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I Hate to Admit It

If I live to be 100, I expect to still be cleaning vinyl records in 2064. Or perhaps tinkering with my turn of the century Sony SCD-1 and the quaint discs that were sold with it.

But it seems that computer based audio would be useful for archiving things and enable me to throw away hundreds of CDs that I rarely, if ever, want to listen to and basically just clutter up my cabinets.

I am sure there are some threads on this subject, but I don't even know where to search:

My only experience is using a Rio MP3 player and the supplied software. The MP3 sound is pretty bad and recordings often skip.

Could someone therefore explain the quickest, easiest way to get good sounding (uncompressed?) music on a hard drive? I can buy a new computer if necessary.

Is there a consensus in the audiophile community on software/hardware to use or not to use? Is there a program with an amazing interface for a computer based jukebox?

Also, for burning CDs, is it true that high fidelity compilations can be easily made? Again, do I need any special hardware or software?

(At the moment, I have a Sony VAIO laptop about 2 years old and a CD burner that I purchased at about the same time.)

Thank you.
cwlondon
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,273 posts
 
I'm a big supporter of using computer based hard disk systems as digital music jukeboxes. Click on my system and look at the Imp/perfection system for details of my current setup. However, as far as archiving goes, nothing beats the original vinyl disk, with the original CD coming in second. The reason is that hard disks drives are not a proven long term storage medium. Ten years is a real long time by hard disk standards. Compare that to vinyl (40+ years) or commercially stamped CDs (20 years minimum). My advice is if you do convert to a hard disk server that you keep the originals as your backups.

All current Apple computers are bundled with the appropriate software (iTunes) to rip CDs to hard disk and to organize the music for playback. If you are looking to convert vinyl the then I would suggest acquiring an external A/D converter (I recommend the Apogee Rosetta $1,150 street price) and some recording software (I use Spark XL, but there are others). Converting vinyl to digital is a fairly tedious project.
cwlondon OP
1,210 posts
 
Thank you everyone.

I would love to hear more about the SOTA in hard drive based formats. Why is vinyl to digital so tedious? And what about the pro recording devices for home use?

Also, it seems that the SB Extigy requires and AC adapter. Are there any mobile solutions to this?

It would be great to use my Grado external headphone amplifier (40 hours from 2 9V batteries?) with an ibook, or my Sony notebook on airplanes. But I want to bypass the cheesey internal DAC and amp. Any solutions for this?

Thanks.
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,273 posts
 
Converting from vinyl obviously has to be done in real time (as opposed to ripping a CD which can be done in 5 minutes). Once its recorded you still have to break down each album side into individual songs (optional, but strongly recommended) and then once you import them into iTunes you still have to type in song titles and artist names (this is done automatically if you rip a commercially available CD). Count on taking around 1 hour for each album.

The following is a link to professionally caliber A/D/A converter with a firewire interface. It's designed to work with laptops:
http://www.mhlabs.com/index2.html

This link is for a pro caliber internal soundcard with very good quality (but not excellent) converters:
http://www.rme-audio.de/english/digi96/digi96pa.htm

The ideal option for airplay or other portable use is to have a dedicated computer and an Apple iPod. You can transfer songs back and forth.
http://www.apple.com/ipod/

Cwlondon, you're right about one thing. Once you have your music on hard disk it will be a breeze to make compilation CDs. It's a simple drag and click operation. iTunes allows you to add a comment to each song. I use the comment field to add a numerical rating for each song which I can then use to sort the entire database (13,000 songs). Approximately 200 songs got the highest rating. As a birthday present I gave a good friend of mine 11 CDRs composed of my fav songs. He absolutely flipped - said it was the best present (other than from his wife) that he had ever gotten. It took me a little more than an hour to do it all.

Converting to hard disk is not a trivial process, but once you do it you will be amazed at how easily you can access all of your music. You'll listen much deeper into your collection than you ever have before.
sailor720
24 posts
 
if you want decent sound from your computer, but nothing else most commercial systems will not suit your needs well. Talk to one of the smaller companies like micron or abs and spec out a computer with 2 hard drives in as big of a tower as you have space for for future additions, you do not need anything fancy just lots of space, a celeron or duron system should work, and get a good cd burner as this will have fast audio extraction and you can make compilations. use EAC to rip onto the hard drive as wavefiles and buy a soundcard with a digital output because an audio dac will sound much better than anything in a computer.
edesilva
768 posts
 
I had similar bad experiences with MP3s, but now am a quasi-convert. I use them in my iPod, and its OK for commuting purposes. Since I had the MP3s on my computer, I also hooked the computer to my stereo (Quicksilver monos/ProAc RS2s) in my study, and the jukebox software is OK for that kind of thing--its easy and gives good b/ground music. For serious 2CH, its still upstairs to the real rig.

My frustrations with ripping CDs was driven by the lousy software out there. I used a lot of commercial ripping software (all mentioned above) and never got good results, even for WAVs. Then someone turned me on to Exact Audio Copy. Stunning advance in ripping (tongue in cheek)--it actually reads the blocks more than once and does a compare! You would have thought *someone* might have made that conceptual leap somewhere along the way in the commercial world. Anyway, its $20 from somewhere on the web--just run a search on google. No more skips/nasties on WAVs. Much better than anything else I tried. User interface is kind of awful, but the end product is worth it.

If you ever want to try MP3s again, use a free program called LAME, which can be called by EAC. There are some command line presets that work well--I use "--alt preset extreme" for my iPod, but there is also an "--alt preset insane" for really HQ MP3s.
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