wkearney99 wrote:
Say you are a typical recorded sound consumer, and over the last who
knows how many years you accumulated
- hundreds vinyl LPs, some vinyl singles, and maybe even some old 78s
- hundreds cassette tapes, prerecorded and your own recordings
- hundreds CDs, prerecorded and your own recordings
with pop, jazz, classical music and spoken word.


Start with what's important and what's at risk. If you've got old tapes of
your own material you might want to consider dealing with them first. No
sense letting them get lost if they're important.


Now you decide to invest the effort to put it all in one medium, so you
can throw away the turntable and the cassette deck. What will you do?


The hardest part is deciding how much of your time you're going to let this
devour. It will take eff'ing forever and you may well end up with the same
thing you've got now... stuff you don't listen to and won't in the
forseeable future. But hey, no sense being a pessimist.


Convert the vinyl and tapes to .wav files and put them all on CDs that
you can play in CD players and on your computer?


WAV files at CD bitrates are about as high a quality as anyone would likely
need. Trouble is they're huge disk files. With today's drives it's not
impossible to pull everything off it's original media into WAV files. Doing
it for all tracks might be a serious waste of money. You certainly *can*
store everything as WAV files but all those drives, spinning all that time,
burning up all that electricity, might be a waste.


Convert everything into MP3 files, back them up on DVDs, and download
them into your iPod or home system as needed?


If you're a purist you might want to then burn those WAV files onto
traditional Audio CD format discs. This would make them usable on
everything that handles recordable CDs.


Any other options?

Regarding the MP3 option, if you tried such project, have you run into
any problems? Are you happy with the sound quality?


The tipping point between good listening quality and maximizing storage
space for MP3 seems to be at around 192k. Lower than that and even someone
with a tin ear will detect the artifacts. For some material 192k can be
insufficient and end up having a slightly 'tinny' sound. Most material
listened to anything but very high quality headphones will sound "ok" at
this rate. Going higher is up to you, simply budget for the disk space.
Other formats that are 'lossless' like FLAC might be worth considering. But
if you're already burning the WAV copy to the audio CD format then having
better quality need only be used when the digitizing for a track didn't cut
it. This allows keeping "most" of the tracks at good storage rates and only
the few that "need it" at higher rates (or formats).

The best advice is try is and see what your ear tells you is the best for
you.

The next question is how to deal with annotating the tracks. Getting the
tracks correctly tagged is often MORE work than the recording of them. The
typing gets old.... fast. You might want to consider recording them in
large batches and then annotating them later. It's up to you. Just be sure
that before you burn them anywhere that you get tags on the files if the
format supports it. A straight WAV recording from an LP could be burnt
right to an Audio CD and a simple label slapped on the disc. You'd have one
big track for each side of an LP. This wouldn't be very good for
track-to-track random seek access but it'd be a quick way to pull it off the
LP, onto the computer and back out onto an archive CD. You could then later
pull the data back off the audio CD, pick out the tracks and tag them
accordingly. You could do this during the initial process but it's a matter
of how you're prepared to spend your time.

Tagging is tedious, at best. Things like MusicBrainz, SlothRadio and the
like make it 'easier' to find metadata and cover art but don't kid yourself,
it's gonna take a lot more work than you might like.

One factor to give consideration when chosing a 'daily use' format is what
do your players support? It might be worth opening up the decision making
process to include replacement of your playback devices. As in, if your
automobile CD player doesn't support MP3 now might be a good time to get one
that does. Or invest in a portable MP3 player and a car audio integration
device (tape insert, fm transmitter or external CD changer interface).

Things like MusicMatch and J.River's Media Center do make it easy to burn
audio CDs from MP3 collections but none are as easy and just dragging a
boatload of mp3 files right over to a portable hard disc based MP3 player
via usb2.0 or firewire. Decide what your daily use will require and make
sure your archiving doesn't make that more difficult than you'd like. I
mean, after all, if you're going to torment yourself with the tedium of
digitizing all that stuff you might as well avoid making it a hassle to use.

-Bill Kearney


Excellent points. I'd recommend two bits of software (having archived
thousands of songs):

http://www.poikosoft.com/ - so good I actually paid for it.
http://www.our-class.net/mmchristen/...?file=ccc.html - almost
superb and free.

Rob