Not sure if it fits

[paonej]

Hi,
I am new to mysuperpc and what I want to do is build a PC for my Rolling Stones cds. I have about 3000 cds and I want to put them all on a pc and be able to make mp3's. I know that I will need external hard drives but I am not sure if your equipment list would be good for what I need. What changes would you make to the list. I have 2 large cd racks in my living rooms and I am being nagged into boxing them up but I don't want to go through boxes every time I want to listen to a cd. I would appreciate any help from you. I purchased your book but I only skimmed through it so far. I wanted to get some input from you

Thanks------Joe

[Rob]

MP3 files are not that big considering the size of hard drives today. An MP3 for a single song will vary in size depending on the sample rate and length of song, but an average of 6 MB (megabytes) per song would be generous. I have a Boston album at a sample rate of 160 which is 44 MB in size. So even 3000 albums at a size of 100MB each would be 300000 MB, or 300 GB. So one 500 GB hard drive would cover it. Those calculation are very rough, but generous, so you may need quite a bit less than 300 GB.

With hard drive prices so low, you might want to go with 2 500GB hard drives so you can dedicate one to MP3 files, with plenty of storage left in case you need it.

[tumbleweed357]

Hi. I have a bunch of CDs too, but not nearly as much as you! Wow. And my Rolling Stones are the best. I've built my own PC using Robs' manual. And I've converted and am still converting my music to MP3 format from my CDs. However I haven't been purchasing CDs for awhile now. My family subscribes to Napster for unlimited downloads and my daughter is now in the ITunes gig as of Christmas. So all the music is streamed to the PC now. Here's what pisses me off though. It's what you want to do with the music you've bought that can be severely limited. Such as: 1. In-dash CD players are now MP3 capable. I'm talking burning MP3 CDs! The Napsters are real finicky about that. You must have a 'registered MP3 player with Napster' guidelines and such. Just try putting those Napster tunes on another MP3 player that somebody else in your family has and you may be out of luck! Sucks.
I found this site: http://www.applian.com/replay-music/index.php?src=search.yahoo.com and purchased the Replay Music recorder. When you build be sure to use the sound card Rob recommends. You will have NO MP3 converting problems ever. And best of all: You can put your new MP3s on any player you own or whatever. Of course it works with all the streaming music stores online! Just wanted to put my 2 cents in. Take care and good luck!

[paonej]

Thanks for your input Tumbleweed, I won't be using any online music downloads, 95% of my cds are live bootlegs. I just got Rob's book and have not had time to read it yet, but what do you think is the best music software for managing this size of collection? I aslo want to copy cd covers and list the cover info.

[tumbleweed357]

There's so many good ones out there. Free ones too. I have a section on my hard drive partitioned for MP3 Music only. I think I have about 50 gig for it. And I use the media player too for myself but I also have the ITunes player downloaded also on it. You don't have to purchase anything of course, but it is a hell of a player and very, very easy to rip your cd's into it. For example, you can have multiple playlists, play each randomly, etc, etc. But alot of other software can do it also. It is just so very easy to work with. That's the best thing of all about it. And of course it does an excellent job. But whatever you use, just try to learn all you can from it and if it suits your needs, then you should be able to manage your music with no problem. I don't know if this helps any, it's just what I do.
Take care.
FWIW: Some newer CDs do have a lot of copyright management code into
them now and I just use my Replay Music recorder to rip to MP3
without that protection so I don't have any problem with burning
MP3 cds or transferring or whatnot.