I actually ripped my whole collection three times. First time was way back when the iPod was a new thing, I ripped to 128 kbps. Then some years later, I decided that 320 kbps would be better so I ripped them all again in iTunes. In 2018 I got into entry-level high-end audio, and came to understand about the superiority of lossless digital over lossy and compressed. So when I concluded that I needed to rip it all again in lossless, I didn’t mess around with FLAC and trying to decide what setting to use for lossless compression. I bought dBpoweramp CD ripper and it is one of the best audio software purchases I have made (the other would be JRiver Media Center for digital playback). I ripped the whole collection for the third time (hopefully the last time) to AIFF (I read that AIFF handle metadata tagging better than WAV). To hold my whole music library I bought an extra internal 4TB hard drive for my Windows 10 desktop PC. I have since ripped all my audio DVD discs and my SACD discs, and purchased a decent amount of CD quality and hi-res downloads. Presently that 4TB drive is not quite half full, and that includes some lossless uncompressed hi-res surround files (which I ripped from disc even though I do not at this time have a surround system and only listen in stereo).
Having a local library of lossless music is still very important to me as a listener (and as a collector, I still have a conditioned tendency to identify myself through my collection, for better or worse), though I have also got into the world of lossless and hi-res streaming as a Qobuz subscriber. Storage is so cheap and easily available. My primary advice to anyone wanting to rip a CD collection is get a good accurate and secure bit-perfect ripping program like dBpoweramp or EAC and do it the best way the first time. Now when I listen to my collection I cannot tell a difference in sound quality between playing the disc on my Oppo player or playing the files with JRiver through my Rega DAC, so I typically do the latter.
I lack the drive to try very hard at archiving ripped CDs or downloaded files (I have made a living as a professional music critic. among other things, going back to the 1970s), but there are probably 2TBs worth of material, half on a large outboard drive, and the rest lingering on various computer drives needing to be collated. If streaming had not come along, it would be a different story but I just can’t motivate to do much of anything with it. I have a CD suitcase with more than 400 CD-Rs packed with tunes, that collects dust, as do most of the 200 or so CDs I still own that sit on a shelf or in a box. I think if I ever get a DAP for travel, when I start traveling again, I will likely load up some SD or micro-SD cards for use with the player. (And I also have a ton of things parked on Bandcamp). Between resurgent audiophile, new and reissue vinyl, and previously unimagined volumes of exciting new music on streaming platforms, I have more than my ears can handle. It’s great to have all the old files in reserve, but I don’t seem to have a place for it right now. But it’s there, alongside a similar digital mountain of movie files.
I’ve got an idea just as good as they guy on the commercial that is going to invent the CANOE app. Send in your tapes, and old format digital and we can return it to you on a modern SSD.
Heh… I’ve got some iOmega and Syquest disks around here somewhere.
1 Kalax shelving unit with 6 cubes full of records
1 crate full of records
3 more crates worth of records stacked or scattered about (until I move to a new apartment with more space for another Kalax unit)
2 media shelves full of CDs (400?)
2 media books full of hundreds more CDs
Thousands of mp3’s & wavs
Honestly, pretty much the only thing that keeps me from going bankrupt indulging my vinyl addiction is knowing that every time I buy a record I have to actually keep it somewhere. Eventually I’m going to have to move somewhere with reasonable sized living spaces. lol
I tend to feel that a lot of my old files are obsolete since I can stream the bulk of it in higher resolution. On the other hand there are albums that I can’t do be streaming anywhere. And/or are wildly OOP and selling for stupid prices on Discogs. There’s also material sourced from Bandcamp that is only digital not even CD.
Important facts about external USB Hard drives with LARGE Libraries:
Default format is exFAT and not very reliable. ExFAT is standard as it’s about the only format commonly understood between various operating systems.
You will drop tracks and albums due to bad sectors. Large libraries are vulnerable. It might be months before a lost or corrupt file(s) are discovered.
Other common formats like NTFS or APFS are more robust
The cheaper and bigger the spinning disk the more issue prone it becomes
Remedies:
Reformat from ExFAT to either Windows NTFS or Mac APFS. Low cost commercial drivers available for Mac to read & write NTFS. Tuxera is low cost and license covers 3 Mac’s.
Poor man back-up is to buy 2 cheap USB hard drives. Manually mirroring these together is challenging without wiping out files. Tools are needed like DiskDiff to copy the additions and manage deletions.
Get a NAS RAID 0 solution where mirror occurs simultaneous. introduces room noise and other issues, but great data integrity.
STRONGLY consider spending more for a solid-state disk. These are much more reliable and significant faster.
All my external drives are NTFS, even the one attached to the RPI 4 LMS server. That’s a Linux install and I had to do the “drivers” install for the NTFS to work.
Lossless compression format is key to preserving disk space. My own 3.5TB would be nearly 6TB in AIFF. FLAC or ALAC are good size compressing formats without loosing fidelity. Some people think they hear uncompressed formats like WAV or AIFF with more fidelity. This will start a fight with some one, but it’s just hogwash uncompressed formats are better than FLAC or ALAC.
I have several high fidelity recordings in both AIFF and FLAC. There is no difference unless the renderer used is of poor quality.
Roon or Audiovana, among others, are excellent at rendering the bits on the disk to serial format for DAC to convert to voltage.
Someone will bolt out of the woodwork who can “clearly hear the improvement” for non-lossless uncompressed files. My reference is for an identical file in both AIFF and FLAC or ALAC. Obviously 2 different masterings will sound different.
I currently have a dropbox account with 2TB and an extension hard drive with 2TB. So far, that is enough for me, but I imagine I will be upgrading at some point. I buy a lot of music from Bandcamp, which allows me to download albums in high-resolution audio, and of course, they take more space, but I don’t mind. The music sounds less compressed and better, so it is worth it.
I’m not very attentive to it. There’s an old external drive with about 1TB (half capacity) of music and film files. And music files scattered across 3 different computer or laptop drives (to some degree copies/backups of files stored on one of the other drives). Also, a “suitcase” with 400 CD-Rs. Once streaming kicked in, I no longer care much about the old CD-Rs or the files. I’m copying what I want onto SD cards to use with the DAP, and at some point I’ll probably just erase everything. Will seek out any rarities in the CD stash to copy over.
I think I’ll just ultimately have whatever I care about on the 2TB drive (which is super-sturdy).
One NAS has a 10TB RAID1 volume (2 disks synced) as main Library, some legacy iTunes, Photos and docs backup, but mainly music of over 7.5k albums, 112k tracks of which over 65% is HiRes, the rest being CD quality.
Backup NAS with a 8TB RAID1 volume just for Music, working on daily rsync scripts, which is full
Overflow Backup NAS with a 2TB RAID1 volume, also daily backup also holds Roon database backups & other media
Tertiary NAS with 2 1TB disks hold backups of additional media, software versions etc.
Some 23TB of NAS storage
An offline RAID0 enclosure with 2 8TB takes a full backup of Music once a month or so.
Will be looking to grow to 12TB for main volume, 10TB for Music backup, at some point. But also considering a SSD array of 4 4TB PCI SSD for the Music library, and moving the NAS arrays to RAID0 which will maintain primary and secondary backups.
~5,000 albums; ~3.25 TB (80% 16-bit ALAC, the remainder 24-bit ALAC of sample rates from 44.1KHz up through 192KHz) stored on an external SSD (two separate backups of this library).
I’ve been a Mac guy since I was a kid, thus ALAC. I use Music app (formerly iTunes) for management; I very seldom use it for playback; no streaming services for me.
I’d estimate I buy maybe 2 to 3 GB of music each month? Not sure and too lazy to figure it out. Just saying…my library will continue to grow, thus am trying to figure out how best to store and use my library going forward.
My active section of the collection (for critical listening sessions, weekly or less) is about 30 GB (yes, giga not tera), mostly 320-MP3 from when Google Play was selling them, and 320-ish kbps VBR AAC (.m4a) encoded by me from lossless originals (mainly Bandcamp). Full collection is around 70 GB but I have old stuff in there in 128-MP3, originally from the Wild West era of online filesharing, that I never bothered to update from better sources since I hardly ever listen to those.
For redundancy, I keep the full collection in a 3 magnetic disk ZFS zpool with mirroring of the same data to each disk. This style of redundancy served me OK before I discovered ZFS when I was mirroring manually, part of this zpool is one Hitachi drive that is the oldest one I had in my previous set, over 15yo, has developed some bad sectors ofc, but it’s still working otherwise, unlike newer ones I’ve bought along the way - go figure, living definition of “they don’t make 'em like they used to”.
Also, the active-listening section is again triplicated to SD cards, one in my main phone from where I actually listen to it, one in a newer 3" mini-smartphone I was planning to use as a pure music player with a high quality dongle DAC, and one just sitting in a plastic baggie somewhere. After reading stuff online about how flash memory loses data faster than magnetic disks, I decided to periodically zero-out each SD card and re-write the data to it from a healthy copy like the zpool. (Recommended source of info on the inner workings of flash memory = Dave Haynie on Quora.)
