Blind Ripping & Storage

[StanleyB]

In the days when a 625MB Hard disk(yes there was once such a beast on sale), I was very careful to only rip the tracks off an album that I intended to play. Space was far too valuable to waste. But in the current era of 1 and 2TB drives I have noticed that many people rip whole albums 'as a matter of convenience'. But how many people regularly listen to a whole album?
I have still continued ripping only the tracks that I intend to play at some time. At the very least I rip those tracks in WAV, and might rip the whole album in mp3 format for reference purposes. That has allowed me to keep my database to less than 500GB over the last 20 odd years. Yep I started ripping that long ago. Blade.dll and Roxio CD Creator were my main tools. Up to version 3 of Roxio you could even rip from tape and vinyl.

But I would be interested to know how others tackle the problem of too many ripped tracks and not enough time to ever listen to each ripped track.

[Werner Berghofer]

Stanley,


But how many people regularly listen to a whole album?

Here’s one of them. I prefer to hear a complete album, but I was introduced to music back in the old days of black vinyl. I only rip complete albums, but I omit the “Extra” or “Bonus” tracks which were not present on the original LP. There have been good reasons in the past why it was decided to not publish these tracks.

The size of my music library is nearly 250 GB, all in Apple Lossless Audio format.

Werner.

[bobbasrah]

And another, only I rip the lot and put the bonus stuff into a subfolder.
On top of my original mp3's started a long time ago for portable use with a few modern additions, flac, wav, and hidef files have grown a bit. Lossless are 668Gb out of 852Gb of audio on a 2Tb drive.
I have playlists for when I want particular favourites, but I never set them up as I still prefer listening to whole albums, occasionally skipping a track if the mood takes.

[rusty bearing]

I,ve just got a 1TB drive to use exclusively for music storage. Previously I had the files on the laptop HDD, because of the size constraints I only ripped Cd's that I knew I would listen too.

Now they've moved onto their own drive I can be a bit more careless with the space, even so, not many GB's used to date despite recording all the tracks on each CD. Its true there are some I may never play but I recorded them for the sake of completeness.

The originals are kept with the vinyl in the office upstairs and can be brought down individually to play as and when, which is what I do with vinyl.
In fact that's the next thing, every time I play an album I record it as an Audigy project for working on later. Format used is FLAC which I find as good as WAV although I'm sure some will have a different opinion, after all its all subjective.
The result is I can indulge myself with the original LP's or CD's when I have time or just connect up the lappie and set Media Monkey off on its way with either a playlist or auto DJ. That way I often find tracks being played that I wouldn't normally think of and rediscover some old delights. Mind you, at times I think what did I ever buy that for?:lol:
Oh and unlike a recent poster here I sync the files to a NAS drive as well using Allwaysync, definitely a worthwhile thing top do backups. Computers I can replace, data not always so, but I know many who don't think about it until disaster strikes.......

It also , as a happy by product, means the lounge is tidier and SWMBO is happier....:)

[Alex_UK]

I only rip entire albums, and 99% of the time, I play the entire album, in the correct track order I might add! ;)

I might put a few albums into a playlist and put it on random for background music or some such, but I pretty much don't use playlists, and much prefer to listen to the whole album as the artist/producer intended. :)

[morris_minor]

I rip entire albums. And normally, for everything except classical discs I tend to play the whole album. Classical CDs are ripped as one, but if there are only two, maybe three pieces of music on it (say two Mozart Symphonies), I tag them so they appear in Squeezeserver as different "albums". This makes pieces much easier to find, and saves using the search function to find, for example, that overture that was used as a filler for a disc with a symphony on it.

Generally, for classical, the concept of an album has lost all of its meaning for me.

Occasionally I set a player to random play from my entire collection - which pulls out tracks I haven't heard in years (or decades), and can result in some serendipitous sequencing (and some that is just plain weird, of course).

[ZebuTheOxen]

Every single CD I own gets put into FLAC and archived. I only listen to FLAC.

I tend to listen to a whole album at least 3 times before deciding which songs I like from it, and will then make a 'choice cuts' .m3u playlist file for when I want to pull together all my favourite songs from various albums and pop it on Random.

Albums have narratives. It's like picking up a good book and only reading one chapter otherwise!
Of course if you've read the book already, why not read over the parts you enjoyed when the mood takes you?

Enterprise 2.5" 10K SAS hard disks are less than 70p/GB now. I can't see a reason not to just throw more disks in the array and forget about storage.
FWIW, a single 600GB disk will store 1300+ CD albums of FLAC quality music.

[Cans]

:eek:I have been rather more haphazard: I moved into my motorhome and I had a couple of months where I was able to put some vinyl onto digital format- v poor mp3 - I then put it all onto a pc- god knows what happened to it from there....
I have boxes of quality vinyl in a garage - I dread to think of the condition it's in, and I have no idea whatsoever of where I put my rega planar 2 -I sold everything else when I downsized in 2005-but I couldn't bring myself to sell the rega. Now it's bleedin lost! And I couldn't store it in the van even if I found it I guess.
I have a 2 TB drive with a completely out of control mix of music, film, books, photos......
I'll bet I'm not alone, even in these illustrious halls.
However..... I have now seen the light , only CD's, DVD, Blu Ray are listened to, the CD's only once, then stored forever via the ripping software off ITunes losslessly and then put through FooBar2000 ISIO4ALL:cool::cool:

[Rare Bird]

Full albums everytime..

Since my music collection has been axed drastically i use no more than 500GB HD

[DaveK]

Albums have narratives. .

I'm not sure that holds true, certainly for a majority of albums IME, or I'm just oblivious to it :scratch: .
My practice is to play on Random most of the time and get re-aquainted with stuff I loved but have forgotten about.
Dave.

[zygote23]

I have just under a terabyte of music coded as Flac. It amounts to around 27 000 tracks. I mostly play entire albums but am prone to hitting the random button now and then if I am working about the house. Odd to hear so much stuff I haven't heard in years in different rooms lol.

[Tim]

I always play the full album, random play drives me nuts to be honest. I have a mate who plays nothing but random in his car, half the time he cannot even tell you what's playing and never gets to learn an album.... I just don't understand playing random tracks, makes no sense to me :scratch:

The only time I would entertain anything approaching random, is a playlist for a dinner party but TBH that never lasts either, as we always seem to go off at a tangent and play selections.... but when listening by myself, it's the whole thing or nowt!


But I would be interested to know how others tackle the problem of too many ripped tracks and not enough time to ever listen to each ripped track.
Well it's probably never going to happen in my case - I reckon I possess albums I will probably never play again, but I'm not going to worry about it. Mind you, I retire in a couple of years and I plan to make a good effort at playing everything I own at least once more ;)