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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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hardisk space
Sep 23, 2006 12:48AM PDT

500gb almost full of what ever you need

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odkladaci prostor pro mp3 = 20-30 GB
Sep 24, 2006 3:56AM PDT

20.1GB az 30GB

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Как очень странно
Sep 24, 2006 8:40AM PDT

Точно как мысль I

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Not enough...need more :)
Sep 24, 2006 1:36PM PDT

I have around 40 gbs of music on my HD. I have about 30 gbs of music in FLAC and the rest in mp3 Lame.

First I make two FLAC copies of all my cds. One copy on my HD and the other goes on to DVDs and into my safe deposit box. Then I do the same with my mp3s. I make FLAC copies just incase a new format comes out that I like, that way I'll be able to make quality lossy files from my FLAC files.

I think it's smarter to have your backups away from the originals. Don't just be concerned with your HD crashing...also take into consideration house fires, burglers, floods...things of that nature. Taking that extra measure will certainly pay off if such a disaster where to happen.

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Careful with the DVDs though
Sep 24, 2006 11:40PM PDT

Don't forget that even in your safe, the DVDs will degrade over time, and so need replacing sporadically with new copies from your CDs (if they haven't degraded by that time too)!!

Makes one yearn for the relative simplicity of vinyl sometimnes, innit?

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Solutions
Sep 25, 2006 1:38AM PDT

What I do to combat the degrading of DVD's is I date the cases that hold the dvds. I always switch them out within six months of the orginal burn date. This process has worked very well for me.

I'm considering getting a portable HD (http://reviews.cnet.com/LaCie_Rugged_All_Terrain_Hard_Drive_USB_2_0_120GB/4505-3186_7-31661387.html?tag=pdtl-list) to use instead of the DVD's. Although I believe that a HD needs to be ran atleast once a month to keep it in top performance. It'll be a little inconvienant to have to go to my bank once a month just to run the HD...but probably worth it.

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Just do it
Sep 25, 2006 3:16AM PDT

Don't just 'consider' it.. do it!

External drives are cheap and fast. Check out some of the Maxtor product line:
http://www.maxstore.com/searchcat.asp?search_id=3

A bare bones 300 GB drive is about $169. These come with USB 2.0 interface for fast access.

Some newer drives come with both USB and Firewire interfaces, so you have a choice. The better units even come with 2 firewire ports - this is great because you can daisy chain additional HDs to it, and still only have one firewire connection to your computer.

I am currently running with 2 x 300 GB drives configured in this daisy chain arrangement, and it works great.

Keep an eye open for specials.. I got one of my Maxtors at Costco during a sale week where it was $50 off regular price.

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71 GB on 153 GB Drive
Sep 25, 2006 12:03AM PDT

Devoted one HDD to MP3s. Very eclectic mix of around 10,500 titles; from Dr. Demento to Lorin Maazel. I use usually assign to folders by either artist or genre. However, oldies get stored in a folder by year and include Whitburn number in filename. I use a German program (Dr. Tag Plus!) to keep all the ID3v details.
Playback is either via WinAmp or Creative Lab Media Source "Organizer". Working on sending to my stereo in the livingroom via 802.11g wireless.

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Another oddly phrased question...
Sep 25, 2006 3:29AM PDT

So many of these polls seem to be phrased in a way that it's difficult to know what it means.

Do you mean how much space does someone have allotted for files or do you mean how much space are their current files taking up?

For instance I could have 500TB of space 'for' music files but I haven't actually put any on the drives yet.

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how many gigs
Sep 25, 2006 6:20AM PDT

more than 50 gigs, i love my music

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None
Sep 25, 2006 7:46PM PDT

I haven't had time to get out to a gig for ages: I seem to spend all my time putting music on this bloody computer instead of seeing live bands these days Happy

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A few bytes more with a little improvisation.
Sep 25, 2006 7:30AM PDT

Over the weekend I installed a new 400Gb SATA HDD to replace the year-old 160Gb Barracuda drive as my secondary HDD. The Ultra ATA 750Gb Barracuda HDD that I purchased last week is serving as my master drive.

During the installation I happened to notice that the SATA (also a Barracuda) drive was exactly the same size as my floppy drive, which I have yet to use in the 3.5 years that I have had this PC. Naturally, the floppy drive is now in it's new home in my desk drawer and the SATA is now in the floppy bay, as the third internal HDD. Of course this tends to heat things up a bit, but I have opened the doors on both the floppy bay, as well as the CD-ROM bay just above it. I have placed a 12 inch fan directly in front which runs at full speed and so far this seems to be working OK.

With 2 external HDDs (232Gb and 80Gb) this now gives me a total of 1,622Gb of storage. Music is a big priority for me as I have about 30Gb worth of mostly FLAC and Monkeys Audio files from selected songs from my CD collection. I now plan to encode my entire CD collection in Apple Lossless format to use in my iPod.

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get some HD Cooling fans
Sep 25, 2006 8:09AM PDT
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What a cool site!
Sep 26, 2006 7:47AM PDT

Thanks Pilaar39 for the info and for kindly posting the link that you mentioned. This looks like a good plan, however, I am out of power connections, so I may have to further improvise. As it was, I had to borrow the power connection from my CD-ROM drive to power the SATA drive. I am looking over the site to see if I can work something out without getting too exotic.

It probably serves me right for being such a storage glutton. I guess that's one of those 7 deadly sins.

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I was just chilling...
Sep 26, 2006 11:03AM PDT

I just couldn't work out whether the title of that last one was a really bad pun or not.

If it was, then *my congratulations*...

Every day is Punday!

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Don't worry about power...
Sep 27, 2006 12:50AM PDT

Don't worry about the power for the fans.. it sucks up very little. And if memory serves me right, the cooler comes with a power connector that piggy backs onto the power connectory of the hard drive.

I believe you just unplug the power connector to the drive, and stick in the cooler power connector in between. It does not use a separate power source from your computer power supply.

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Probably worth a try.
Sep 28, 2006 8:00AM PDT

I think that I will give the fans a try. I guess I really shouldn't have been worried powerwise, as I could always go with a Y-adapter if necessary. Speaking of power, a lightning bolt just hit nearby causing me to lose almost this entire post so this is my 2nd shot. I guess I better type this fast.

I also made a change yesterday as I removed my CD-ROM drive and moved my slave drive over next to my DVD drive. This allows me to use the former slave HDD as the new master on the secondary IDE channel (with the DVD drive now being the secondary slave). The main benefit from this is that each of the 3 HDDs now has a separate controller (the SATA drive has a PCI card controller).

This is way too much information so I'll just say that the hardware monitor seems to be much happier with this set-up. I have already started ripping my CDs into Apple Lossless format for my iPod. I also plan to rip my favorite songs encoding them into AAC format so that I can use the Predexis (I think that's what it's called) playlist randomizer in Winamp. My neighbors are just going to be thrilled!

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SCSI and SATA
Sep 25, 2006 8:09AM PDT

Just recently bought and installed a 320 GB WD SATA II drive. I also installed a 9 GB SCSI drive for the OS and applications

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m4a takes a tiny bit more than wma, but quality is best.
Oct 1, 2006 1:46AM PDT

m4a takes a tiny bit more than wma, but quality is best.
Use Itunes to change wma to m4a.
It works great!
m4a doesn't take up too much memory with itunes. It takes the same as wma with windows media player though.

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Memory usage: WMA v M4A
Oct 2, 2006 1:19AM PDT

I didn't realise there was a memory usage issue with loading M4a files into different apps: is there a significant amount more RAM used when playing back these files, or is it just a bit of 'overhead'?

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*sigh* Since I'm too poor to buy much music...
Oct 3, 2006 12:37AM PDT

My 1GB Nano is pretty much full with BOL episodes... I have about 500MB worth of songs though.

I wish iTunes would have better free songs... *sigh*

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Lots of choice
Oct 3, 2006 5:08AM PDT

re: ''I wish iTunes would have better free songs... *sigh*''

iTunes is not the only game in town.

Lots of free tunes at Garageband.com. True, most are independent and new bands, but many are better than some so-called professional tracks on iTunes and other professional artists sites.

Also, check out Usenet (newsgroups). Get a good binary reader like Newsbin ( http://www.newsbin.com/ ), and check out some of the binary mp3 newsgroups. Lots of current and old tunes available there. Giganews ( http://www.giganews.com/ ) is a good source for Usenet, with binary retentions around 90 days.

And of course, you can always rip your own (or your friends') CDs and convert to mp3 or whatever format you want.

If you have an iPod, check out the program iFill ( http://www.griffintechnology.com/ ) This is a cool program that captures streaming audio (like from online radio stations) and downloads directly to your iPod. I have not tried it since I don't own an iPod (yet), but supposedly it even separates the tunes and tags them properly, instead of it all being recorded as one continuous track. Fire it up at night, and in the morning you have a whole new set of tunes to listen to the next day.

A similar program called AudioXtract ( http://www.audioxtract.com/ ) will do much the same for non-iPod players. However, it downloads the tracks to your PC, and then you need to move them over to your mp3 player. An extra step, but still..

Where there is a will, there is a way.

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Naughty, naughty! :-)
Oct 3, 2006 7:08PM PDT

> you can always rip your own (or your friends') CDs

Your own CDs are okay to rip. But ripping your friends' CDs is no better than those awful people who download music via BitTorrent and that sort of thing.

If people carried on doing that, then the poor old record industry would be reduced to making mere millions instead of billions every year Happy

And, of course, the entire point of being a musician is nothing to do with having as many people listen to your music as possible. It's to make as much cash as you can through every possible channel of exploitation.

Oh, wait a minute, that's not a musician, that's a business tycoon, isn't it Happy In that case, and speaking as an ex-musician (in several of the world's very worst post-punk bands), it's probably morally okay to rip your friends' CDs, download as much music as you like and generally enjoy acquiring and listening to the stuff!

I only have about 50GB of (obviously completely legitimate) music. But I'm working on it!

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iTunes etc...
Oct 5, 2006 10:52AM PDT

Thanks for all your suggestions guys. I'll certainly give it a look. It would be nice to have a cover-art-based graphical interface, rather than having to click on the song title, in these days of impending Vista etc!

I'd like to be quite sure that it won't try to create *copies* of my existing tracks, though, before I get it to create a library. Am I right in thinking that it just creates 'pointers'?

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How to download music onto an Mp3 player
Dec 20, 2008 9:01AM PST

I am a new user for the Slick Mp3 player and I don't know how to use the Mp3 player In the box was a little black cd, and a plug for the computer and the other side was for the top of the Mp3 player,and last there were some head phones

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80GB
Apr 12, 2009 9:05AM PDT

I have a dedicated hard drive for music that is 80GB in size but currently only have used 35GB of that space

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More room for music
Jun 10, 2009 5:30PM PDT

I had 60G on my Ipod and 80G on my computer... and then I just realized, Why do I need tons of music files when I don't have time listening to them... LOLs

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I can't down load songs in my drive in rar file to my phone
Sep 29, 2015 8:20AM PDT

help me

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storage I internal memory
Sep 29, 2015 8:23AM PDT

3 gb above

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Tip: If you have a question don't bury it.
Sep 29, 2015 8:30AM PDT

This poll is 9 years old. No one may answer.