I have had a series of posts about my ongoing CD ripping project started 1-1-07 and finished today 3-6-07 after 65 days of work. The first post is here, but you can see them all by using the labels (tags) feature.
The final result is 10,629 songs for a continuous playing time of 29.8 days — this represents 773 albums and 252 artists*.
As I said in my original post, I’ve always wanted to have my complete library available to me, and now I do. I’ve ripped everything except spoken word discs
I used either 160 or 192 and in a few rare cases 320 bits depending on the recording. Most are being done at 160 because when they were recorded any real difference wouldn’t be noticeable, and as a result I saved tons of drive space. Newer discs were done at the higher rate for better quality. My calculations for total space were way off because I took a typical CD and used that for all calculations, but as it turns out, most older albums are much shorter. Back in the LP era, an album could hold 45 minutes of music. The new ones hold 70 to 80 minutes, so I ended up using half the space I expected. I also did the calculations before factoring in disk space shrinkage for using smaller bit rates. It was all calculated at 320, so my 1TB hard drive still has a lot of space which means I can buy more CDs.
I still wish iTunes would let you have real dual libraries — that is you could have two open at the same time and move songs back and forth. That would please me, and it would make my project of removing any remaining illegal tracks go faster. I’ll start updating tags which should be done later this year. And I’m slowly adding artwork too, because I’m anal that way.
* Sort of. Some albums a multi-disc set counts as “one album” and on others it counts as “two albums” depending on if iTunes recognizes it as “Title” or “Title (Disc One)” and “Title (Disc Two)” but that is a minor quibble. Also, for artists, it’s the same thing “Elton John” is not the same artist as “Elton John & Billy Joel”, so the count isn’t perfect. Use the iTunes browse feature to get this information.