[Charles D.]

I've decided to rip all of my CDs to an external hard drive as .wav files using EAC. I can then make them into Apple Lossless or FLAC or whatever else I need as I change digital front ends. I expect that .wav files will be the most versatile form over the long term, and the cost of an extra hard drive to hold them is worth the savings in time to me from having to re-rip my discs if I have the files all in Apple Lossless, for example, and want to use a different lossless format in the future.

In any case, I decided to quantify the average size of a CD and calculate how many I might expect to store on a 200 Gb hard drive (since these are common and inexpensive).

I checked the amount of data stored on 58 of my CDs, and found that it ranged from 360 Mb to 756 Mb on the CDs examined (a wide range of musical types, although type of music doesn't matter, just length of recording).

The average CD size was 524 Mb, significantly less than the disc capacity. On a 200 Gb hard drive (formatted size), therefore, I might expect to store about 380 CDs. And on a 60Gb iPod I might expect to store about 220 CDs with Apple Lossless compression.

These are higher numbers than I had previously suspected, and I expect that my final results will be within 10% of these estimates.

This all may be old news to folks, but since I spent about an hour checking the disc sizes and running the numbers I thought I would pass on the data. You could also simply look at the total playing time on your discs to arrive at disc size.

Regards,

Charlie

[gitarretyp]

I've decided to rip all of my CDs to an external hard drive as .wav files using EAC. I can then make them into Apple Lossless or FLAC or whatever else I need as I change digital front ends. I expect that .wav files will be the most versatile form over the long term, and the cost of an extra hard drive to hold them is worth the savings in time to me from having to re-rip my discs if I have the files all in Apple Lossless, for example, and want to use a different lossless format in the future.

In any case, ...

Raw wavs are not really any more versatile. A lossless format such as flac can be converted back into a wav or any other format with no loss of information (remember, it's lossless). If you go flac, you'll be able to fit closer to 600 cds on the 200GB drive.

[Nick B]

Thanks, the figures are quite helpful for me as I have a little over 300 CD's. I was thinking of doing the same thing, but not using any compression at all. But that is still a few weeks off and more study of the software involved.

[Folsom]

Flac fully compressed with dBPowerAmp is 100% lossless. Apple Lossless is too... The thing is as I just discovered, Itunes blows at playing music, Foobar or some thing else makes a huge difference in over all fidelity.

You can also convert from Flac right back to .wav , and with Nero you can directly burn Flacs, auto conversion.

In your case you have enough room, me on my laptop, I just about ran out of room before Apple Lossless and now Flac (the right choice with Foobar).

Good new as well, I found a codec thing that allows conversion of Apple Lossless to Flac with tags! You can download it right off of the dBPowerAmp page some where.

One other thing, dbPowerAmp will, when choosen too, delete the old file and put the new one in the same folder, painless converion.

[Eli]

I've decided to rip all of my CDs to an external hard drive as .wav files using EAC. I can then make them into Apple Lossless or FLAC or whatever else I need as I change digital front ends. I expect that .wav files will be the most versatile form over the long term, and the cost of an extra hard drive to hold them is worth the savings in time to me from having to re-rip my discs if I have the files all in Apple Lossless, for example, and want to use a different lossless format in the future.

I think once you've been at this a while you'll realize WAV files are far from the most versatile format in which to store your music.  The lossless formats have a great advantage in terms of storage space, but perhaps more important is the tagging or metadata capabilities of those formats.  Adding artist names, composers, album names, genres, dates, comments, etc. to the files, without having to incorporate the data into an enormously long file name, is a great advantage.  And most software works much better when it pulls that data from tags rather than trying to parse it from a file name.

For versatility in encoding to another format, WAVs have only one very small advantage.  A WAV file only has to be encoded into your desired file format, while a FLAC file (for instance) needs to first be decoded, then encoded (transcoded) from its stored format to the final.  There are quite a few programs available that make this transcoding a simple task, so the only advantage WAV has in this regard is one of speed.

FWIW, the 425 CDs that I've ripped to date, stored in FLAC format, require on average 0.29 GBytes per disc.   And that includes quite a bit of artwork scans, usually about 5-10 MB per CD.  A "200 GB" hard drive is actually about 183 GB in size, so would store approximately 630 CDs in FLAC format.

[ksie]

Your calcs sound pretty accurate.  The rule of thumb I always use is 10mb per minute of WAV (1gb = 100min), which will equate to something like 6mb per minute (1gb = 167min) of FLAC.

Remember that you should budget your dollars at twice the price for disc space.  Backup everything that you rip!

karl

[Charles D.]

Thanks for all of the good comments. The lack of metadata in wav files is a real problem that I hadn't considered. Ripping everything to .wav without retaining album, artist, track title, and track number (at a minimum) is a waste of time.

I'm going to use the files with a Red Wine Audio modded iPod, so I need the files in Apple Lossless (ALAC) for the moment.

As a Mac user (with access to but not ownership of a PC), it seems most reasonable to revise my plan to use iTunes with "use error correction" turned on and all the "sound check" levels adjustment options turned off.

I could rip with EAC to FLAC for archiving, perhaps (maybe, possibly) saving some bits from being inaccurately ripped, but there isn't any FLAC to ALAC transcoder for the Mac as far as I know, so once I got done with the ripping I would need a PC to move things to ALAC as I want them on the iPod (unless some Mac software crops up to solve the problem). Assuming there's a FLAC to ALAC transcoder on the PC (?).

The main issue is that FLAC won't import into iTunes, and while WAV will import they won't have their metadata.

So, unless I'm missing something it looks like "error correcting" rip to iTunes for ALAC encoding is best. Maybe Apple will open up the ALAC format down the road so I won't have to go through a WAV conversion in iTunes to move it into some future format. ALAC should be around for a while in any case since iTunes and iPods seem to be well established.

And since this thread started out concerning hard drive CD storage capacity, let me pass along my recommendation on a hard drive: the OWC Mercury Elite Pro drives. (https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/fw400-USB2-combo-drives/#) The only reason I especially like them is that they are whisper quiet--much much quieter than my LaCie hard drive. Otherwise they are on par with other high-speed, external drives, just spookily quiet (which matters when it's in the listening room...).

Thanks again for all of the good advice.

-Charlie

[buckeyefanandy]

I think it is like the kid that asked how many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop?

1, 2, 3...  The answer is 3.

[PhilNYC]

On a related topic...when I knew a lot about hard drive storage (15-20 years ago!), it was a general rule that you shouldn't load up a hard drive to more than 70-75% capacity if you wanted it to perform reliably in terms of access speeds et al.  Is this still true?  Or are people loading up their hard drives to the fullest capacity without any performance issues these days?

[Folsom]

On a related topic...when I knew a lot about hard drive storage (15-20 years ago!), it was a general rule that you shouldn't load up a hard drive to more than 70-75% capacity if you wanted it to perform reliably in terms of access speeds et al.  Is this still true?  Or are people loading up their hard drives to the fullest capacity without any performance issues these days?

Well it would be bad if you had nothing to page to or operate temporary files on.... However now with a 200 GB hard drive you will never 50 GB of paging and temporary files. On a storage, not the operating system hard drive, I would not worry about the capacity and how full it became.

For the record older drives are much smaller and there for room to work was a lot larger.

[mca]

DoS wrote:

Good new as well, I found a codec thing that allows conversion of Apple Lossless to Flac with tags! You can download it right off of the dBPowerAmp page some where.

I looked for this but could not find it. I don't understand much on that website so I probably missed it. If you could provide a link I would really appreciate it  

[kenscott30]

I have looked at 2 albums, one was 327megs, the other 360 megs, Apple Lossless Encoder...

So about 583 albums give or take.

Good luck.

[mca]

Found It!

[Folsom]

Found It!

Glad you found it, I was just about to look until I read this post.