How should I archive my CDs?

[nixage]

I have two questions for the Gurus out there?

1. I have a CD collection somewhere between 800-1000 CDs and want to archive them. I started to convert them to mp3 (320kbps), but after only a few CDs I'm wondering if this is the way to go.

I basically want to have the same quality that is on the CD to be on my hard drive. Is there any way I can make an image of the CD?

After reading through this forum it seems Monkeys Audio might be the way to go. Can I zip these files or compress them otherwise? What would you do?

Space is not really an issue since I currently have over 300GB of storage and I can get more if needed. I figure if I have 1000 CDs and each one has about 500MB (many singles in the collection) on average then 500GB should be plenty storage.

I know it's kind of overkill, but I want to be able to manipulate the music in a very easy manner and keep the actual CDs archived away.

I also use an IPOD so I would want to convert the monkeys audio or wav files to mp3.

2. Second question is this: When converting to mp3 it seems that the bitrate comes out wrong. Sometimes it's really low (40 something) and sometimes really high (400 something) and it's very random. I use "never v1" tagging and "preserve tags" on. I'm converting from CD (original) directly. I'm also using CBR at 320kbps and no presets. The strange thing is that if I turn off "preserve tags" then it doesn't do this, however I don't get the tracks, year, etc. in the tag so it adds a bunch of manual work.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

[RossRoy]

For archiving, I'd go with either Monkey Audio or Flac, through my own experimentation, it seems that Monkey compresses better but takes more CPU time to playback than Flac. Also, it'd be useless to ZIP them since both Monkey and Flac compress the file so ZIP wouldn't compress much of anything. And you will need a heck of a lot of HD space. On average, the best you will get for compression is 50%, and that's best case scenario. Also, if you go for either Monkey or Flac, keep it on the default settings as going higher again just makes the playback take even more CPU time and since you say that storage space is not problem, going with a higher setting than normal will just take forever to compress (as opposed to normal) and the gain in space is not worth it IMHO.

As for the MP3 not encoding at the specified bitrate.... ??? I have no idea sorry.

[Spoon]

The mp3 problem will be the ID3v2 tag just making the reading program show the bit rate incorrectly. Anyhow for an iPod you might want to look at the .mp4 codec.

[Unregistered]

Thanks guys. I've downloaded monkeys audio and wanted to start using it but it won't recognize any CDs. ???

Am I doing something really stupid here? I've looked into the help menu, but it looks as if you can only copy/compress wav files and not copy them from CDs.

I don't know. Getting frustrated now, will have to do more research tomorrow.

[RossRoy]

Are you using the Audio CD Input module?

[Unregistered]

Are you using the Audio CD Input module?

No. Where do I get that? Didn't see it on the monkey's website.

[nixage]

The last two "UNREGISTERED" posts were from me. Forgot to log in.

Sorry.

[RossRoy]

It's installed as part of Music Converter.

Go to Start/Programs/dbPowerAmp Music Converter

and you will see Audio CD Input

[nixage]

RossRoy,

I see what you're saying. I should use dbpoweramp for converting to wave and then compress using monkeys audio?

[RossRoy]

Actually no, you would lose your tags if you rip to wav first and would end up having to put them all in manually in the end.

Audio CD Input can rip the CD directly to monkey audio, provided you installed the codec for dbPowerAmp available in Codec Central (look at the bar right under the illustrate logo)