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I recently purchased an audio hard drive thingy and committed my entire music collection to it. This included my vinyl, tapes and CD's. It took about four months to transfer everything (but mainly because I kept getting bored doing it), having finally done it, I've waved goodbye to my vinyl and tapes, freeing up shelf and floor space I haven't seen for a long time. The carpet under the records was not only completely flat, but a much lighter colour too I'll keep the CD's for now at least.

According to a web survey most people own ~300 albums. I was surprised that my final tally was 856, which included the legacy vinyl/magnetic media. So at the flick of a remote I can now summon any album and any track. I've always bought music since I was a kid, so I accumulated my collection over ~40 years. It has a bit of everything in there which reflects my changing tastes over the years (no rap however). Listening to some of the older stuff has also reminded me how good it really was. I did come across a few embarassing albums and did consider not transferring them for posterity, but did anyway. So I have instant access to such delights as Showaddywaddy , (guess I must have liked them once).

Anyway, is my collection actually that substantial?, how much music do you have and do you keep it or over time discard it?

Hi eagle, just a note first to say i hope you've got a full backup of all your music and not just the single one copy of each.
I did what you've done afew years ago now with all my music & all my dads vinals that he left me after he passed away years ago so i had those and mine with countless cds & tapes also. Ive got two 250gb harddrives almost full and one is just a backup copy of the first because i nearly lost the original from an accident by my daughter so i made sure i took that backup when i did it all again. I was lucky as i was just a quarter of the way through copying but your not so take a copy please! You can buy seperate harddrives now that will do a full copy of your entire computer files overnight and there about 50 - 150 £ for a 120gb - a 500gb. I got mine from qvc btw.

Hi guys... I've got about 400 LPs and 600 singles amassed since the early 70s... used to run a mobile disco... the collection would be a lot bigger were it not for the fact that huge loads got stolen in two burglaries whilst i was a student in Liverpool... I have a pair of "normal " decks for playing and an LPtoCD deck that will "rip" an LP or CD and re-record it as a new file, burning it onto CD or storing digitally...I have hours of fun compiling "custom" CDs for the car

ATB,J.

TheEagle, Is that the 'Brennan system' Iv'e been looking at that, we have old singles ex jukebox from the '60's when Pa in Law had a pub in Portsmouth.

Most of our older CD's and LPs' are stored in boxes, we keep the ones most played to hand, it's like you say to find one cd is a nuisance.


John

Styxis, I was worried about that, especially after all the effort. So I have it backed up in two places. One copy is on my desktop computer which has its own Maxtor backup and I also bought a 1Tb Buffalo unit which I store remotely. The latter is way bigger than I actually needed, but memory is so cheap these days it was a bargain.

EJJ, yes its the Brennan JB7 unit which can hold 5000 CD's. In practice I never used it quite as Brennan suggest. I rip'd all my CD's to MP3 onto my desktop computer and then copied them to the JB7. For the records and tapes, I used a USB turntable and also a USB tape deck connected to my desktop computer, to record the music I used a piece of software called Spin It Again (www.acoustica.com/spinitagain). The USB turntable and USB tape deck I bought on Ebay and later sold on Ebay too!

The records were tedious to transfer since I found I really needed to listen to them as I was doing them, just in case they got stuck on a scratch or worse. The tapes were much easier, just press the button and walk away. For each album I transferred I made sure the track info was all present and correct (the software does that), then copied the lot to my JB7 and even made a backup from there too. So I suppose I used the JB7 more like a hard drive which had audio capability. I don't think I actually loaded anything into the JB7 unit the conventional way.

I'm very happy with the final quality of the music, I suspect real experts/purists might be more critical as there is inevitably some loss of quality.

The major thing this exercise gained me was the ability to listen to any of my entire collection at the flick of a remote. So I listen to stuff a lot more than I ever did before. Hearing all that music again has brought back a lot of memories, listening to the older stuff has mades me relive my youth! So many albums seem even better than I remember. I guess my favourite music was mostly in the era before heavy processing, digital correction and production, so in other words the 'raw' or 'pure' sound of peoples voices and people playing instruments.