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need help re: backing up a 200gb hd full of audio

B

broadwayblue

Golden Member
i just bought a 200gb hard drive and i plan on ripping about 400 cds on it. since the process will take a while i want to back up the drive. i have Ghost 2003 but i have never used it before. what kind of compression options are available? i'm mostly interested in learning what size file would be created using the maximum compression possible. does the fact that i'm backing up audio files have any effect on the compression ratio? basically i'm wondering what size drive i will need to use as my backup.

or would i be better off using some other program to backup/compress the 200gbs?
 
If you're storing anything except WAVs they're already as compressed as they will get.

If you are storing WAVs you should be storing as FLAC lossless compression instead, as FLAC shrinks WAVs by 40-50% with 0 loss of information.
 
well i've been ripping the cds using exact audio copy and saving them in monkeys audio format. i'm not familiar with FLAC but from what i understand ape files are lossless too. what are my options for backing up the 200gbs of music files? or do i need to buy another 200gb drive and use that as my backup?
 
You could buy another 200GB drive for back up, or maybe an external drive instead of another internal. Otherwise, i don't know of any really consumer level friendly (affordable) backup solutions of that size. You could do a multi-(multi)-disc CD-R backup, or maybe DVD-RAM (if you are strictly talking backup) otherwise, DVD-RW or DVD+RW. Fewer discs, but still a bunch for 200GB worth of data.

\Dan
 
What he said 🙂 -- Monkey files are as compressed as they're going to get.

FYI, FLAC is similar to Monkey's the main difference is that it's cross-platform, open source, and license-free / royalty-free. Because of the more manufacturer-friendly license it's starting to be used in hardware devices and is much more likely to show up in future portable CD/DVD players. Iin another year you'll probably be able to buy a DVD-ROM iRiver slimx with enough storage for 12 lossless FLAC-format CDs (4 GB) -or- 30 listenable MP3-format CDs per disc.
 
maybe i should switch to FLAC. if it's the same quality as monkeys it might be worth it. where can i download it? and i assume it has plugins for all the major players (winamp, mediajukebox, etc.)? can EAC rip using flac?

not sure how i should go about backing up all the music though. it would really suck to have to re-rip hundreds of cds.
 
No need to re-rip, since both are lossless you can always go ape -> WAV -> flac whenever you want to with no loss of quality. You can also just keep using ape and only convert when you have a good reason to since you're already set up for ape.

But if you're curious, www.hydrogenaudio.org has a bunch of FLAC threads in the "lossless" forum, including the right command-line switches for FLAC compression in EAC.

FLAC's own homepages are www.xiph.org and flac.sourceforge.net
 
DaveSimmons, just wanted to thank you again for the links. i checked out the hydrogenaudio site and found the threads on flac. it sounds a bit more complicated then monkeys but i'll read a little more and try it out. i'm not quite sure what cuesheets and offset and some other terms are...but it looks like the flac users love it!

now if i could only come up with a convenient and affordable backup up solution.
 
You're welcome -- cuesheets are just the start/stop times of songs on a CD. They're text files, so you could make with your current setup (if using EAC) by picking Actions > Create Cue sheet then open it with wordpad or notepad. There's an explanation in one of the threads linked to by the Hydrogen Audio FAQ which is here:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=4917

Basically the "noncompliant" cue sheet would let you burn a CD that is more like the original in terms of where and how things like the between-tracks crowd noise on a live CD are written. The "as one WAV" one is if you are storing CDs as single (ape / flac) files instead of 1 file per track.

[ ed ] ps here is the EAC "command line options" I'm using for FLAC (as user-defined encoder type) in case you do decide to use FLAC:

-T "Artist=%a" -T "Title=%t" -T "Album=%g" -T "Date=%y" -T "Tracknumber=%n" -T "Genre=%m" --replay-gain %s -o %d

For each CD I also write the "(noncompliant)" cue sheet to the same folder as the FLAC files.
 
sorry if this is a stupid question...but is there any advantage to saving the entire cd as one file vs splitting each track into its own file? so does the information on the cuesheet inform the player where a particular track begins and ends?

i've currently been ripping a file for each track. if the one file/cd is a better way i can go that route instead.

and what is replaygain?

sorry for all the questions...i'm new to this process.
 
No problem, I've been doing my reading too.

One file per song makes more sense than one per CD for most pop music. For classical music and shuffle play you might want tracks joined together in one file to keep a piiece together (each movement of a concerto is usually a separate track on a CD).

> so does the information on the cuesheet inform the player where a particular track begins and ends?
Yes, though players only have limited support for cuesheets right now. It's probably still worth the extra 20 seconds to make the cue sheet when you're ripping in case you need to burn a CD for car or home player later (if you scratch up the original for example).


>and what is replaygain?
It tells FLAC to store peak volume information in with the other tags. Some players can use this to "normalize" volume playing back tracks so the the volume doesn't bounce up and down so much in shuffle play.
 
sounds like you've done a bit of reading. i think i'll stick with the 1 file/track method as i've been doing. guess i'll spend some time in the forum reading about all this. maybe it's just because i'm new to all this but at first glance it seems like it requires a little more effort (and skill) to rip with FLAC (compared to the way i've been doing it with monkeys in EAC.) but it's probably pretty straight forward when you get down to business.

as far as making the cuesheets and using replaygain... are they both done during the ripping process? or are these done in advance?
 
> as far as making the cuesheets and using replaygain... are they both done during the ripping process? or are these done in advance?

ReplayGain peak-level finding is done during the encoding process by FLAC itself while it's compressing. This is something you can always do later too, if you decide to stop going ape at some point 🙂

Cuesheet is a separate command in EAC under the Action menu. It's easy to do it while you have the disc in the drive to rip, but it's totally separate and can be done later.
 
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