Thursday, January 03, 2013

It has begun

One of the projects that Ken and I planned for this winter is ripping all of our music CDs into electronic form and putting them into iTunes. That way we can just play music through the computer. The goal is to box up the physical CDs and put them into storage so they're no longer taking up space in the living room.

Getting started with the sorting and alphabetizing. I'm putting the discs in wine boxes, like those you see on the upper left.

Ken started the ripping process a few weeks ago and just finished doing them all. According to the database, we have over 8,000 song titles, almost 750 CDs in all. It's not a huge collection, but it was still a big job. So now I've started the process of boxing up the discs.

I'm trying to carefully sort through and organize them so we can get to them should we need to. That means keeping English and French language albums separate and alphabetizing the collection by artist. I'm also keeping classical music, soundtracks, and multi-artist compilations separate. I've packed up about five boxes so far, just under half the collection. I need more boxes.

16 comments:

  1. Time to go and buy more wine !!

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    1. jean, exactly! Ken's on his way out this morning...

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    2. Jean got in with that suggestion first!!
      Any old excuse to buy more wine... but this is the most imaginative excuse.

      The WV is vintage... 1926 ernrit... but was it a good year?

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  2. oh my quite a chore......happy new year!!

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  3. Oh, I need Ken at my house! I started this process years ago and then gave up!

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  4. Have you thought about selling them, rather than storing them. Of course you'll want a back up of the electronic version in that case.

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    1. Brent, if you don't have the originals, you can be prosecuted under the piracy laws!!

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  5. I sympathise with the process. I started doing it with a 2000 CD collection in the late 90s. Luckily I chose to rip everything losslessly so that there would be no quality issues when moving to different devices. Now when I still have to buy CDs because I can't buy online I always rip it immediately. It's like the old days when I'd buy an LP and record it to cassette on its first playing.

    I make sure I have at least 3 copies of it all, and one of those copies kept at a friend's house. Hard drives can just die and then you've got thousands of man-hours of work lost.

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  6. My first thought: you're just not drinking enough wine! Guess we all are on the same wavelength.

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  7. It's well worth the effort! We have about 18000 tunes/songs on the iplayer and just love our now traditional Sunday morning random shuffle. Sometimes the juxtapositions are a little odd - Squirrel Nutkins next to Elgar! but it's so good to re-connect with half remembered songs.

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  8. Mary, We don't buy much wine in bottles, except sparkling like vouvray and champagne. We buy our everyday wine in bulk. taking our 10-liter plastic barrels to wineries and having them filled.

    Mike, I have 3 copies of all the music I've ripped, on 3 different hard disks for now. Maybe it is time to invest in a 64 GB SD card.

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    1. Ken, LeClerc are doing 32Go Maxell SDHC cards for 16.99€ this week...

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  9. We have well over 700 CDs. We rarely play any more than a dozen of them. Mostly we listen to Chante France by way of the internet, or the soft jazz channel on TV.

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  10. I have opera and symphony recordings in LP, cassette, and CD form i a collection I began when I was around ten years old (my parents kept asking if there wasn't ANYTHING ELSE -- anything at all -- I wanted for Christmas other than opera recordings. I have to have access to them to record excerpts for my various lectures and talks. When I die, my heirs will have a huge job on their hands, but that's the way it is.

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  11. I have far fewer CDs and no excuse. I'm still scanning old photos to make new photo albums that take up less space and won't fall apart as the old ones are doing. The files are currently saved on an ext. HD and some folders, when finished have already gone on to CD, which is what I started saving to way back when. Of course, then came DVD, and now we have the SD. I guess I'll get a high-capacity SD and try to get all the photos onto one or two of those, but then some other support will come along and we'll have to do it all over before we no longer have devices to read the old ones. Hell, I still have things on old JAZ drives that I couldn't transfer onto more modern supports when the machine died. I'm sick of changing support systems!

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