Comments on: Week 159: Griping About The New Fangled Way We Listen To Music

By: Justin

Justin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:38:35 +0000

I decided to go with 198k to save space. I figure I still have the CDs if I want to do critical listening.

By: Ghost of the Machine

Ghost of the Machine — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:00:55 +0000

Also, I would always encourage people to rip their collections to a lossless format like FLAC or Apple Lossless. Having enough disk space is always the problem, of course…

By: Ghost of the Machine

Ghost of the Machine — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:58:34 +0000

You don’t need a special turntable, you just need to go turntable -> phono preamp -> soundcard/interface (or use your computer’s built-in sound interface, usually via an 1/8″ jack). But yeah, it’s usually not worth the time to do that, when you can find/download most stuff online. I’ve also noticed mp3′s from vinyl can be not so great. Seems like they use a lot of bandwidth encoding the surface noise, so less bits are available for the signal.

By: roberto

roberto — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 04:42:25 +0000

Ripping all my collection would involve me getting an mp3 turntable. And i’m not even sure that i like mp3s from vinyl. on the turntable they sound nice, on the ipod they just sound crappy.

i am slowly working on ripping all my cds, but gee thats tedious.

i should get something like a time capsule or a dedicated external drive, but what i think we’ve lost is the physicalness of it all, and particularly the part of that which makes it an effort to obtain. like the difference between lifting a rock and lifting air. There is something satisfying about the rock.

By: Justin

Justin — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 23:33:53 +0000

I ripped my entire collection right after I got rid of all the jewel boxes. Then I spent several weeks going through making sure they all had artwork associated with them. Finally I moved the collection to my Time Capsule, which is a router/hard drive combo unit. Now I can access the whole collection from either of my computers. And theoretically, I can access the whole thing from anywhere via the internet. In practice, though, that’s excruciatingly slow. Anyway, I don’t regret the time I put into getting my collection in badass shape, since it’s so nice to be able to play anything anytime.

By: Ghost of the Machine

Ghost of the Machine — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:35:24 +0000

I would take a day and go through and alphabetize all your vinyl and CD’s. Even if they can’t be together in one room, you can at least have an A-L vinyl section, P-Z CD’s, etc.

You might want to look into a NAS (network attached storage) device to house all your mp3′s centrally. The computers would then hook into that via ethernet or wireless. Desktop sized drives were up to 1.5 TB, now go up to 2 TB. Laptop sized drives were up to 500 GB, now about to be up to 640 GB.

I’ve been wanting for some time to try designing a stereo component sized computer hard drive based home audio player, but still haven’t gotten around to it. I’m not sure how many people need something like that rather than just an iPod (or computer + NAS), but I’d sure like one. Of course, the thought of ripping all my CD’s fills me with much dread…