Thinking about selling my CD collection = MP3

I did something like what you are suggesting, but I did keep most of my collection in case of failure. I burned to two separate hard drives and backed up additionally on DVD's. The latter is a bit of a PITA, but makes for added piece of mind. Yeah, like others have said, hard drives can, and do fail. Backup or perish. Media and storage space is relatively cheap when compared with the time and aggravation of the alternative. I sold off about 300 CD's that I rarely listen to and wouldn't miss that much if I lost them. I did a nickel in the state pen for selling the CD's. My advice to you is do your time, don't look anyone in the eye, don't bend over to pick up the soap in the showers, and definitely don't tell'em what you're in there for. Make something good up like jay walking or removing tags from the bottom of sewn furniture.

Marco

Marco,
Were you permitted conjugals with your hard drive? All's I know is I've had one go down on me, and nothing else feels quite like it.

Were you permitted conjugals with your hard drive? All's I know is I've had one go down on me, and nothing else feels quite like it.

....and that's why they call them "gagabytes"

Marco

Assuming you take care with a music server - dedicated machine, don't run other programs on it, plenty of disk space, etc. - you should easily be able to put all your music on the server, have a backup strategy that fully protects you, and be able to interact with your music more flexibly than ever before. I would suggest a lossless format, and I would store the music on dedicated external USB drives. Support for any part of that setup won't go away for a long time.

Keep or sell the CDs? There are possible legal issues, probable moral issues, and a loss of ultimate security of your collection if you sell. To me, though, this is a completely different question than whether everything should be on a server and accessed that way.

Tvad-

While I agree that d/l mp3s wasn't the question presented, the takeaway is that the RIAA is *very* vigilant about enforcing its perceived rights, and if there was a way that they could go after people merely for storing their own ripped CDs, I suspect they certainly would try. While there is no simple existing means for determining what's on your hard drive, the subpoena game played by RIAA is hardball--look at their track record where people (including grandmothers without computers) are being forced to prove a negative after being sued. I'm not so sanguine about the ultimate "privacy" of my hard drive--there have already been attempts by legislators to require software monitoring compliance with copyright.

Besides, keeping the CD is sort of the ultimate backup.