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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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On 4/25/2020 at 8:02 PM, mathman said:

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

I'd love to know the answer to that question!  Johnny B's theory seems to be that a 6-minute piece by a full orchestra would be a much larger file than a 6-minute AC/DC song.  I have no idea!

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On 4/9/2020 at 12:48 PM, tommy p said:

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.

That said, it's better to have ripped them to an optimized lossless format.  You did the right thing by your music. 

It's a one-time annoyance to get them to mp3 or whatever but the format is called "lossy" for a reason - you can't get the audio quality back once you convert to lower bitrate mp3s.

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6 minutes ago, sixesandsevens said:

That said, it's better to have ripped them to an optimized lossless format.  You did the right thing by your music. 

It's a one-time annoyance to get them to mp3 or whatever but the format is called "lossy" for a reason - you can't get the audio quality back once you convert to lower bitrate mp3s.

It's not exactly a one-time thing if I have to repeat it 1800+ times, so I repeat: WHY would I need lossless files of music I have on CD's if they will not universally play in cars or whatever portable device I'm using?  That makes no sense.  There are a few people here who are still insisting that ripping to flac is a good idea.  Given my personal experience, I say it isn't.

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9 hours ago, tommy p said:

I'd love to know the answer to that question!  Johnny B's theory seems to be that a 6-minute piece by a full orchestra would be a much larger file than a 6-minute AC/DC song.  I have no idea!

I don't know the details of the compression algorithm for mp3s, but I do know a few.  As a rule they capitalize on patterns in the material.  A a simple lossless example is run-length encoding where you find contiguous runs of a bitstring and then store the bitstring and how many times it happened instead of storing all the copies (e.g. a million zeroes becomes (0, 1,000,000) vs. a megabyte (give or take) of zeroes). 

White noise is probably the hardest to compress since it's by-definition the absence of patterns. 

John Cage's 4'33" is probably the easiest.  ;)

Now the software doesn't hear/see patterns like we do just yet (e.g. it doesn't copy verse 1 to verse 2 and change the words), so the files that are smaller probably were clearly less challenging to compress in the eyes of the codec, but not necessarily to the listener.

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1 minute ago, tommy p said:

It's a one-time thing that I have to repeat 1800+ times, so I repeat: WHY would I need lossless files of music I have on CD's if they will not universally play in cars or whatever portable device I'm using?  That makes no sense.

I get that it's frustrating, but the next car (or the next stereo) might read those lossless files.

As far as converting the files, you absolutely shouldn't have to manually convert each one.  It should be like "load up the folder and hit go" and come back a day or so later with a batch transcoder. 

Is it annoying and does it waste electricity?  Yeah, it is and it does.  But it's not wasting your time, so to me that's a one time thing, not an 1800 time thing.

 

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18 hours ago, JohnnyB said:

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.

So sorry to hear about the stroke. I've always appreciated your posts as you are very knowledgeable. Don't let one mistake dissuade you from posting... Keep 'em coming! Take care! 

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10 hours ago, tommy p said:

I'd love to know the answer to that question!  Johnny B's theory seems to be that a 6-minute piece by a full orchestra would be a much larger file than a 6-minute AC/DC song.  I have no idea!

Each song was 12 mb except the boss was larger at 12.6 mb.

You have to remember that the algorithm for a digital lossy file is looking for patterns that repeat but also and this is true for lossless formats,  it is digitizing two tracks, The left and right of the stereo image.  Complexity of the music will make a larger file unless the complexity is repeated.  And of course length makes a larger file.  

 

Screen Shot 2020-04-26 at 8.17.38 AM.png

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29 minutes ago, mathman said:

Each song was 12 mb except the boss was larger at 12.6 mb.

You have to remember that the algorithm for a digital lossy file is looking for patterns that repeat but also and this is true for lossless formats,  it is digitizing two tracks, The left and right of the stereo image.  Complexity of the music will make a larger file unless the complexity is repeated.  And of course length makes a larger file.  

 

Screen Shot 2020-04-26 at 8.17.38 AM.png

Very interesting.  I would consider that equal.  Thanks for taking the trouble to do the test!

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I am STILL bitter that Apple decided that something that just plays music wasn't in their master plan. They were such a nice platform, and you could control them easily without having to look at them.

I did manage to find someone to install an SSD and a new battery in my iPod classic, so now I have a 256GB ipod classic.

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On 4/9/2020 at 3:10 PM, tommy p said:

Not happy about having ripped 2,000+ CD's only to find out that my vehicle of choice won't play the files.

Have you tried to play the flac files via mobile phone? My car allows to connect via Bluetooth and USB. The latter, the better.

I have just decided to rip Flac for anything not available in the Qobuz subscription. Paying the monthly fee for the mainstream (popular) bands and keeping to support smaller bands with CD buys at concerts. Working great so far.

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5 hours ago, gorch said:

Have you tried to play the flac files via mobile phone? My car allows to connect via Bluetooth and USB. The latter, the better.

I have just decided to rip Flac for anything not available in the Qobuz subscription. Paying the monthly fee for the mainstream (popular) bands and keeping to support smaller bands with CD buys at concerts. Working great so far.

I haven't, and I'm not.  Maybe in all my previous comments I'm not being clear, but I don't want to store my music on my phone and play it from there.  I want it on a jump drive so I can load as many albums as I want, plug it in, and leave it in the car for weeks with no disconnecting/reconnecting every time I get in and out of the car.

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3 hours ago, tommy p said:

I haven't, and I'm not.  Maybe in all my previous comments I'm not being clear, but I don't want to store my music on my phone and play it from there.  I want it on a jump drive so I can load as many albums as I want, plug it in, and leave it in the car for weeks with no disconnecting/reconnecting every time I get in and out of the car.

Which is why I still use my iPod in my car.  I have some music on my phone but it is for biking, working in yard or garage and playing through headphones or bluetooth. 

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All clear. I'm just phone centric and have not reached any memory limits for what I'm carrying with me.

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For those of you that still use iPod Touch, there’s a great app called VLC (easily found for free in App Store, icon is an orange and white pylon, haha). 

It can load nearly any format of audio or video easily through AirDrop via WiFi from your Mac. You don’t have to go through iTunes, and you can just select files from your hard drive and click and drag to the Airdrop icon and you’re good to go.

I have a 128gb iPod Touch 5 that has about a hundred full length movies and a ton of albums at any given time. If it were your dedicated music portability with no movies you could have a lot with you very easily.

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1 hour ago, geoff_hartwell said:

For those of you that still use iPod Touch, there’s a great app called VLC (easily found for free in App Store, icon is an orange and white pylon, haha). 

It can load nearly any format of audio or video easily through AirDrop via WiFi from your Mac. You don’t have to go through iTunes, and you can just select files from your hard drive and click and drag to the Airdrop icon and you’re good to go.

I have a 128gb iPod Touch 5 that has about a hundred full length movies and a ton of albums at any given time. If it were your dedicated music portability with no movies you could have a lot with you very easily.

IPod Touch were great. We had them for the children long time ago. They lasted a very long time. OS support ran out one time, but they never broke SW wise. 
 

Thanks for the VLC tip. Unfortunately it doesn‘t support general webdav for cloud connect. Might have to ask the programmer to implement it.

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