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General discussion

How much storage space do you have for music files?

Sep 21, 2006 7:21AM PDT

How much storage space do you have on your hard drive for music files?

500MB or less
501MB to 1GB
1.1GB to 2GB
2.1GB to 5GB
5.1GB to 10GB
10.1GB to 20GB
20.1GB to 30GB
30.1GB to 50GB
More than 50GB
None

Discussion is locked

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Now *that* takes me back!
Sep 22, 2006 8:47AM PDT

Alvin and the Chipmunks!

"We're happy while we're rolling along
We're singing every goofy song
Who cares what the oerchestra costs?"

"I'LL Tell ya who cares, Alvin!!!!!"

Halcyon days, fersure!

Can't disagree with any of your musical highpoints there, especually "Oh Happy Day!". Might I just put in a mention for Curtis Mayfield's "Beautiful Brother of Mine" which I forgot in my earlier post?

600GB in WAV format? I really must get some more hard drive space! But then again, stuff like old punk tunes actually benefits from 128KB MP3 I think - reminds me of AM radio Happy

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I can never get enough
Sep 25, 2006 12:58AM PDT

For all the moods and all the occassions, I just keep letting my collection grow.

Although I am sorry not to have mention my collection of the Motown sounds, country music, Big Band, Jazz, Rock and more, there is just so many to mention.

Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Little Stevie Wonder, Mary Wells, Martha & The Vandellas and the list goes on and on for just the Motown sounds alone.

I have taken all my original disks and put them onto 100 count spindles after coping them into my hard drives. This saves space and WEIGHT! All the original CD's & covers are scanned & then stacked into a small box, should I ever care to go through them again. All the original jewel cases have all been thrown out (those things get heavy & take too much space when you add them up).

You can't beat the high quality sound of the WAV's. but yes, I agree the 96, 128 & 160 MP3 settings can create a simular sound quality that of a 33 rpm vinyl record without the scrathes (with that limited frequency response), or even sounds simular to a high quality cassette tape (still hissy)(ah! memories). That's how we listened to those oldies originally and that is why they sound better to us with the bassy, tinny, not full frequency spectrum sound with out-of-phase equalization and distored high and low ranges. (grin)

Keep on truckin' people and shake, shake, shake, those booty's to the sounds that have given us fun, fun, fun and Lazy Day's to remember walking in the sand, riding the wild surf, or hearing it through the grapevine about the itsy bitsy teeny weenie yellow polka dot bikini that she wore for the first time today.

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Sound quality generally
Sep 25, 2006 7:39PM PDT

I definitely agree with you that WAV files are much more true to the originally recorded material, but only insofar as the originals were digitally recorded themselves!

IMHO, the master tapes from most 1950s - 1970s recordings weren't of even barely comparable quality to what's available on the most basic CD Walkman these days, so there appears to be little point in discussing (as others have elsewhere in this thread) the loss of quality in encoding MP3s for this kind of music.

And, funniest of all, I love to hear hi-fi buffs discussing 'fidelity' when it comes to digitally-remastered music from way back when! Last time I looked in the dictionary, the idea of fidelity means "being true to the original" (or something quite like that Happy ). I got a digitally-remastered Chuck Berry album (of which I used to have a vinyl copy many years ago). Sure, there's some lovely stereo separation and nice evenly reproduced vocals, crisp treble and pumping bass on there, but it doesn't sound anything like the original. It sounds like what a recording engineer in 2006 thought it *should* have sounded like when it was recorded!

And, as for cassettes, just don't get me started on what a bad day it was for 'fidelity' when they put the first player with Dolby NR on the market Happy

Most of the stuff I listened to in the 1970s was not intended to be listened to in an armchair in an acoustically-perfect environment. It was intended to be listened to in your mate's bedroom on the AM waveband of a

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I concur...
Sep 30, 2006 11:42AM PDT

I start up upbeat music when I feel depressed, blue, ETC.

When I'm happy, I play upbeat & decent rock. I play many different styles of music, too many to list.

I even play music from the 50's & I'm only 27. I like the 50's music that is peppy & bouncy. I like the 50's kind that makes me wanna groove.

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Agree with no time
Sep 23, 2006 12:24AM PDT

The easiest thing for me to do is set up an online radio station and forget it. I have a web designing business and am working on a degree. So in my case I have little time left for anything(let alone HD space). That is just my alternative. If I spent a lot of time on the road the sattelite radio would make sense.

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Storing Music?
Oct 3, 2006 4:24PM PDT

The songwriters and musicians stopped writing and playing music back in the early 70's, there are no artists any longer, only musicians and what can laughingly be called songwriters, I have none of that on my hard drives and the radio in my new truck is tuned to an AM 24/7 news station but you said it all when you said...to each his own.

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Eh?
Oct 3, 2006 6:54PM PDT

>The songwriters and musicians stopped writing and playing music back in the early 70's

Er, no they didn't. Or did I miss a meeting?

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Not MPAA, worry about IRS!
Sep 21, 2006 10:52PM PDT

Has anybody worked out the average cost of a gigabyte's worth of legally-purchased music on a hard drive?

There's the cost of the download bandwidth, plus the cost of buying the downloads. And if the music was ripped from legally-purchased CDs, then that would originally have been even more expensive per track, wouldn't it?

Say, for instance, one had 270GB of music on an extarnal hard drive and 15GB of music on another internal drive.

And that each track is 5MB (reasonable quality MP3).

And it costs $1 to download a track (roughly).

... That's over $58,000 worth of music. No wonder people back their MP3 data up!

Do any of you guys tell your home insurance brokers that you have that much virtual property hanging around your hard drives? I bet it would send your premiums sky-high! And I'd guess that the IRS would be plenty interested to know how a few of us slackers with McJobs came to have sixty thousand dollars worth of music sitting round the house!

Seriously, though: has anyone managed to work out a more scientific, or informed, formula for the average cost of a GB of music?

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re: Not MPAA, worry about IRS!
Sep 22, 2006 3:00AM PDT
"Do any of you guys tell your home insurance brokers that you have that much virtual property hanging around your hard drives?"

Not the virtual property, but you better believe that the 1,600 CDs those files were ripped from are covered in my policy!
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Sensible backup policy
Sep 22, 2006 3:34AM PDT

Wow, I'd make sure I didn't have *all* those CDs *and* the 'backup' soft versions on the same premises at the same time.

Best to ask a friend to look after the CDs at their house 'for safe keeping', eh Wink As an extra precaution, you could set up 'torrent' files so that your backup data was easily available for you to recover remotely if the original CDs were lost.

That's why HM The Queen and HRH Princes Charles, William and Harry never travel in the same plane, you know: if there was an accident the whole line would be wiped out! This is somewhat analogous to the popular 'Grandfather, Father, Son' backup system don't you think?

Or perhaps you should send all your MP3 data to Google so that your 'backup copies' are safely stored on their servers in case of an emergency Happy

Of course, you would have to make sure that you didn't access the files from anywhere else, as that would probably be a copyright violation.

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Probably 5 to 10... So far nowhere near that though.
Sep 26, 2006 6:50AM PDT

There's still plenty of room on my 100 gig HDD, so maybe 5 to 10GB. But with the compression I use, I haven't reached 1GB yet. Audiophiles would probably hate some of it due to quality, but music's music when you need something to keep you going on the computer for hours...

I try to keep it mostly in .mp3 format since it's the most compatable with players available (software and physical devices.)

As for cost in downloading? How about for free? (And in a way that's legit too.) What's great is the variety of tunes you can find under Creative Commons Licence as direct independent releases from artists themselves. Most of which is free for personal (non-commercial) use and can be found in the audio treasure trove at archive.org. Of course the quality varies by huge amounts, and finding decent music takes some time... (Still worth the effort if you want music that's not mainstream.)

As for encoding music from CDs I purchased? The OpenSource winLame encoder (its at SourceForge) works nicely.

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Check out Garageband.com
Sep 27, 2006 12:45AM PDT

Check out http://www.garageband.com for some really great free music!

Don't be fooled by the name.. some of these bands and artists are near professional - many have launched their careers here.

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How much storage space for music files?
Sep 21, 2006 11:17PM PDT

None -- I am a musician: a vocalist and pianist. I object to having 'noise' around me every place I go. I have never listened to music while working on the computer. I would always be thinking the words or humming or singing along with it, not concentrating on tweaking a photo or composing an email or updating other data. I don't want ''background'' music anywhere because I find it distracting, even in church!
I occasionally listen to music on CDs in the car on longer drives, but I usually listen to a talk show while running errands. My husband finds even that too distracting while driving. I've been known to walk out of stores with blasting music that makes it impossible to think! I would like to eat a fast food or other restaurant meal in peace without noise. Cell phone conversations and loud so-called 'music' make me want to take the meal to my car and eat in quietude.

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About 200GB
Sep 22, 2006 12:23AM PDT

Stored on an external HD and backed up to another external nightly - one section per night 6 nights a week.

I accumulated my collection by ripping my vinyl/Cassette/CD collection and downloading/purchasing from the internet. I still hit the used record shop for cheap vinyl and used CD's to keep the cost down. The concept of playlists has unlocked my massive collection to the point where I'm always (re)discovering music I didn't even know I had!

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Music files
Sep 22, 2006 12:29AM PDT

No space.
I suppose if I NEED music while I work, I will just listen to my CD player. I did not buy a computer to store music files, I'll let some one else do that.

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Other uses for computers
Sep 22, 2006 1:00AM PDT

Well, a CD player is a 'computer' in a way. Somebody has written the digital to analogue software inside it and burned it onto a ROM chip, haven't they?

Does your CD player play MP3 format CDs? 2-300 tracks to a CD really saves carrying all those disks around with you all day I think.

I own a pocket calculator, but as my computer does arithmetic very quickly I sometimes use it to create Excel spreadsheets. I also own a pen and paper, but Word is jolly effective at producing documents too! I didn't buy the computer to do those things, but as they're serendipitous side-effects of owning a PC, I make the most of them!

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120 gigbytes
Sep 22, 2006 1:49AM PDT

I have 1 terrabyte of raw disk space spanned between 4 hard drives running raid 5. I have over 120 gb of MP3 in lame.

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I hope you're young
Sep 22, 2006 2:37AM PDT

If you're over 30 you probably won't live long enough to listen to it all.

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File type is a critical factor in choosing storage
Sep 22, 2006 3:30AM PDT

I archive mostly AIFF files (RedBook CD standard). These "uncompressed" files take up gobs of storage space, but hard drives are cheap, and iPods carry more than enough audio to last me through a trip. I like the fact that the files always sound great and, thanks to the lack of DRM tags, I can share them between my computers, home audio system via Apple Airport Express, and also burn high-quality mix CD's too.

I don't understand why people waste so much time and energy messing with expensive, restricted compressed files, when importing your CD's and archiving your favorite tracks is so easy and soooo much better quality.

And yes, i do listen to all of it. Youth is a state of mind.

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up to 50 GB, NTFS, more available on external hard drive
Sep 22, 2006 2:08AM PDT

Subject title says it all.

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Zero GB.
Sep 22, 2006 2:35AM PDT

I don't care for the sound "quality" of MP3's and other downloaded music, so I don't have any space on my hard disk for that. Now if music download services and "free" music download sites started letting you download the 30-50 MB uncompressed WAV file, or ISO image of the actual CD, then I might start downloading. But why waste space on my computer for sound quality that might not even be as good as what I can tape off the radio?

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Free Lossless Audio Codec
Sep 22, 2006 3:23AM PDT

FLAC lets you have 'audiophile' level sound, and this lossless audio codec (guess what) is free! It sounds *good*. For instance, I have a gospel album in this format, and I swear you can hear the vicar's cassock rustling in between tunes! It's basically a format which uses 'ZIP' like compression, but doesn't make any compromises in audio quality.

I'm sure you're not the sort of person who downloads free music, but if you were and you went to isohunt.com and searched for "FLAC", you'd find thousands of items there for your perusal!

The codec is described in detail at: http://flac.sourceforge.net/ and there are download links from there.

Enjoy!

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no HD space needed
Sep 22, 2006 3:46AM PDT

(except for temp storage)
I use a DVD R/W (or three or four or.....)
*** grin ***

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ul be grinnin....
Sep 22, 2006 4:26AM PDT

when your dvds deteriorate and you lose all your music...dvd-RW out of all of them is one of the flakeiest medias in existance...the dye fades...the aliminum corrodes...and they get scratched and cracked.

i have never trusted optical media and never will.

if you want to keep anything for your entire lifespan, put it on a HDD, preferabley 2 or more in RAID 1. or magnetic tape.

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500MB or less
Sep 22, 2006 5:55AM PDT

I just don't have much music on my system. I listen to music over the digital cable through my TV. I have music I've ripped for my wife's Ipod and for my son's Ipod, but that's about all. If I ever get one, I'll probably end up with more music files. Most of the files I have are m4a files, a few midi files and some wav files. I may also have other types but I'm not sure.

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300 GB External Drive
Sep 22, 2006 6:47AM PDT

I am using an external 300 GB drive for my MP3 files.. I have about 110 GB in Audiobooks, and about 60GB in music.

The external drive uses a firewire interface, and the drive can be daisy-chained to other external drives with a firewire cable. Great for expansion. In fact, I am using this configuration right now.. two 300 GB drives daisy chained together.. one for my MP3 files, and the other for all my digital photos.

These external drives are relatively inexpensive.. about $200 each. Not a bad deal for portable storage.

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Total 480GB's
Sep 22, 2006 11:17AM PDT

I have one computer with 4 120GB hard drives totally dedicated to serving music on my home network. I'm about to upgrade to 4 300GB hard dives. They'll be almost full within 3 mos.

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That is what i'm talking about!!!
Sep 22, 2006 11:39AM PDT

are you using any software package to manage the collection???

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software package
Sep 12, 2007 3:00AM PDT

Nope, just windows explorer. Since my post from last year, I have upgraded to four 500gb hard drives on a NAS system and have also networked my Tivo to stream video across the internet.

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mp3
Sep 22, 2006 3:41PM PDT

average 10 gB that I used