blackdance

I’m only 20% through digitizing my CD library. The biggest problem I have found is lack of security – two hard drives died on me last few years. I wouldn’t like to repeat this process again, so I’ll wait until I can afford huge external RAID. Other than that, it should be really straightforward – I will use EAC to rip CDs into FLAC, and I am already using excellent OrangeCD cataloging tool and fantastic SlimDevice’s Squeezebox Wi-Fi player to play albums from HDD through living room speakers. All in all, in the end it is totally worth doing.

I did it a couple of weeks ago and it is totally worth it. I did it mostly for reference (to avoid buying what I already have), convenience of finding stuff on shelves and playing files through Squeezebox.

It took me about 4 hours to catalog 1315 CDs, 21 tapes, 19 collectible vinyls and 30G of FLAC and MP3 files (some purchased, some ripped from my CDs for convenience). The hardest part in my case was that some titles were present as both CDs and music files, and I wanted to avoid duplicates.

I used OrangeCD Suite and wireless Flic barcode scanner – excellent software and hardware, highly recommend both, well played together. Barcode scanner was somewhat on expensive side but I found a good deal on eBay. The alternatives to scanning barcodes are either inserting each CD in computer for recognition, or looking up titles in online database – both ways are pretty slow, so I figured the barcode scanner is worth $50.

Now, important part is to keep your database up-to-date with all new puchases. Otherwise you’ll end up in same position as before – not knowing what you have and what you don’t.