Help me with my digital music project for my teacher!!

I have this project for my music teacher to digitize her music collection b/c she makes tapes for all her students for each chapter and the quality sucks and you can never find the beginnings of tracks. I've been getting a lot of cds from the library and will use her personal collection to rip all the tracks I'd need into mp3 or WMA and then start putting them on CD.

I've got two options:

• burn ONE BIG data CD w/all the mp3s in seperate folders (which may be a problem since then kids have to be able to access a computer)

• The other way is to burn a music CD for each chapter so that anyone w/a cd player can listen to the music

My first question is: Which do you guys recommend? W/ option 1, she could burn ONE CD for each kid @ the beginning of the year and it'd be done with. W/option two, we could ensure that just about every kid could use the CDs and hear the music (w/out a computer)

Also, if I rip/encode @ 96Kbps, would I be able to fit more songs onto a music cd than if I burned @ say, 128 kbps? SHe puts about 20-25 songs on a tape (using about 100 minutes of a tape), so that's my main concern w/option 2 right now.

Thanks for the help - this is going to be a mammoth project and I hope I can finish it by May!

 

Shameless bump...C'mon - someone must have done something like this!!

 

[UglyCasanova]

how many students and chapters?

 

There's about 200 students in the class (about 70-80 of them give her tapes to dub - the others are just apathetic). There's 7 chapters in the entire year, each with about 20-30 songs/samples. Based on my limited mathematics skills, that'd be about 150 songs, so let's call it about 400-500 MB @ 128 kbps. Give or take about 150 MB.

 

[MajesticMoose]

if you burn it as a music cd, cutting the quality will not add anything. It would help if you were doing the data cd option though. I would say that option 2 is better, but you might want to only offer that to those who need it as opposed to the mp3's. That would let you save money and still have everyone be able to access the information.

m00se