Mass Encoding

Beginning to plan for the move, and decided it was time to do something about all the CDs in this house. If we listened to one CD a day, we wouldn’t repeat a song for about four years. I like having lots of music at my fingertips, but the space sacrifice for all these CDs is silly. Now that Amy is comfortable with the SliMP3, and now that I have the Wiebetech for large-scale backup, and now that iTunes has lifted the 32,000 track limit, decided to get serious about digitizing and selling off discs. The initial goal is to get rid of 1/3 the CDs in the house, which means a miniature emotional battle fought over each one – I’m very good at justifying why any particular disc I haven’t heard for five years is still important. Nevertheless, making good progress. This will get harder after cherry-picking the low-hanging fruit (nicely mangled metaphor). Sticking with 192kbps for almost everything, dipping to 160 for pre-1960s low-fi stuff.

Music: The Three Suns :: Smoke

13 Replies to “Mass Encoding”

  1. Ludovic, no way – I HATE the post office shuffle, especially for low cost items. Wd drive me crazy and consume massive amts of time. I’ll just haul these off to Amoeba for cash or possibly some credit.

  2. Hmm, if I were to sell my CDs, I would digitize and archive them using FLAC or whatever other lossless format I could find.

  3. FLAC only saves 50%. With ~1500 CDs to encode, it’s just not feasible with today’s storage costs (cheap, but not cheap enough). I’ve done blind testing a number of times on good equipment and have a real hard time telling the diff b/w original and 192kbps (yes there’s some difference, but the recordings I care THAT much about I’m keeping).

  4. since you’re using a Slimp3, I guess you’re planning to encode everything as MP3 instead of AAC?

  5. good god, I am with you. I love music so much,but I’ve been hanging on to vinyl, phono and preamp to play stuff I havn’t listened to in almost decade. I hope I can let go.

  6. I am fascinated and interested in your planned CD divestment.

    Two things:
    1) Selling – use half.com for all of it. Since I assume you are keeping the “really rare” stuff and are interested in selling the more “commonly available stuff” you won’t do as well in a time limited auction format. Some things take a while to sell, but w/ half they can stay up indefinitely.
    2) Encoding – check closely the 50’s era stuff and earlier since much/most of it is mono. Mono encoded MP3s (@ 80kbps since its half of 160kbs) are extra tiny and doubly satisfying to add to the library!

  7. Jay, correct, I’ll stick with MP3 until SliMP3 figures out how to decode transcode AAC on the fly (some talk on the list about this already).

    Lee, hot tip on half.com, although again, I really hate the post office shuffle (although in this case it could mean the difference of a good chunk of change). Good tip on the mono recordings too, tjanks.

  8. I almost bought one recently (SliMP3), but backed off because of the lack of AAC support. I’m glad to hear that they are working/considering AAC support. I guess I’ll have to keep my eye on the message boards from now on.

  9. Why not just put them in a box and stick them in the ? That way you still legitimately *own* the music and can prove it if the RIAA weasels ever decide to make an example of you, since you’re vocal about them in your blog.

    It also means you don’t have to back the library up as religiously – it CAN be reconstructed.

    -Jim

  10. Not a bad suggestion, Jim… except for the fact that I’m trying to get rid of things! :) It’s a good point about reconstruction, but at the same time half the point of going digital is to get rid of all this physical stuff.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *