Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Furniture or mega-changer?

I have no idea on your question but I have played around with my external drive with the USB hook-up and the firewire hook-up and didn't see any difference in speed, reliability............nothing.

OK...after further investigation, I'm leaning heavily towards ripping my cd's. (*sigh*)

Lacie 250gb USB2.0 drive
Belkin 5 port USB2.0 PCI card
Belkin Gold Series USB2.0 Cable (A/B)
Apple Airport Express

What am I missing? (A wireless network is being setup this week already for other reasons.)

From their lit (the Lacie 250):

Available with high-speed FireWire interface, the LaCie Hard Drive offers fast data transfer rates (up to 400Mbits/s) that are required for substantial jobs like rendering 2D/3D images

I find that utterly humourous - for anyone that has done any 3D rendering - you realize the rendering engine spits out one frame (about a meg) every say 30 seconds to 30 minutes, which means you need something capable of about 0.25-16 (not 400) Mbits/s.

Uncompressed CD audio requires about 10MB a minute (or about 1.5mbits per second) so I'd say you're pretty much covered.

Bren R.

Just the software you are going to rip with and I have a feeling that will turn into a debate and a half around here!!!!!

From my own experience (I have been doing MP3's since before Napster if that matters!) I have had the best results with EAC and LAME following this standard:

http://www.ubernet.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Files&file=uberstandard

I must admit that I don't follow that to the letter. I use EAC version V0.95 PreBETA 5 from 8 and LAME 3.96. My results after trying a ton of other combinations, are flawless at 320kps. I have tried them all from Flac to Monkey to a ton of other variations and in the end I have had the best luck and the best results using the above.

In reply to:

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What am I missing?

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About 100 hours of your life that you'll never get back. I thought about going this route - and yes, the end product is a great investment - no more worrise about scratches - you effectively get a back-up version of all of your music, and in the meantime, you can purchase a big floppy binder and put all of your discs in your car or second room if you want... but jees, that project sounds like something that would take the better part of two months over the course of several weekends. On the other hand, I loaded in my discs and input the names in less than a day (most of the time was spent loading in the names, which went faster than expected).

I know you're a big boy, but make sure you consider what you're getting into.

Time, Craig, you're missing Time.

You're OBVIOUSLY going to want excellent fidelity (I like and respect NeverHappy's experience here). I don't know how long it takes to rip an average CD using his methodology. My (limited) experience suggests that 7-8 minutes per disk using Musicmatch at 192. For 400 CD's, you're talking about ~60 hours of swapping disks continuously. PLUS cddb lookup time, PLUS category/list management, etc.

Now, I don't dispute that some of this investment really pays off in value-added functionality, but the infrastructure startup time is signficant.

Craig, don't you also need a control device on the listening end? Digital media receiver or some such?

Do you guys back those huge drives up?

I guess I just don't want to relinquish my nice, shiny disks to the binary desert. Yes, I still have a turntable. No, I haven't used it lately.

Anybody else considering abandoning their VCR? I still have several, but now that I have Tivo, I can't imagine ever actually using one again.

Hey, if I ditch the turntable AND the VCR, maybe I'll have room for those mega changers! No, wait, I don't need one of those if I do all that ripping/networking stuff.

God, I am confused. I'm just going to go back to the beer thread where I belong.

Hey now guys...after I finally start to come around to the ripping cd's idea, you bust out the "NO STOP!" routine!

I too am hesitant to give up my nice shiny cd's. But on the other hand, I've given up on a land line phone (hell, did that about 2 years ago!), we got tivo last week, and I've already removed our vcr's.

Yeah, it's going to take some time, but I'm weird...I actually look forward to it. I like cataloging stuff.

What about all the time you and your computer will have to spend away from the Axiom forum? Those moral majority guys will probably try to take over the politics thread.

I've given up on that political thread. Too out numbered. You guys wore me down.

If I'm sitting at my desk for hours at a time ripping cd's what do you think I'll be doing while they rip? I'll be here of course.

Good for you! You will have to invest some time but in the end, you will be happy you did it!

One thing to mention is don't forget to back everything up as you go along. I have all my MP3's on one 100gig and I back it all up on to a seperate 160gig. Chances of them both crapping out at the same time are about the same as me winning the lottery!!!!

If you need help with anything, let me know and I will do my best.