So yesterday we finished ripping our entire CD collection – we’ve now completed our switch to digital music at home. It’s done.
It amuses me to think of the statistics:
- We have 11,284 tracks stored, including 279 Christmas songs and 549 kids songs!
- Most songs were ripped using LAME at the VBR3 setting in joint stereo
- This music library takes up 58 GB of storage on my NSLU2/Firefly server
- The jewel cases take up six large cardboard boxes, but the original discs take up just two fat CD storage books
We’ve quickly adapted to a hierarchical model for home music distribution. The main server has everything, so our two Roku Soundbridge players play directly from it. But we also use iTunes on three machines, and have imported a subset of the music to each based on personal preference. From these iTunes implementations, we sync a sub-subset to our iPods – a 40 GB click wheel, two iPhones, and two Shuffles.
Although our TiVos can play MP3 files over the network, we don’t bother. It just seems wrong to turn on the TV to listen to music… Similarly, we don’t use Windows Media Player for much of anything, even though it’s compatible with the Soundbridges and media server.
We listen to a lot more Internet Radio than I thought we would, too. Sometimes we’ll even tune in WKSU over the Internet rather than hoping for good FM reception. And I’m listening to WBUR a lot again, too.
I’ve also started to rip DVDs to watch on the iPhone, and am storing these on the NSLU2 too. Add in the iPhone versions created automatically by TiVo Desktop Plus, and I’m amassing a large collection of H.264 media. In fact, I’ve already got 50 GB of H.264 video stored up there! Makes me want to go get an Apple TV so I can easily watch it at home. Is the end of the DVD coming soon, too?