Waay off topic Q about "music systems"

[bikerz]

The way my office pals and I did it was to buy a device from Sony that holds 200 CDs in a carousel, connects to your PC like an external CD drive (which it is) and rips them automatically onto a disk. It was a little finicky to use, and we had to send it back once to Sony for repair because it was out of alignment. It worked for my whole collection (750+ cds), and saved a ton of time, but it only worked for half of Chip's collection, and JP gave up on it completely and did his manually. The CD carousel is not working again, and I might try to send it back to Sony for repair, but since we split the cost, it wasn't that expensive, and it has pretty much served its purpose already. (But I'm not suggesting you get one - they are not very reliable!)

All you really need to rip CDs is a CD drive connected to a computer. You can do them one at a time, and ripping a CD these days does not take very long. It's best if you can have a PC that is doing nothing but ripping, and you just lean over every 2 minutes a drop another CD in the tray. or you could send them out, if you can be without your CDs for a while. Or hire some neighborhood kid to do the ripping for you.

As for formats, I researched and researched, and decided to rip to a lossless format (e.g. flac, wma lossless) instead of a lossy format (mp3, wma lossy, aac) because I didn't want to touch the CDs again when the next "better than mp3" comes out.

Lossy formats achieve the smaller music file size by removing some of the music data before compressing the file, which ultimately affects the sound quality. The loss of quality is not really noticeable on little iPod speakers or in a car stereo, but I really noticed a difference when listening to MP3s on my stereo. You can also get near-CD quality by using a very high bit rate in MP3, but I decided I didn't want any data removed, thank you very much! Especially since disk storage is so incredibly cheap these days, and only getting cheaper.

Lossless formats do not remove any music data, but achieve a smaller size by just using different types of compression. (I'm sure Pedal Wench can explain all this better than I can!). Music players that can read these formats uncompress and re-compress the file as they play it.

So all my CDs are ripped to flac format, which can be played by the Squeezebox, and by many PC music players, including Windows Media Player (with a plug-in). Then I used a great, cheap program called dbPowerAmp to batch convert all the flac files to mp3 on another external drive one weekend, so I can listen to them in my iPod. Piece of cake!

Tagging files and organizing your digital music library are the next big topics - the Squeezebox site has some great articles on tagging classical music that I followed.

You can do all of this for FREE! (Except $30 or so for dbPowerAmp...)

[bikerz]

Whew. One all inclusive article. I hope.

http://www.ecoustics.com/tl/21081/

That's a great article.

It really illustrates the one weak point in all my process, which was using the SONY VGP for the ripping - it is not really a high quality device for the purpose. I had been thinking that I might select the the CDs to which I listen most attentively, and get them professionally ripped, and see if I can tell the difference.

[SadieKate]

Good article yoresef!!

We probably have no more than 250 cds so a pro service might be a good idea for at least the lossless format at 69 cents per and then do your batch conversion for MP3. I'd want to figure out a lossless solution the long run for each CD as I buy it.

MusicShifter had one of the better sites I've found as I've stumbled around the net. They'll do ten for free

[bikerz]

That link that Pedal Wench posted is for a place just down in Palo Alto - I'm going to give them a call and find out their prices.

[bikerz]

Here's the page from Squeezebox on tagging classical music

[SadieKate]

ReadytoPlay looks good also. Squeezebox and the links have good info about the metadata for classical which is a challenge.

Have you looked at any of the services that work with Squeezebox? Either MusicShifter or ReadtoPlay talked about Vorbis for metadata.

[Pedal Wench]

The ecoustics article is okay, but two things stand out to me. The first is that it's written by the man who runs a company that rips CDs. So, of course your home system will never measure up... Read that info with a grain of salt.

Second. He mentions the different lossy formats, and the difference in sound quality that you get at different bitrates, but he never mentions the difference in sound between the lossy formats. For the same bitrate (using up the same amount of space on your computer) formats such as AAC and WMA will sound better than MP3. MP3 was the first, and it hasn't improved much. AAC and WMA use newer psychoacoustic models that sound better -- audible at 128kbps.

[SadieKate]

maybe I'm missing something but what about surfing Shoutcast for classical, and using a simple free media player like winamp? It's all free, no subscrition or software fees.

Like Pandora and probably other similar sites are blocked by my employer?

[Irulan]

Like Pandora and probably other similar sites are blocked by my employer?

shout cast is not file sharing, it's just catalog of internet radio links based on genre.

[Irulan]

Using iTunes for what I little I have on my iPod was painful.

I absolutely hated using iTunes. Winamp is a really nice alternative. Very easy to use, drag and drop, doesn't do what it thinks you should be doing, I love it for managing my music files.

[SadieKate]

shout cast is not file sharing, it's just catalog of internet radio links based on genre.

Thanks, Irulan. I appreciate your attempt to help but you still have to download software (winamp) to use shoutcast and I have no problems find internet radio stations I like by just googling

My employer does not allow non-approved software to be loaded to their computers.

Even streaming radio on my work laptop was going to be a challenge because using the VPN already bogs down the speed so any extra load is unacceptable.

All this means I have to have a separate standalone sytem. I'll consider WinAmp when BikerZ's purchases arrive.

[Irulan]

LOL, I was going to say you should be able to use the Windows media player for radio, but I guess there's still the streaming issue.

Oh well. I will shut up now and be glad I'm self employed.

[SadieKate]

Yeah, but then you have to be your own bookkeeper, secretary, garbage taker outer, etc. And my gawd, the boss problems!

[SadieKate]

Ah, I'm listening to Larry Carlton's "Don't Break my Heart" on the good stereo upstairs via Pandora. Lessee. V started it. Oakleaf and others enabled. BikerZ spent my money. Typical TE behavior.

Bubba was impressed with the simplicity of the SqueezeBox. Since the bedroom mini-stereo has a hum to it while turned off, he may be looking for some powered speakers just to hook up to another SB. Put the mini-system, out in the garage with the bike stand.

Talk about a snowball effect.

[Pedal Wench]

A little late to the party,... but I just found out about Slacker.com. I LOVE it! My column on dvice.com will be about it -- you customize your own radio station for listening online, but they also have a portable device, so you can load it up and plug it into your upstairs system, then just update it whenever you want new tunes. My column goes up late on Thursday afternoon on it.