Saving My Music Collection

[Anybodyhome]

Okay, so I've got hundreds if not close to a thousand music CDs, but I haven't purchased one in over a decade. I'm willing to part with them once I've saved them to another storage medium. My question is what is the best? An external hard drive? I could just "cloud" them all, but I have a feeling that could cost me some money as well, depending on the amount of space I'll need. I have another collection of MP3, iTunes, WMA and M4a, which is close to 8GB, on my PC hard drive as well. If my PC craps the bed, I'm afraid I've lost all that.

I simply want to consolidate and have it all available in one place I can rely on not to crash and burn. Help?

[frash.exe]

Keep all of them in at least two different physical places, whether that be two identical external drives, a local PC drive and an external drive, a local PC drive and an iPod, etc. Whatever is most convenient for you.  I can't tell you exactly how much space you need because 1000 CDs is a monstrous amount of CDs and it depends what bitrate you want to encode them with; I'm sort of an audiophile so I don't rip anything under 192 kbps, but if it doesn't matter to you that much you can just encode them in 128 and save a lot more space than say if you were to do it in 320 or 256.

 

as for your other collection of music on your computer, 8GB is really manageable and if you can find the location of those different files you can easily fit them on a thumb drive even. 

[fitty76]

I just put all my CD on iTunes.  

[Anybodyhome]

I just put all my CD on iTunes.  

Which works until your device dies, in which case the only recoverable music on your iTunes account will be what you purchased as far I know.

[Zaximus]

Rip those to 320vbr mp3s !