It's the confluence of computer nerds and audiophiles. This is sort of a tricky topic to ELI70 because there are a lot of options and layers to this sort of thing and because there are so many different options, the kinds of folks who like to dig into this topic all have their own individual preferences. This is what I do.įor 400 CDs the ballpark estimate for a FLAC archive would be about 200 GB, and maybe about 70 GB for 320kbps MP3s, but this can vary greatly based on what the actually musical data contains. The FLAC files are your "gold standard", your reference files which you guard forever against data loss by having multiple copies of the FLAC archive in multiple places. If you delete them or lose them or whatever, it's not the end of the world as they can be recreated from the perfect FLAC files. The traveling files are what you put onto your phone or music player. IMO best practice would be archive them to FLAC, then make a second "traveling" archive out of mp3's or oggs or whatever your chosen lossy format is. (Works fine as a playback program, I've never used it to organize.) You can also use VLC to organize & playback your music. If your music is already in the computer as WAV files, you can convert it to mp3 using VLC, a totally free and safe media player program. People who notice and care tend to use the FLAC file format already mentioned. Some people notice this and care, lots of people don't. Creating mp3 files makes the music file much smaller by doing some fiddly stuff that reduces the fidelity of the music. If you're looking to listen to the music on a portable device, like your phone, you'll probably want a smaller file than WAV, the usual format is mp3. (At the very least, you can play the albums as is via the files on your hard drive.) Once the music is ripped to your computer you can use Windows Media to play the music & organize your collection, to some extent. WAV files are the largest size of file - about 11 megabytes per minute of music - so 400+ CDs could eat up a lot of hard drive space you might want to think about an external hard drive for storage, depending on the size & free space on your current hard drive. If you're primarily interested in preservation and/or backup you can rip the CD's to your computer in a variety of file formats - WAV format is "lossless" as in literally the same fidelity as the actual CD. You can use it to play CD's direct from the CD drive. Windows Media Player that is included in Windows will rip (copy) CD's. If your computer (is it a desktop? a laptop?) has a CD/DVD drive (or you buy an external USB CD drive) you can get some better speakers or headphones, connect them to your computer, play the CD's from the drive. You could buy a reasonable quality bookshelf system - small CD player/receiver/amplifier with a couple of speakers - for about $200-$400 and just listen to your CD's "old-school." This suggests you don't currently have a CD player & home stereo system to listen to them on. I'd like to be able to enjoy them again by transferring to.?
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