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.

Comments

� terabit music jukebox

[Perdo]

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.

Re:Get an AudioTron

[cs668]

It's not only about expense. The changers I have seen don't give you the same flexibility.

All my music has the id3 tags set thanks to freecddb. That lets me access and play my music in a way that no CD changer can. Plus I have one in my family room and one in the basement, which gives me access to my music simultaniously in both places( something a CD changer can not do ).

Third I don't actully use my CDs. They are in a box packed up so that they don't get wrecked by the kids.

The final benifit is that in their last firmware release they added a network API to control it. I wrapped it with a Java wrapper and can now make the AudioTron do things that the designers had not even anticipated.

I hate keep going on and on about it, but a cd changer can't touch it.

Use compression anyway.

[Wakko Warner]

3jane:/shn 291891992 146780768 121759872 55% /store/shn
3jane:/mp3 116358328 64690856 42358808 60% /mp3

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.