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High Density CD-Audio Solutions?
Deagol writes "Like many of you, I've got a fairly good-sized music CD collection. I'm having a problem with managing the sheer number of CD's (about 350, which I know isn't a lot by some standards). My current setup consists of a Pioneer 6-CD changer CD player and 50 of the cartridges, each numbered, and a tome affectionately known as the "List O' Music" which is a 3-ring binder listing the contents of these 50 cartridges. Not horribly efficient, but the best I could manage when I started. I've recently began cloning my CDs, and using my burned copies for every-day use and keeping the rest in storage -- this came about after having to use paranoia to recover some child-scratched CDs. Along the way, I decided that the 6-CD cartridge thing isn't satisfactory anymore. I've thought about those 200-CD changers and maybe having a couple, and I've also thought about the MP3-type stereo components, though sound quality matters (I use flac for my CD archiving). For those of you with 100's to 1000's of CDs, how do you store and index them, either on the shelf or in the player?" Most of the questions like this involve managing large quantities of mp3's rather than disks.
And keep them zipped up and put away on the bookshelf when I'm not using the CDs.
When I want to listen, I open up one of the cases and thumb through it. If I can't find what I'm looking for, I zip it back up and put it on the shelf and do the same steps with the next one until I find what I'm looking for.
I thought about sorting the CDs and using a binary search method to find the CDs, but it's simply not worth it. Linear searching with a wild initial guess as to the CD's location works best for me. YMMV.
I would suggest getting rid of any jukebox style approach: they require you to commit your storage of your precious media to them, and can be somewhat rough in handling. Instead, consider ripping them (uncompressed, if you're a purist, to a hard disk). 100 Gb drives are reasonably priced, and will store about 120 CDs, uncompressed. I'm told that the lossless compression shorten (.shn) format is half decent, compression-wise, and will give you a bit more space.
As for indexing, I tend to use an Artist/Album/track scheme, with permutations of symlink trees thus: Artists/Artist/Album/track, Albums/Album/Artist/track, Genre/Artist/Album/track, etc.
You could've hired me.
...is twofold.
Number one: CD changer, enough to hold ALL of my CD's. Sony's 400-disc changer would be enough to hold your current collection with some room for growth.
Number two: Turtle Beach's Audiotron MP3 player. No onboard storage, it pulls directly from your SMB-enabled shares. Very cool piece of tech.
These are linked together with a MySQL database. This database holds the information on all 130 of my CCD's, and all 1200 of my MP3's. A simple web interface allows me to search by title, artist, etc. Thanks to the Audiotron's API, a hit on an MP3 in my database can be immediately played via the AT. With this, I can search for a song, find it on CD or MP3, and get a list of exactly where in my carousel or where on my server I can find it.
If you're really interested, I can let you have the scripts. They're pretty basic.
I have over 800 cds (811 at the time of this posting). I use a 1 disc player in my office, a 1 disc player in my bedroom (plus another cd player in my alarm clock!), and a 5 disc changer downstairs in the living room, and a 1 disc player (well apex dvd player) in the kitchen. I do NOT use a 200 disc changer, because I hate them. I hate them because unless you actually want to store your music in them and never remove them, they're a huge pain in the ass. If you have more than 200 cds, they're not a viable option (you could get multiple changes are use S-Link or something to connect them, but $$$). If you have more than one listening location, they're not a viable option (centralized audio is not a solution in a house with roommates). If you listen in your car cd player, if you bring them into the office, if you like the liner notes & packaging, ...
For actual storage, I use shelves. Boltz makes some truly great cd racks that hold about 600 jewel cases. Run out of room? You can expand it to 1200, though it takes up a fair amount of wall space in this configuration.
I have several pieces of furniture by these guys, and they're great. Sturdy, attractive, and their customer relations policies can't be beat - They've actually changed their product line because of someone I know's feedback. Their prices INCLUDE shipping and tax. And so on. They're not dirt cheap or anything, but they're worth more than what they cost. I don't work for them or anything, but they get the highest recommendation I have.
If you really are strapped for space, you could use those caselogic books, but they're a big pain if you want to keep your music sorted (with shelves with a little extra room, insertion is basically O(1) rather than O(n) ).
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
the drive space required to hold 350 cds uncompressed cost about $400. Add another $200 for a ATA 100 controller card and a 5.1 soundcard with spdif outputs. Be the first kid on your block with a ¼ terabit music jukebox. I'm assuming you have a rack system with spdif in. Otherwise tack on another $300-$400 for THX certified 250 watt speakers. Still, $1000 beats burning copies on cdr to stick in two 200 disk changers, still without a decent interface to search and find specific songs and compile playlists by point and click.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I've heard this question from *loads* of folks... and my answer is always the same. Just get a DVD player with MP3 play capability! You can get great units for both in-dash car operation and/or home audio use
Here's some links:
Samsung Player
Apex Player ($70!!!)
Have a good day!
Hard Drives are cheep!!!
You can then listen to all of your music, make playlists, play by artist, genre, album. The 200 disk changers don't give you easy access to your music by anything other than album.
If sound quality is important you can do really high bitrate mp3s or even wav files. It has optical output so the nice dac in your reciever can do the converion not some crappy soundcard.
Plus the best customer service I have ever seen with any product.
Don't work for em, just own one and like it!!
It's called ALPHABETIZING.
Sometimes I have to wonder if the Slashdip crowd remembers that there is such a thing. I was once talking to an acquaintance about the library in my hometown and how it had taken them two years to migrate their card catalog, and he said, "What's that?"
Sigh.
With 350 CD's your a prime candidate for Sony's 400 CD changer. They have a couple models and they all work like a charm. They're also outfitted with Sony's S-Link technology which allows you to chain the units seamlessly when you get your 51st new CD. There's also a gadget out there called the S-link-e (Slinky, get it?) or some such that you can find out there on the internet. It uses S-Link, IR, and a PC interface to automate as much of your AV devices as you want, and it only costs about $50. My friend hooked it up to an old laptop he got for $100 bucks from Ebay, and has his whole music collection catalog with a great interface for building and running playlists and what not.
-Andrew
I never understood anyone who would want to keep their entire music collection in a cd-changer. As someone with hundreds of cds, I can say that I love my 200 cd changer, but only because it allows me to load twenty or so cds at a time and to have continuous music play as I'm working at home or studying. 3-cd changers run out too fast and require constant tending to, and also make it impractical to listen to singles, which may have some great b-side tracks.
As for the organization, I recently invested in some oustanding free-standing shelves, initially getting 2 and then quickly realizing I'm going to need a 3rd very fast. They were only about $25 online, and I'm very happy with them, though my memory fails me at the moment. When I get home, and if I remember, I'll try to post the brand or even a link to these shelves. Regardless, after a few hours of alphabetizing, I was able to get rid of all my old plastic single-insert storage, and now have shelves that allow for easy insertion of new titles. I'm very happy with my current arrangement, and would choose it over any cd-changer-loading, cross-linking, or database-catalog solution.
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I just picked up some CD shelving from Media Play last weekend that stores 532 CDs and cost me twenty dollars. But if you feel like paying that much, feel free to send me the extra money instead . . .
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
The CPU performance cost to alphabetize a CD collection with a bubble sort algorithm just isn't worth the trouble.
As far as the actual jewel cases/booklets themselves there are many ways you can go, depending on your lifestyle and the size of your wallet. For a few years I was quite content to store my CD's in a combination of shoeboxes and the cheap CD racks you can find for $10 at the CD store. Which works fine up to a point, although it makes organization difficult and it isn't exactly attractive. So, unless you're living in a dorm or your parents' basement you're probably looking for something a little nicer. I recently made the purchase of one of these, which also comes in smaller sizes as well, although I found the large version nice as I can also store my cassette's and DVD's in it as well. In addition it's very attractive and doesn't look out of place in my den.
I store my CD's in alphabetical order by artist, then by album name. It takes some patience initially to get everything in order but it's a lifesaver once you're finished. I also find that using a program such as Music Collector helps keep things organized.
Finally, as far as playing the CD's goes, I like the big jukeboxes such as Sony's CDP-CX450 which holds 400 CD's and can be daisychained with another for a total capacity of 800 CD's. As with anything there are advantages and disadvantages to the jukebox system, but it works well for me. YMMV.
For storing CDs - mediazone cases. Very slim. I hold over 400 CDs in the shelves of my regular-sized (for a 27" TV) entertainment center.
For flexible listening solution - rip with EAC and encode with LAME at 192 or 256 vbr. Unless you spent over, say, 20 grand on your stereo, you simply will be unable to hear the difference. Store them on a modest 30-40 GB hard drive and access them via Netjuke, sending digital outputs of your sound card to your receiver.
Before you go to a great amount of expense and trouble over this, I'd like to suggest an alternative that does not seem very popular with slashdot posters:
Get a life.
Just a suggestion.
Thank you.
3jane:/shn 291891992 146780768 121759872 55% /store/shn /mp3
3jane:/mp3 116358328 64690856 42358808 60%
The first one is RAID 5, the second is crappy vinum-based RAID 0. The important stuff is all compressed losslessly with Shorten (SHN). The other stuff is MP3, encoded at 256+ Kbit/second. Everything gets played on another machine (Ultra 30) connected to my DJ system and a high-quality headphone amp (with either a pair of Senn 580s or a pair of ER-4Ss.
The only suggestion I have is to buy a real IDE RAID card and don't toss all your data on a single, non-mirrored disk. Also, make backups every once in a while.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I think your simplist move would be to archive them on a PC. There are plenty of choices for lossless compressors out there, and they all result in a reduction of 40-50%. As another comment mentions, drives are cheap. Back of the envelope math says your entire collection should fit in just over 200gig's.
As for playback, get either a very high quality playback card (midiman, hoontech), or use digital output to a reciever with digital input. Use a video card with tv out and a wireless keyboard with built in pointing device to control it. I believe there's software out there for automagickly grabbing the cd/song titles from cddb or freedb and providing indexing capability for easy playback.
It's perhaps not the cheapest solution, and doesn't have quite the appeal of a consumerized all in one device. But then again, someone with 350 cd's obviously has some disposable income and is pretty agressive about enjoying music on their terms.
my CD collection is approaching 500 now and I've found that the easist way to deal with them is to get (cds/264) case logic cd "wallets". (there more like binders). and then pick up a smaller one for the cds you listen to on a daily basis.
120GB WD Hard Drive
$140
WinAmp
Free
Not having to dig through CD's again?
Priceless
I keep my collection of over 700 roughly alphabetized in a dresser from Ikea. As long as they get put back I'm OK.
For playback I use RioCar/Empeg players (they were recently blown out for $199/10G units) and provide excellent sound. Ebay is where you'll find them now... or The Empeg BBS
Bantha poodoo. Get some of these 3 ring notebook pages, and use a bookshelf. Much prettier and denser than storing in those stupid jewel cases. I've got about 800 CDs currently housed in 3 or 4 feet of shelf space. The 3ring solution is cheaper, too.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I got a much of packs of the caselogic pages that hold 8 cd's (w/o inserts) on a page. Picked up 6 5" binders and migrated 1300+ cd's there.
:-)
Since I have players in the cars, various rooms, and at work a big changer is not a real option.
I keep all of the inserts in a few floppy disk holders, so I can reference them whenever I want.
Now I am starting ripping all of them, and am hunting for good indexing software that will let me manage them by the CD, track, playlist, and mp3 archive cd for things like artist, composer (for classical), song title, classification (allowing for multiple), etc.
Anyone seen anything that does that reasonably well. I am thinking a mySQL database, but ideas on schemas and naming criteria are the fun part
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
why not sell some? less is more: you don't need to listen to Britney Spears more than once.
Once all my CDs were stored centrally, I really just wanted to put the cases out of the way, but keep them easily accessible. I found the wonderful storage boxes at Bags Unlimited. I purchased a couple of the plastic 100-CD boxes and alphabetized my CDs into them. Now they're nice and organized. I never have trouble finding the liner I want in a minute or two, and they don't take up much space.
This comment is late, so probably won't get seen. I was just going through this last weekend. (My son finally got ig enough to start pulling them off of the IKEA shelves in the living room.) So, I finally bit the bullet and bought a Sony 400 CD changer to store a good chunk of my collection of ~650 CDs. (Probably soon he'll be reaching for the buttons on that.) I pulled out the largest set of discs that both my wide and I enjoy and stored them in the changer. The rest I grouped in categories and stored in CaseLogic 92 CD binders with the front jewel case inserts i.e a maximum of 46 CDs per case (I find any of the double wide binders, like the 264 too unwieldly, but still use of for my data CDs). Looking on USENET for solutions I found numerous mentions of sratching on CDs stores in CaseLogic binders/sleeves and it does kind of make sense since there is no protection in these sleeves where the cutout is, and CDs will sit back to back in the case. Probably OK if you just keep it on a shelf... Anyhow, I found mentions of DiscSox and Jewelsleeves. These both seem to have better protection for the discs front and back, as well as being able to store the front and back jewel box inserts. I ordered some samples of each. I haven't seen either of these mentioned in eralier posts. I'm also looking ath teh Jukebox sleeves from discsox to store the jewle box art in a much smaller area than required by jewel boxes... Ultimately I think I will slowly archive my collection over to DVD+RWs using EAC and FLAC, just to have a backup... I know some older CDs seem to skip in the car. :-(
Anyhow, it also sounds like Sony will soon have a 400 disc MP3 and CDR/CDRW compatible changer. This sounds REALLY cool! http://www.videodirect.com/sony/cdplayers/cdpcx455 .html Too bad I couldn't wait. No information on it direct from Sony though...
Balam
I'm an avid music collector with over 1200 CD's (and growing!). For a long time, I kept them organized alphabetically, in binders, without the jewelcases - and used a 6 disc changer for playback. Even with careful alphabetizing, the addition of new discs (and the corresponding binder shuffle) was a real PITA, and finding a particular disc was cumbersome and slow. I purchased an Audiotron (http://www.audiotron.net/audiotron/producthome.as p) almost a year ago - and I can't tell you how much it has improved my enjoyment of my music collection.
Several key points:
1) I can find, access and play any song in my collection in less than 10 seconds, from my couch, with a remote;
2) I can easily (3 button presses) create a playlist by genre, artist, album, or any combination of the above;
3) Since the storage is external to the Audiotron, I can easily, and cheaply, expand my storage capacity;
4) Turtlebeach has one of the *best* support mailinglists, and consistantly responds to user and developer requests.
Yes, there is the initial overhead of ripping a pre-exisiting collection; but after that point the system more or less maintains itself.
Yes, people will complain about the quality of compressed audio - but hey, even on my Atlantic Technologies speakers, 256Kbps is fine for my casual listening, and I keep my Opera and Classical discs accessible for when I want the pristine experience.
And before folks say 'but you could just build a cheap box and put it next to your stereo' - yes you could, but the Audiotron is fanless, remote control accessible, and comes in a pretty 1U package.
It's the best audio purchase I've made in years, and no, I don't work for Turtle beach!
--
stubbie
Get the Audiotron! No useless changers with bad interfaces. It's sounds good, especiall with the digital out playing .WAV files. I've got it going wireless to my server in the back closet. No ugly ass computer by your stereo! No writing freakin scripts to play your damn CD's! CD players are now obsolete.
Store your CD's in the cases they came in. When you want to listen to one, take it out of the case and put it in the CD player. It's not hard to find the CD because you can read the title on the case.
:)
If sound quality matters, forget mp3 completely