"Ronnie McKinley" wrote in message
...
In uk.rec.audio "Keith G" wrote:
as you rightly say, a new 200
Gb disk would take months to fill up with vinyl rips only (WAVs which go
400-500 Mb each for a whole album).......
Months indeed
.... and with CDs one would have to be buying at least
one CD per day. every day ..... 30+ CDs a month!!??!!
You know my view on CDs - I never buy 'em! (Deadest format there is -
already shot through the head, just hasn't fallen over yet.....)
You know my view on mp3 - annoying, wearisome and ultimately fatiguing.
Agreed. (True of all digital music, IMO.....)
I don't agree that HD space is really all that expensive. IMO, HD space
offers good value for money, with 120Gb, I think, now a good bit below
the £100. I think anyone with a PC based audio system, and who wants a
reasonable degree of 'high fidelity' it would seem just silly to rip or
transfer files as mp3. With a couple of 120Gb drives on board and that
should accommodate a reasonable size music collection in wave format,
compress using ape files and the 240Gb (2x120) should serve the function
of most average type people ..... for a good while, at least
I don't really disagree with any of what you say. My 200 Gb disk cost about
£117 - better value than 2 x 120 Gig but, more importantly, there isn't room
for more than 2 drives in the computer I'm using atm. (A cheap but brilliant
little eMachine jobbie). My usual method is to have all my programs on a
smaller disk (40 Gig) which doesn't get changed and the data on the larger
disk which I upgrade periodically - makes it easier to recover the machine
if/when summat goes tits-up.
Anyone who has yet to get into mass storage would do well to consider how
long it takes to move stuff about (even over a LAN) and definitely to
consider what a disaster looks like when you get over, say, a hundred Gig's
worth of stored material go down the pan! AFAIAC, hard drives are a rapidly
moving feast and I will 'disk hop' until such time as I can build a box with
enough storage space (2 or 4 Tb?) to allow me to comfortably store all the
'digital music' and video material I want.
FWIW, up 'til now my MP3 collection has been more for having than actually
playing. Now that I'm happy with my PC to 'HiFi' setup, I swipe a range of
MP3s and play them as background music. I have thousands of tracks not yet
heard - if anything really stands out (presents itself, as it were) I make
the effort to chase it down on vinyl and am now continually buying vinyl
online and have a number of eBay bids on the go. (Charity shops are history
now - having all jumped on the 'vinyl bandwagon' and reduced a healthy trade
in secondhand bargains into a dreary, tatty, ****-shovelling exercise...)
Any MP3s which really are ****e get deleted.
Anyway, I dispute this continual wailing about 'MP3 Quality' (now, there's a
good example of an oxymoron if you want one!) and the various
merits/demerits of different bitrates because by the time I've got them
dacced and vacced (external DAC and valve amplifier) even 128K MP3s sound
perfectly reasonable - easily as good as listening to the radio. Swim bought
me a copy of 'Wot HiFi' the other day and there was a test (surprise,
surprise) comparing MP3 players - IIRC, most of these had 128K of onboard
memory at most - which makes adds to the mockery of compressed music stored
at high bitrates. (Also, FWIW, I have conducted enough experiments to prove
that an Audio CDR made from 128K MP3s is virtually indistinguishable from
one made from WAVs., if that were the object of the exercise - which it
isn't!)
Vinyl recorded as WAVs is a different ballgame entirely - they are very
'listenable' in their own right and knock the **** out of the equivalent
CDs. I record LPs as I listen to them and play them over and over (as you
do) when I need a 'hands free' style of operation. Ultimately they get/will
get squished into summat smaller and chucked on the MP3 pile. (If I didn't
have the other clutter on the 200 Gig disk it would give me a potential of
up to 500 LPs recorded as WAVs which is not 'inconsequential' by any
standards!) Saving on stylus wear etc, is a bonus in this situation.