Running out of music storage space!

[garyc]

Hi Everyone,

need your ideas... I have around 500 cd's... around 300 MD's and over 400 lp's, they are starting to take up too much room! Not sure how I can increase space... don't wanna get rid of any as I've done that before and ended up buying the stuff again! PLus I would like to have access to them all do I go down the hard disk route... any suggestions?

[Richard]

Hi Everyone,

need your ideas... I have around 500 cd's... around 300 MD's and over 400 lp's, they are starting to take up too much room! Not sure how I can increase space... don't wanna get rid of any as I've done that before and ended up buying the stuff again! PLus I would like to have access to them all do I go down the hard disk route... any suggestions?

I can sympathise with you as I have around a 1000 cd's myself. I'm not sure what the solution is, in my case I just seem to fill up more and more bookshelves with them, a few are stored away in boxes. Maybe you can relegate some to the attic/basement if you have one? Store the lesser used items at a friend or relatives house?

[greenmachine]

CDs are relatively convenient and fast to copy to HD. If you plan to get rid of the them, archive them losslessly compressed (e.g. FLAC, Wavpack...), otherwise i guess high quality lossy compression (like high bitrate vbr mp3) would be adequate.

[Christopher]

Wait a couple of months till Blue Ray is out, 50GB dual layer disc will do you swell.

Otherwise, grab a HDD..

[garyc]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.. I reckon I'll start with moving the lesser used ones up to the attic. longer term, I'm growing quite fond of this: http://www.yamaha-uk.com/hifi_components/?product_id=111

[streaml1ne]

If you go the harddrive route I highly suggest you get a raid setup with some sort of redundancy. The last thing you want is to lose the music and time you put into ripping, encoding, and tagging your collection.

[garyc]

If you go the harddrive route I highly suggest you get a raid setup with some sort of redundancy. The last thing you want is to lose the music and time you put into ripping, encoding, and tagging your collection.

good call sl, thanks for that

[ZosoIV]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.. I reckon I'll start with moving the lesser used ones up to the attic. longer term, I'm growing quite fond of this: http://www.yamaha-uk.com/hifi_components/?product_id=111

I almost bought one of those, until I realized several things: a) it would be far cheaper to get a very basic barebones case/motherboard/3.5" HDD/good soundcard than it would be to buy the Yamaha, the Yamaha's little brother (CDR-HD1000) is infamous for its failure/repair rate (do a search online), and c) you can digitally rip CD's to the HDD as wav files, but if you were to make a CD-R from the image on-unit, it will erase it to comply with SCMS. The only way to retrieve recordings off the unit without having them erased (like for the car, friends, etc) is to record the original CD's in analog mode, which is 1x and loses quality compared to DAE. SCMS doesn't apply if you go that route.

I've gone the computer/HDD route myself, and encoded all my CD's to the lossless FLAC format. I even did that for my LP's and tapes, though I might re-do some of these with Hi-MD as the MZ-NH1 probably has a better analog section than the cheapo on-board sound chip that I used to record them onto my computer.

Another thought: archiving to lossless on a computer allows you to make backups on DVD+R's if you have a burner. After ripping and tagging everything, I did just that with about 30 8.5GB DVD+R DL discs that are now stowed away for safe-keeping in the event of a HDD crash.

edit: formatting

Edited January 26, 2006 by ZosoIV

[Jacques]

... Store the lesser used items at a friend or relatives house?

I've had to do the same thing, got a large library (100s) of CED titles and my SKT-400 with nowhere to go. Had to move everything to a friends house, of course, they're much bulkier than CDs.

[garyc]

I've had to do the same thing, got a large library (100s) of CED titles and my SKT-400 with nowhere to go. Had to move everything to a friends house, of course, they're much bulkier than CDs.

nice! how is the picture and sound quality on CED? I've never seen one here.. I had considered buying an LD player at one stage, if only for the "Star Wars Definitive Collection"

[Jacques]

nice! how is the picture and sound quality on CED? I've never seen one here.. I had considered buying an LD player at one stage, if only for the "Star Wars Definitive Collection"

"RCA's new "SelectaVision" VideoDisc player employs a diamond stylus which tracks a recorded signal that moves at a 450 rpm turntable speed."

Picture quality is 'Crystal Clear' All transport functions without distortion or frame loss.. Most titles are in Mono, but a decent library of discs in Stereo is also available,. which the SKT-400 supports, I highly recommend it! Actually IIRC this format introduced OSD which is quite amazing for a machine of such vintage.

A Universal Product Code is being recorded on the blank copper master.

This code will match up with the UPC symbol that appears on the back of the disc caddy.