Just gotta love MP3... 8^)

[Eug]

I'm now out of hard drive space - gotta get a new 30 Gig drive...

I haven't finished encoding to MP3 all my CDs yet, but I'm now well over 2100 songs. According to my global Winamp playlist, that's over 150 hours. Kinda to have a 15 Gig jukebox of top quality MP3 at the click of a mouse button.

I think out of all of them I probably will have to re-encode about 20 or so but otherwise I have a very hard time telling them apart from CD, even on my main stereo system. (I used the best settings the software allows.) No wonder the record companies are scared of MP3. I should have 3000+ by the time I'm done, and that's not even counting my Napsterized stuff.

And the encoding continues...

 

[yakko]

3000 songs? That's not that many.

 

[Eug]

Well, maybe not, but at least I own all the CDs for these (about 300), except for I think 3 of them. (Aside from some hard-to-find stuff, I don't listen to my Napster collection, just the stuff I encode myself.)

 

[apoppin]

Just curious. Why do you leave mp3s on your hard drive at all?

I transfer everything over to CD so I can play them on my Walkman and in my car. EZ CD Creator makes it especially easy - average of 17 tracks per CD, $0.30 per CD.

Your 3000 songs should take up only 175 CDs - total costs only a little over $50. A new hard drive would cost you nearly $200.

 

[yakko]

<< Well, maybe not, but at least I own all the CDs for these (about 300), >>



I only have hard to find stuff on my computer(unless it is something I plan to buy)but I own about 700 cds and would never dream about putting them all on the hard drive.

 

[Pretender]

It may be 1/4 as much as a new hard drive, but the convenience of being able to double-click on a song to play it instead of swapping cds to find a song just to play it, then swap again to play a song from a different album is worth it imho.

 

[apoppin]

That's what the CD changer is for.

I won't care much for mp3 players until they get as cheap as CD players.

 

[Eug]

Actually I have both the CD-Rs and the stuff on my hd. All of my MP3s are all already on CD-Rs in preparation for the eXpanium I'm gonna buy. However, I guess I'm just getting lazy. Even with CD-Rs full of MP3s I still find it a pain on my computer. (My CD-Rs hold about 110-25 songs each since I use rather high bit-rates. Avg about 5 Mb each song.) As Paulson said, it's for the convenience.

After my apt. was robbed, I replaced roughly 160 CDs all within a few weeks or so. It took me YEARS to even take the plastic wrap off of them all. Now with them all in one playlist, it's easy to flip through them all whenever I want.

Yeah, 700 is a bit much to encode. However, a friend of mine has done several hundred CDs already, even though he uses a much slower encoding method than I do.

CD changers aren't that useful for me, since I'm not gonna have a CD-changer in my office. Plus, a big one only holds about 200 CDs usually, and switching discs is slow. By the way, I do have an MP3 player in my stereo system that plays MP3 off CD-Rs, but it's a pain in the @ss since I have to have the TV on to navigate, and even then it's hard because it only does 8.3 format names. (It's an Apex MP3/DVD player.)

 

[yakko]

Eug,

They do have a 500 cd changer. I think there are only two or three companies that make them though.

 

[Eug]

<< They do have a 500 cd changer. I think there are only two or three companies that make them though. >>

Yeah, but for how much? Plus I've seen I think a 300 disc unit, and the thing was an absolute monster. And it was still slow. It wasn't too expensive though, but like I said, it's just gonna be a convenience thing for my home office (where my stereo isn't going to be located).