~8,000 tracks occupying ~200 Gigs of hard drive space.


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Hence my need to be able to convert my music to a format determined later on. I realize we can take the original CD and convert it to any and all the other formats but, from what I've gathered, it's best to use the original and not any form of lossy copy to transfer? So if I were to transfer my collection of cd's onto my computer using EAC and MPC's would I be at a disadvantage when transferring them vs if I had used EAC and LAME vs if I had just let EAC keep them as WAV's?
Converting from lossy to lossy (i.e., from MPC to MP3) will always result in quality degradation.  So, again, if you archive your collection in a lossless format, you will not need to re-rip the CDs when you want to use a new lossy codec.  Just transcode for lossless to lossy (i.e., from FLAC to MP3).

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If I just placed an original CD in the tray and selected that drive would Windows let me "drag-n-drop" the file list into any directory of my choosing?
No.
The (audio) files would have to be extracted by a program such as EAC or AudioGrabber.  With EAC, the audio data is extracted in WAV format, and then compressed into lossless or lossy, if instructed to do so. (I don't know about AudioGrabber, since I've never used it.)

Anyway, check out the Lossless Forum.  Once you have the tracks in a lossless format, converting and transcoding is a breeze.

Hope this helps some.
 
~esa

Yet another "which is the best way?" question

Reply #2 –
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First of all, if money wasn't an option how would you all go about storing your CD's onto your computer?

some LOSSLESS codec, probably FLAC, or WavPack, so each CD would ocuppy half  the size.

Yet another "which is the best way?" question

Reply #3 –
Quote
First of all, if money wasn't an option how would you all go about storing your CD's onto your computer?


I would hire mercenaries.  I would pay them to recuperate every damn
music tape of the world, digitize them to LAME --aps then burn the
tape.  The array of HDD containning the MP3s would be kept in my swiss
bank deposit.

Hope this does not give you any ideas.

Radetz

Yet another "which is the best way?" question

Reply #4 –
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Isn't a .WAV file very similar to the .CDA? (I’ve herd they're identical, is this true?)

Yes. An extracted WAV file, at 16-bit 44.1kHz, is equal to the CDA source. As mentioned, lossless compression formats do also preserve the audio signal perfectly. You can extract to WAV, compress it with a lossless codec, then later decompress the file back to WAV - and the waveform will still be 100% identical to the original.

edit:
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...what I want to be able to transfer to is my car, ... and my car will only accept CDA right now.

No worries here either. Any software that burns music CDs will convert WAVs to CDA, as long as you choose the proper burning procedure. Meaning you just have to be sure to burn it as a Music CD (which will produce a compliant CD-DA disc), vs. just copying the WAVs onto the disc in a data session. It's very simple and easy.

Yet another "which is the best way?" question

Reply #6 –
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First of all, if money wasn't an option how would you all go about storing your CD's onto your computer?[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=280150"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Even if money - and hence the number of CDs I could store on, say, 1 TB of HDD space - weren't an issue whatsoever, I would still encode to a lossless copy of the albums, for the sheer reason that a good lossless codec is a lot more versatile than just plain WAV when it comes to tagging. What's more, the time when a comfortable 10 Mbps of internet upload bandwidth becomes as everyday as 56 kbps of download speed is today, is still a long way from now. By which I mean, compression ratio (= bitrate = download speed = storage space) will always play a major role.

In fact, all considered, money really shouldn't be such a big deal, with HDD prices dropping below 0.60 EUR/USD per GB. That makes about a 1000 CDs on a new 300 GB drive (my CDs compress to an average of 310 MB each with FLAC -8 or 285 MB with La -high), amounting to just some 20 cents per album.

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So what is the average number of CD's a person could fit onto 100G's of space if the songs are uncompressed?....If  we say the average CD has, say 12 songs on it and lets just say the average song in WAV(or CDA?) form is 0.035 Gig(35meg), if my math and these assumptions are correct, I come out with about 2800 songs which is about 230 cd's per 100G hard drive…Wow, can this be correct?...[a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=280150"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]
Yes, it can, and you can even easily bring that down to more than 3 CDs/GB of disk space by using any modern lossless codec, as mentioned above.