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

Managing CDs

[renehollan]

Storage of the physical media isn't too much of a problem: there are rather dense shelving arrangements available. The real problem, IMHO, is online access and indexing.

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.

Re:Managing CDs

[diesel_jackass]

handy links:
Winamp plugin

XMMS plugin

other windows shorten software

SHN FAQ

Re:Managing CDs

[quintessent]

If you're running Windows, Monkey's Audio (get the Beta, not the previous release) and
EAC (Exact Audio Copy) make a great combination for lossless compression. I've tried many other programs and finally have settled on these two. Once you've installed both, you'll never run Monkey's Audio. The codec will be accessible from EAC. Oh yeah, and it comes with a WinAmp decoder plugin too.

My management solution....

[Patman]

...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.

Re:My management solution....

[JabberWokky]

Sony's 400-disc changer would be enough to hold your current collection with some room for growth.

Sony's system also daisychains so when you have two hooked up, the numbers just go to 800. That's my currect CD setup (well, I'm currently packed to move, but that's what I normally use). However, they are a pain to use, plus I've got hundreds of CDs outside the changers. I'm looking at getting a RAID of a few large capacity drives, and making high quality MP3s of every disc. That will allow me much more flexibility. I've already experimented with directories and how to handle autogeneration of thematic playlists, and I think I've got some good solutions - i.e., I decided *not* to use discs at all. 256k is pretty close to CD, anyway, and if I really want to, I'll have all my CDs in binders, alphabatized (I've long since gotten rid of the jewel cases, and gone to binders with the CD and cover).

--
Evan

Store them on shelves, not in a changer

[Cuthalion]

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) ).

Re:Store them on shelves, not in a changer

[singularity]

I have about 300 CD's and, for the longest time, I completely agreed with you about CD changers. They never helped with multiple locations, and unless you can store all of your CDs in one at one time, they are a waste. No one is ever goign to sit down and replace all 200 CD's in a changer.

With CD buners and larger changers, though, the choice is starting to come back. I know that a lot of my CD's will never be played in my car or in my bedroom. Ones that I will listen to in multiple places you can either burn or rip to an MP3 player.

That said, I am still using single CD players in multiple places. I would like to get a 5 disk changer for my main listening environment (currently making due with a DVD player), but having single players is definitely still the way to go.

Now VHS and DVD's are a complete other story. I have about 125 VHS tapes, about 30 DVD's (and climbing weekly), and about 20 Laserdisk. All of those are a pain to store for easy retreival since they take up so much room.

� 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:� terabit music jukebox

[Perdo]

Some motherboards come with spif out 5.1 built in too, like the soyo dragon for instance. 130 for the board, 30 bucks for the duron 800, got 8 channels, 2 120 GB drives for 320, case for 20. 142 for a plextor 40x burner, 60 bucks for memory.

$700 for a spif in/out, 40x burner, quarter terabit jukebox.

That might rip, mix, burn and serve a little faster than a old system, expandable to 1.1 terabits for $1100 more. One terabit for less than $2000... sweet

350 CD's?

[torinth]

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

Changers

[erasmus_]

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.

Re:Changers

[erasmus_]

Of course if I just searched for a minute more, I would've found it. They're LaserLine brand, and I'm not going to provide any vendor link, b/c you can easily find them through Google, but the model number is "MMW250DSS." Here is the link to LaserLine's site - it's the first rack they list.

Six hundred cases for $269?

[cjpez]

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 . . .

Re:Get an AudioTron

[SuiteSisterMary]

Assuming 1:2 compression with flac, each CD is going to be 325 megabytes. Multiply that by 400 CDs, you get 130 gigabytes. So the question becomes, what's more expensive; a decent 400 CD changer, or a decent 130 or so gigabyte hard drive?

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.

Re:Get an AudioTron

[SuiteSisterMary]

I agree, I agree. Physical media is so.. cumbersome.

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.

just rip them to a pc

[jason_watkins]

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.

3 ring binders

[mckwant]

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.

Re:3 ring binders

[GooseKirk]

That's awesome - I've looked for a long time for reasonably-priced binder pages. Thanks!

Still, though, even these aren't really all that cheap. Ballpark $500 for 2000 decent-quality blank CDs and $100 for binders, and that's $900 for 1.4 TB of storage. Not bad, but with 120gig hard drives going for $160 and all the "just-around-the-corner" massive mass storage devices they keep promising, I hope something better comes along soon. A 3-ft shelf of CD binders just reminds me of a wall of cassette tapes... soon to be obsolete and, if you move a lot, just one more PITA.

Where's my $50 terabyte storage card, dammit?!?

Re:3 ring binders

[mckwant]

Note that I said cheap-ER. I hear you, but the other problem is that something's going to come along and replace mp3 (or ogg, or whatever), so you're probably going to have to go back to the source material anyway.

Another thing to check out is whether you can get them in 25-packs from a retail outlet. It'll be a little pricier, but they were $15 @ BestBuy here in Austin, TX, and $15 every couple of weeks as you gradually migrate is a LOT easier to swallow than $300 all at once.

Re:Gosh darn it...

[Deagol]

There's a thought. Does the Apex support DVD-R?