Now That You've Ripped Your Entire Collection...

One day soon enough people will look back on today's computer audio systems with fond memories and some of the hardware will be in landfills along with the older yet disc players mouldering away into antiquity. Hopefully our kids and their kids will do a better job of recycling than we have though.

Backup, backup and totally more backup, to many different hard drives. Be sure to have rented a safe deposit box to store one of the backup copies. I am sure your house will burn down one day and all, including the CD's themselves will be lost. No, the cloud is not as safe.

I know it is a pretty low priority to most people, but, it is illegal to rip CDs and then sell or give away the same CDs --that violates "fair use." If you sell or give away the collection a second (and later, third, fourth, etc.) purchaser will be acquiring the music without the original license holder getting any royalties.

I am in the process of ripping my collection (currently up to 2100 CDs ripped. I will be keeping the original CDs. Given how much work is involved (A LOT--to correct/complete metadata for classical cds), I expect to never have to re-rip the CDs (the NAS is backed up). Aside from security issue, I am not convinced that current ripping is "bit perfect" so that once ripped, one has all that can ever be extracted from the CD (as the original source). Not that I trust "Absolute Sound" (certainly not absolutely), but they did publish a "study" that showed differences in the way the files were ripped and stored (FLAC vs. WAV) and between the software used to do the ripping. I have heard a FLAC vs. WAV demonstration where differences could easily be heard (in favor of WAV), and quite a few users have reported that CD playback through a particular DAC sounded better than playing back a ripped file of that CD through the same DAC. This suggests another reason to hold on to CDs for at least a little while longer until one can be absolutely assured of perfect retrieval of what is on the CD.

Larryi --

You and another poster bring up a good point with respect to copyright infringements. I had not considered that at first.

Between that, and wanting to have the CDs around in case better ripping technology comes about, I'm deciding to hang onto the CDs.

Thanks all,
Rob

Read the Computer Audiophile site on backing up your data - you need at least 2 backup copies and a CD is sure handy as one of those.

I read about audiophiles dispensing with their CDs and I am puzzled by the excessive amount of confidence they have in their physical harddrives and the ability to decode them.