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Making hundreds of cd accessible and portable?


bubs_42

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I'll try to make this short I have a shit load of CD's. The reason I still buy then is that I can take them where ever I go, I usually go every other week and buy 5 or so more. I have done the iTunes thing, where I ripped a bunch. But after my desktop took a dive and we moved to a laptop, I cannot access any of those CD's .

So what's the best way to be able to make my Library Digital, portable, and accessible? Without paying a monthly fee for shit I already paid for. This way I can leave the hard copies at home. 

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16 hours ago, kizanski said:

Trying to operate it (especially while running) was as confusing as it's visual design.  

Years ago somebody gave me one that worked but was in need of a battery replacement. After playing with it a (while connected to a power source) I decided it was not worth fixing. This one wasn't as strange as the one pictured above but the user interface wasn't very good and the software to load it was utter crap.

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On 4/5/2020 at 8:57 PM, scottcald said:

That’s why I don’t like the subscription stuff. The record companies or whomever currently holds rights can remove something randomly and it’s gone. 

Same here.  I have the free version of Spotify and that's it.  When I'm working at home, I listen to that to discover new music but I always buy the CD if I really like something.  Like Bubs, I have about 2,000 CD's and still add a handful every month.

It was a bummer when I discovered looking at new cars a few years ago that CD players were being phased out.  I did a lot of reading up on it and the addition of a CD player to a car costs the manufacturer about $30, for which they then charge hundreds.  It seems like they would have at least left that as an option.

Knowing my next vehicle would not have a CD player, I spent months ripping my entire collection to flac files.  I had worn out 3 6-CD changers in my current vehicle (the first two times it was replaced under warranty) and now have an aftermarket single disk player with a USB port.  I got a 128Gb jump drive, loaded a bunch of my new flac albums to it and it played great!  The only issue is the jump drive has folders for each artist and the player won't read the folder names so it just says Folder 1, Folder 2, etc.  They're not in alpha order either so if I have 20 folders on the drive and want to hear Alcatrazz I have to keep advancing through folders until I hear an Alcatrazz song.  Still, not too shabby.  I'll put 20 or so albums on the drive at a time and I can leave it in my car for weeks (especially now!).

Then this happened: I had decided on my next vehicle and went in for a test drive.  I took my flac file album loaded jump drive with me, plugged it into the USB port of the new vehicle and...nothing.  Won't read it at all.  The salesman remarked how weird that was but couldn't offer any explanation or fix it.  No other salesman had a clue.  I went to an owner's forum and posted about it and got several suggestions, all of which were a dead end.  Not happy about having ripped 2,000+ CD's only to find out that my vehicle of choice won't play the files.

 

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50 minutes ago, tommy p said:

Then this happened: I had decided on my next vehicle and went in for a test drive.  I took my flac file album loaded jump drive with me, plugged it into the USB port of the new vehicle and...nothing.  Won't read it at all.  The salesman remarked how weird that was but couldn't offer any explanation or fix it.  No other salesman had a clue.  I went to an owner's forum and posted about it and got several suggestions, all of which were a dead end.  Not happy about having ripped 2,000+ CD's only to find out that my vehicle of choice won't play the files.

 

This may be worth the $40.  It will batch convert them into other formats.  I would guess the car will play WAV or AIFF.  

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

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On 4/9/2020 at 10:02 AM, mathman said:

This may be worth the $40.  It will batch convert them into other formats.  I would guess the car will play WAV or AIFF.  

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm

Mathman, luckily I already have that and I'm going to use it.  I'm just bummed I didn't know when I started the process.  I would have just ripped to a playable format to start with.

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Rip them to flac. I don't know what kind of phone you have. I have a Sony Xperia that I bought only because it had superior sound quality to most other phones. And it takes separate memory cards. If you can have a memory card in your phone, buy the biggest it will take and load the music on to that. Then you will always have it with your. Or get a cloud service. Microsoft Outlook has a family account where every family member gets 1000 gb for like 6 dollars a month, including the office package. Its a great deal. JUst load all your music up to the cloud and stream to your phone or other devices. Or keep your music ther and download a couple of albums each day that you will listen to, then erase them from your phone if phone memory is an issue.

I buy CDs and vinyl for about 100-200 dollars every month. I still love the CD format. CDs sound pretty great for the most part. I can play them at home or in the car. And I buy a lot of stuff that is not available on Tidal, or I've would go lossless streaming. Still love album covers though. And vinyl. Love to sit down and listen to vinyl. I think of it as a way to support the artists as well. Smaller artists get paid if I buy a physical product. The revenue if I listen on Spotify is silly, both for the artists and songwriters. So I feel solidarity when I buy music. It feels good.

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I and definitely thinking of ripping them to an external drive and then to an SD Card. My Manvan has a card input and that seems to work for me. I'll touch base back with you guys when I get this project rolling. 

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46 minutes ago, bubs_42 said:

I and definitely thinking of ripping them to an external drive and then to an SD Card. My Manvan has a card input and that seems to work for me. I'll touch base back with you guys when I get this project rolling. 

If you have a card input, your issue is solved.  

No cables, no Bluetooth, no connection issues of any kind.  

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On 4/5/2020 at 11:24 AM, Steve Haynie said:

An external hard drive can be bought cheaper every year.  Get one for back up of all your files.  Get another external hard drive to back up your external hard drive. 

I don't use it much since I moved on to vinyl, but I bought a 1TB USB-driven Seagate external drive at Costco several years ago at Costco. I immediately ripped a bunch of my CDs  to the drive, but especially before one Christmas I shamelessly checked out an armload of Christmas CDs from the library and ripped them all. I haven't used it in awhile, but when I wanted Christmassy sonic wallpaper, I'd connect a 10' long stereo mini-plug-to-dual RCA plug interconnect from my laptop's headphone outlet into my stereo, where I could run an hours-long stream of Christmas music of my choosing into the living room sound system with no DJs, commercials, or swapping out and reloading CD carousels.

And of course, the external drive is about the size of a pack of cards and currently holds 132 complete albums.

The Seagate currently holds 394.58 GB of recorded music with another 605.62 GB space available, which should give me space for at least another 198 albums.

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On 4/22/2020 at 3:34 PM, JohnnyB said:

I don't use it much since I moved on to vinyl, but I bought a 1TB USB-driven Seagate external drive at Costco several years ago at Costco. I immediately ripped a bunch of my CDs  to the drive, but especially before one Christmas I shamelessly checked out an armload of Christmas CDs from the library and ripped them all. I haven't used it in awhile, but when I wanted Christmassy sonic wallpaper, I'd connect a 10' long stereo mini-plug-to-dual RCA plug interconnect from my laptop's headphone outlet into my stereo, where I could run an hours-long stream of Christmas music of my choosing into the living room sound system with no DJs, commercials, or swapping out and reloading CD carousels.

And of course, the external drive is about the size of a pack of cards and currently holds 132 complete albums.

The Seagate currently holds 394.58 GB of recorded music with another 605.62 GB space available, which should give me space for at least another 198 albums.

What file format are you ripping to?  330 albums on a 1Tb external drive seems incredibly low.  I put around 1800 albums ripped to flac on a 1Tb drive with plenty of space left over.

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1 hour ago, tommy p said:

Do NOT rip them to flac until you've read my previous posts in this thread.  Don't let what happened to me happen to you.

I'd still think I'd go with flac, and perhaps even rip 'em to mp3 as well. Then I would only play music in my car from my phone, so that the phone is the dac. And stream over bluetooth, or cable. I know there is a loss in quality with bluetooth. But in the car I don't care that much, so much disturbing outside noise to deal with anyhow.

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22 hours ago, Disturber said:

I'd still think I'd go with flac, and perhaps even rip 'em to mp3 as well. Then I would only play music in my car from my phone, so that the phone is the dac. And stream over bluetooth, or cable. I know there is a loss in quality with bluetooth. But in the car I don't care that much, so much disturbing outside noise to deal with anyhow.

I'm never going to put my music on my phone and then play it in my car.  I use my phone as a phone, for simple games, and Googling stuff when I'm not near a computer.  It's not going to become a CD rack too.  The only reason I'm willing to go as far as putting my music on a jump drive for the car is because CD players are being phased out.  At least that has the advantage of holding a lot of more music and there's no BlueTooth issues or extra cords to deal with.  My phone can stay in my pocket where it should be while I'm driving, and there's no connecting and disconnecting every time I get in and out of the car.

What good would ripping everything to flac be if it can't be played from a jump drive as I've described in this and my previous posts?  You'd still have to convert to another format if you wanted to play music in your car so why not just rip to a playable format to begin with and not have (in my case) 1800 albums' worth of unusable flac files sitting on a drive somewhere?  Just trying to follow the logic of the flac recommendation here.  Mine are all already ripped to flac, but if I had to do over I sure as hell would choose a different format.

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52 minutes ago, tommy p said:

I'm never going to my music on my phone and then play it in my car.  I use my phone as a phone, for simple games, and Googling stuff when I'm not near a computer.  It's not going to become a CD rack too.  The only reason I'm willing to go as far as putting my music on a jump drive for the car is because CD players are being phased out.  At least that has the advantage of holding a lot of more music and there's no BlueTooth issues or extra cords to deal with.  My phone can stay in my pocket where it should be while I'm driving, and there's no connecting and disconnecting every time I get in and out of the car.

What good would ripping everything to flac be if it can't be played from a jump drive as I've described in this and my previous posts?  You'd still have to convert to another format if you wanted to play music in your car so why not just rip to a playable format to begin with and not have (in my case) 1800 albums' worth of unusable flac files sitting on a drive somewhere?  Just trying to follow the logic of the flac recommendation here.  Mine are all already ripped to flac, but if I had to do over I sure as hell would choose a different format.

I understand what you mean. I tried to get a setup working at home with Plex some years ago. There were always problems and I could never get it to work correctly. I gave up on it. 

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8 hours ago, tommy p said:

What file format are you ripping to?  330 albums on a 1Tb external drive seems incredibly low.  I put around 1800 albums ripped to flac on a 1Tb drive with plenty of space left over.

Questions like that remind me of how old I'm getting, and after I abandoned digital for vinyl in 2007, I don't keep up. File format on my Seagate is .m4a, a straight drag'n'drop transfer via iTunes from CD to Seagate portable hard disc files. If I migrated to streaming digital, it would be MQA files available from Tidal. I heard a demo of MQA files a year ago on a 5-figure high end audio rig, and the results were stunning.

Part of the discrepancy in my number of files vs disc space may be attributable to the digital density of the albums. Most of my rips are of cantatas--large orchestras of 100 or more instruments plus vocal ensembles of an equal size. Since I ripped most of these files for Christmas season,  most of my music file stats are big cantatas like that--denser and longer. One of the recordings was of Handel's "Messiah," a 2-disc set of 54 tracks totaling 600 MB, and my wife's all-time favorite music piece is Mendelssohn's "Elijah" another monumental cantata with similar stats of ensemble size and length.

Most pop albums (and especially simple rock) and small-group jazz have only 3-5 musicians at a time. Big bands may hit a group of 15-25 musicians.

Many of my large scale orchestras record 100 instruments or more. I've seen live performances of Gustav Holst's "The Planets," and the orchestrating requirements are so vast that the orchestra recruits extras to fill out the larger cello section. By the last last movement, they bring in every percussion instrument I know of--orchestral bells, chimes, 9' grand pianos, more tympani and other drums, celeste, plus a massive pipe organ that is a permanent installation for numbers like this, plus a v female vocal ensemble positioned in the last row of the balcony.

"Messiah," "The Planets," "Elijah," and many others like these 200-voice recordings also occupy two hours each of uncompressed, lossless digital files. A recording of a power trio or rock or pop group of 4-7 on a 35-minute recording is nowhere near as large. That's a recording of of 6 parts x 35 min. length (210 part/mins) vs. "Messiah's" or "Elijah's" 200 parts x 120+ mins. (240,000 part/mins).

 

 

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3 hours ago, JohnnyB said:

Questions like that remind me of how old I'm getting, and after I abandoned digital for vinyl in 2007, I don't keep up. File format on my Seagate is .m4a, a straight drag'n'drop transfer via iTunes from CD to Seagate portable hard disc files. If I migrated to streaming digital, it would be MQA files available from Tidal. I heard a demo of MQA files a year ago on a 5-figure high end audio rig, and the results were stunning.

Part of the discrepancy in my number of files vs disc space may be attributable to the digital density of the albums. Most of my rips are of cantatas--large orchestras of 100 or more instruments plus vocal ensembles of an equal size. Since I ripped most of these files for Christmas season,  most of my music file stats are big cantatas like that--denser and longer. One of the recordings was of Handel's "Messiah," a 2-disc set of 54 tracks totaling 600 MB, and my wife's all-time favorite music piece is Mendelssohn's "Elijah" another monumental cantata with similar stats of ensemble size and length.

Most pop albums (and especially simple rock) and small-group jazz have only 3-5 musicians at a time. Big bands may hit a group of 15-25 musicians.

Many of my large scale orchestras record 100 instruments or more. I've seen live performances of Gustav Holst's "The Planets," and the orchestrating requirements are so vast that the orchestra recruits extras to fill out the larger cello section. By the last last movement, they bring in every percussion instrument I know of--orchestral bells, chimes, 9' grand pianos, more tympani and other drums, celeste, plus a massive pipe organ that is a permanent installation for numbers like this, plus a v female vocal ensemble positioned in the last row of the balcony.

"Messiah," "The Planets," "Elijah," and many others like these 200-voice recordings also occupy two hours each of uncompressed, lossless digital files. A recording of a power trio or rock or pop group of 4-7 on a 35-minute recording is nowhere near as large. That's a recording of of 6 parts x 35 min. length (210 part/mins) vs. "Messiah's" or "Elijah's" 200 parts x 120+ mins. (240,000 part/mins).

 

 

.m4a is a lossy compression that is an improvement over .mp3.  The file format of CD is PCM which shows up on a PC as .Wav or On a Mac as .Aiff.  Both are Lossless file formats.  Digital files sizes are based on the format and length of the music composition.  Johnny, you are a wealth of information, but I am not sure if you are trying to say that a three member band would produce a smaller digital file than a 50 member orchestra each playing a 4 minute song? 

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5 hours ago, mathman said:

Johnny, you are a wealth of information, but I am not sure if you are trying to say that a three member band would produce a smaller digital file than a 50 member orchestra each playing a 4 minute song? 

No, he's saying classical and opera just don't exist in the 4 minute format. Some of that stuff goes on for hours.
They call it 'theme and variation'; we call it wankery...

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2 hours ago, killerteddybear said:

No, he's saying classical and opera just don't exist in the 4 minute format. Some of that stuff goes on for hours.
They call it 'theme and variation'; we call it wankery...

Yeah, except when all that stuff was written, having it repeat with a variation was the way people remembered it.  No vinyl, CD, cassette or 8 track.  If you didn't go and hear it played in front of you, you didn't know what it sounded like.  

Also, your wankery is others' limits of talent.  😄

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25 minutes ago, mathman said:

.m4a is a lossy compression that is an improvement over .mp3.  The file format of CD is PCM which shows up on a PC as .Wav or On a Mac as .Aiff.  Both are Lossless file formats.  Digital files sizes are based on the format and length of the music composition.  Johnny, you are a wealth of information, but I am not sure if you are trying to say that a three member band would produce a smaller digital file than a 50 member orchestra each playing a 4 minute song? 

On the contrary, I was saying that more instruments and much longer musical numbers (several minutes to two hours long) combined with larger numbers of singers and instruments, would create more data length per track and more data density of the music in those tracks.

I have rips of Messiah, The Planets, Elijah, Pictures at an Exhibition, and others. I have also heard live concerts of all those including Elijah. When they are performed they take up half of the total 4-hour musical program. When I mentioned the albums I ripped to portable disc, I was including these 2-hour musical behemoths. Those are 2-hour tracks hosting up to 200 individual voices and musicians. My rip of "Messiah" is a single album that'

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8 hours ago, JohnnyB said:

On the contrary, I was saying that more instruments and much longer musical numbers (several minutes to two hours long) combined with larger numbers of singers and instruments, would create more data length per track and more data density of the music in those tracks.

I have rips of Messiah, The Planets, Elijah, Pictures at an Exhibition, and others. I have also heard live concerts of all those including Elijah. When they are performed they take up half of the total 4-hour musical program. When I mentioned the albums I ripped to portable disc, I was including these 2-hour musical behemoths. Those are 2-hour tracks hosting up to 200 individual voices and musicians. My rip of "Messiah" is a single album that'

Your post cuts off in the middle of a sentence.  Don't leave us hanging, man!

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So if all songs are ripped at the same bit rate and same format and each are the same length.  would you expect the following songs to be the same file size?

Artist:     song                                     Genre      Time

Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, Op.71   Classical  06:03

Stevie Nicks Beauty And The Beast    Rock         06:03

Bruce Springsteen Worlds Apart     Rock           06:03

Take A Picture  Filter                         Alternative   06:03

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The solution for me is iTunes, an iPhone, and a Mac mini. There are well over 600 full albums on my phone, with plenty of memory left. I wear hearing aids which are bluetooth, and had the audiologist adjust the EQ curve for music mode to my tastes... But BT ear buds would be as good or better. Works awesome! A new album and a backup are only a DL and a sync away. And, I always have my phone with me.

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18 hours ago, tommy p said:

Your post cuts off in the middle of a sentence.  Don't leave us hanging, man!

Oops! I meant to say that my  "Messiah" album has 54 tracks totalling more than 2-1/2 hours, about 12 times the length of a Vince Gill album.

I had a stroke last July and still have trouble with short-term memory.

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So, to overcome the "CD Rucksack in new car without CD player" problem, I downloaded the EAC - Exact Audio Copy and ripped a few CDs to HiRes Flac. Saved to cloud and back loaded to iPhone, working fine with the FileBrowser app via Apple Car Play so far. Wire connected it has a much fatter sound than over Bluetooth. Qobuz app is also working in Car Play. Problem seems being solved for now.

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