Where to store/save music

Started by kylie, June 22, 2012, 03:45:47 PM

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kylie

     I have a collection of CD's that I am thinking about saving as software.  Fyi, I have never had a portable MP3 player so I don't know what their limitations normally are.  Any recommendations for where to save the music for smooth retrieval and transfer to a computer/portable devices? 

I could toss them in Itunes, but I have quite a few and I'm not sure whether they will be so easy to pull back out again. 

     Or, are there online sites that you find easy to use?  Thanks.
     

LaOnomatopoeia

What sort of equipment are you sitting on? Mac? PC?

kylie

     I have a desktop PC, but I'm thinking more...  Where can I save the music from so many CD's, so it's retrievable anywhere?  I don't know if I can ship all the discs. 

     What won't be compromised too easily, or too difficult to pull back off onto a portable device (or another computer) again?  I was thinking maybe, would it be practical to I put it all on a flash drive or save it on some online archive site(s)? 

     And where has a good default recording quality?  Itunes usually works for me now, but as I recall:  The settings once took fiddling to get the sound to come through just right.
     

LaOnomatopoeia

For your needs, it probably would be best to settle on a flash/external hard drive. It's pretty inexpensive too. At least I assume on all of those.

I've actually never had a problem with iTune's sound quality, though. That is the method I use to store all my music.

jonathantrick

I must admit I prefer iTunes, at the risk of sounding like a noob. I find iTunes stores music quite well and organises it in alphabetical order by artist when I look at the folder it is in, which I like. I never had a problem with sound quality and I don't have trouble with iTunes. I find the media player itself easy to navigate as well.

I'd say a portable hard drive wouldn't go wrong either. Last I recall they were quite cheap to buy.

Callie Del Noire

iTunes is fairly good.. and if you're using a PC.. windows media player is okay too..

The important thing with BOTH applications is to make sure you feel comfortable with the settings and set up of how the media is saved. DEFINITELY look over whatever app you use and how it is set up. That way you know what format and setup you're using throughout the set up.

Once done.. either burn to CD/DVD (I use DVDs for my bigger groups of albums/artists like my Queen, Clapton and such) or a external drive. depending on how much you got at the end a flash memory card works really well too. IF it's only a few gigs you can utilize free cloud drive accounts like amazon to back up as much as 5 gigs of music.

Also keeping in mind if you use a vendor like Amazon, iTunes and a few other vendors.. they typically keep your purchases online.. (I have wiped my drive and downloaded old purchases and put the CDs I bought in stores back in)


kylie

#6
     Have been slapping the cd's on a friend's Linux machine with a program called K3B.  It moves them across quite fast, like 3 min. for a regular sized album or so.  We've saved them as either Ogg Vorbis or Flac files, both of which she swears are completely lossless. 

      I'm not absolutely sure as I'm listening to these new file types through unfamiliar speakers, but I think they sound fairly good.  Supposed to be able to convert them back into smaller mp3 for discs, etc. as needed.  The Ogg Vorbis take slightly longer to dub, but have a broader range of compatibility.

...  Now, I just need one sizeable hard drive for this collection.  Buahhh.  Hee.
     

DudelRok

There are tons of online storage options available to you, kylie, and many of them are free up to a certain amount of gigs. As it's online, you'll have access to download from any PC, and from there you just sync to any digital music recorder. iTunes being one of those services, but I'm not going to encourage people to use Apple products.

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TentacleFan

As someone with a pretty sizable music collection I'll weigh in with my setup. I personally am not fond of Itunes myself but I do have an aversion to apple products in general so take that with a grain of salt. I ripped all my cds into digital files close to a decade ago using Windows Media Player so I'm not terribly up to date when it comes to converting to digital as I haven't bought a physical cd since then.

I currently use Google Music as my primary music player. It's free and since I have unlimited data for my smartphone (and of course on my home broadband) It works well for me. It's true I can't hold that much of my collection at once but the 20,000 songs it covers is more than I really need at a single time anyway. I keep a portable hard drive as well for backup. I'm currently using a Western Digital 1 terrabyte drive for storage. I picked mine up over a year and a half ago for well under $100. I haven't priced them recently as I have room still on it. The times I am playing something and don't want to pull from google music on my computer I use Windows Media Player still but that doesn't really happen frequently.
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kylie

  Of course, I go through all this and then end up with a hard drive that won't transfer all the data smoothly.  There are web pages with oodles of different things that could be the problem. 

    Which for the moment leads me to say, think twice about ripping all your cd's unless you seriously absolutely have to.  (Or if you have tons of time and are totally desperate to make more portable files.)  I've been trying to do this for over a month and it's been one hard learning curve after another.  The concepts are simple enough, but something seems to be incompatible with something at almost every stage for me.  Argh.  It's no fun when you only have a short time before you have to travel.
     

kylie

     Well after replacing one hard drive, this seems to be finally wrapping up.  Word is, backup and security software bundled with some drives can place a real lag on the whole system.  Without all that, am doing better. 

    Thanks for the recommendations.  I may see about stashing some backups in Google after the drive writing business is complete.