Home Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

RE: Moving all CDs to network drive..advice?

If you do it, don't do it all at once. Do a small batch of your favorites and enjoy the rips. After a few months when you are certain that things came out the way you like then you can do more, etc... If you try to do them all at once there's a good chance you will screw up and have to start over. That would be a lot of wasted work.

As to software to do rips, definitely use dBpoweramp if your computer is a PC. It's easy to set up and comes with access to lots of Internet databases that have tag information, saving a lot of labor. You could also use Exact Audio Copy and it will probably do as good a job in the end if you don't screw up the setup, but it has less access to databases and so you will spend more time tweaking tags. I do not suggest using media player software for ripping, as these are easy to set up in such a way that you think you are making good rips when you are not. (Been there, done that.) Always rip CDs to the the original sample rate and bit depth, 44/16. I suggest ripping them to FLAC as it will save storage space and provides good tag support. Eventually you will run out of storage space. Also when you have a disk drive failure it will take less time recovering and making a new copy of your library if the files are have been losslessly compressed.


Be warned, also. Unless you have some kind of a personal disaster, you will almost certainly outlive your disk drives. Their expected lifetime is about four years, although they can fail at any time and may last longer. The good news is that lots of albums can be quickly copied to multiple drives for backup purposes, so the loss of a drive will be a minor inconvenience. You should keep at least two backups of your rips. Yes, if you still have the CDs you won't lose the music, but the cost of a backup drive is minimal compared to the labor involved in ripping. If you have your own personal recordings or have purchased downloads then I suggest having two backups of your library, since you won't have the physical disks around in case of a major disaster. I keep one backup drive off site, bringing it back every month or so to add any new items.

There is file synchronization software (such as SyncBackPro) that will take inventory of your library disk and a backup disk and automatically add new albums to your backup. This can be set up so that if some glitch silently corrupts one of your library files your backup will not automatically become corrupted as well. It only takes a few minutes to synchronize my music library and I do it every day if I have added any music.



Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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