My one major accomplishment of the weekend was finally completing a project that I’ve had going on for months now: importing every CD I own into iTunes. Quite a task, when after years of being a complete music junkie (compounded by a few years of DJing), I’ve built up a CD collection of 1,142 albums!
Now that I’m done, though, the final tally…
- Total songs in my iTunes library: 14,622
- Total time: 49.6 days (49 days, 15 hours, 8 minutes, 23 seconds)
- Total space: 65.09 GB
The fact that all that music takes up only 65 GB was a pleasant surprise. When I was using my G3 as my primary computer, I picked up an 80GB drive specifically to hold all my music. At that point, though, encoding my music as 160kbps VBR MP3 files, I couldn’t fit all of my music on that drive! This time, though, I’ve been encoding at 128kbps AAC (not archival quality, but slightly better sound quality than the 160kbps .mp3s even at smaller file sizes), and managed to get all of my music on the ‘puter in 15 GB less space than before.
Then, since iTunes has a special “Grouping” field that can be used for whatever sort of customized sorting options the user wants, I set up four groups for my music. I’ve always prided myself on the fact that the majority of my music is music that I actually own, and I’ve generally only resorted to downloading songs from peer to peer networks such as Napster or the like when I was trying to get really rare tracks that I couldn’t find any other way. I was curious as to just how the numbers worked out, though, so here’s my four groups, and their final results…
- Copied from friends or downloaded from P2P networks (technically illegal): 610 (4.172%)
- Original rips (my own mixes, GarageBand creations, or imports from vinyl): 51 (0.349%)
- Bought from the iTunes Music Store (legally owned, though without the physical CD): 232 (1.587%)
- Ripped from CDs that I own: 13,729 (93.893%)
Overall, I really don’t think that that’s too bad of a ratio.
And yes. I’m a complete and total music whore. 
iTunes: “Come What May” by Kidman, Nicole/McGregor, Ewan from the album Moulin Rouge (2001, 4:48).
CJ
Brandon
Tim Who?
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So run your collection through this:
http://www.disobey.com/d/perl/itunes2html.txt
and show us what you got.
I started working on ripping mine, but there’s still plenty to do. I have between 1800 and 1900 CD (I’d have to check my database for the exact number), but I think I’m more than halfway through the process by now. Since I’m ripping to 192kbps mp3s, however, it’s taking up significantly more room. But I have a 200GB hard drive just for them.
And like you, the percentage of downloaded files is small compared to my purchased collection (although I have more overall - I just have to get rid of what I don’t want). How long did the whole process take?
Ok I’m a light weight in volume. Can’t find the number of albums.
2335 songs 7.2 days 9.56 Gig
Copied from friends - 1 Album ( ? % ) Original rips my own mixes. 0% Bought from the iTunes Music Store 0% Ripped from CDs that I own. 99.9%
Poor in music but honest!
Paul — I went ahead and did that, though Morbus makes one assumption in his script that I don’t follow, so it doesn’t work as well for me. Namely, he checks the “compilation” flag for compilation CDs, and I don’t (in older versions of iTunes using the “compilation” flag would remove artists from the Artist pane while browsing, and now I just use it to keep things like Broadway soundtracks — which have multiple different artists and combinations of artists, but are still part of a single ‘piece’ — grouped together).
Because of that, I end up with one huge list, with nearly every track listed as its own album. But, if you’re really curious, here it is, just be prepared for a 1Mb HTML download.
Indieb0i — honestly, I have no clue how long it took. I’ve been working on it off and on since I got my G5, almost a year ago now, but there were weeks when I’d work on it every night, and there’d be weeks when I didn’t touch it. I guess in one sense, it took almost a year…but if I’d actually concentrated on it, it wouldn’t have taken nearly that long.
There’s a funny new section on the Apple site describing iPod etiquette: Pod Etiquette. Remove both earbuds: During a job interview Taking your driver’s test When your sweetie calls
Remove one earbud: Listening for your flight Buying groceries When a coworker calls
Leave ’em in: Visiting the inlaws At the laundromat When your boss calls
I suppose the same could be held to be true for iTunes listeners.
Cool!
Hold on to those CDs, though; you’ll eventually want to encode them in FLAC.
Oh, I’m definitely keeping the CDs — after all, as good as 128kbps AAC sounds on my chintzy little computer speakers, it’s still a lossy format.
I’ve been keeping FLAC in mind for future use. Right now I don’t have the storage space to rip my entire collection losslessly, and while a future project may involve ripping the CDs to FLAC and them archiving them to DVD-R, I’m so done with CD ripping for the moment.
That said, however, one of the things I hope to be able to do when I visit Alaska this September is see how much of my family’s vinyl collection I can ship down to myself here in Seattle. Once some of that is down here, I plan to pick up a cheap-but-decent turntable and start ripping some of the stuff from that collection, much of which is likely never going to be released on CD.
When I do that, I’ll probably want to bring the audio in raw, do a quick filter to get rid of some of the worst of the vinyl noise (though not too much filtering, since I want to affect the music as little as possible), save that to FLAC and AAC, then archive the FLAC files on DVD. Of course, right now I have no clue how I’m going to do all that, but I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it all out with a little poking around.
I have some notes on what I have done to encode vinyl to bits, if you’re interested. I am keeping the WAV files as a hedge as well. I think what I may do is burn a CD of each LP and just drop it in the sleeve. Then I have the WAV files if I need ‘em and I can free up some disk space (hard to feed a hobby with no income).
I quit ripping after 7GB. Alot of the cd’s I bought way back when I got for one or 2 songs. Although I would like to see how much space it would take up.
I wouldn’t mind the hints at all, Paul, whenever you’ve got a few moments to toss ‘em my way. Thanks!