Digitising your music collection

[kagenaki koe]

Originally Posted by Tiger

thanks, and do u get a choice when u encode a cd as to what MB it will be stored at?

in itunes, yes (well not the exact mb part). just to give you an idea of file sizes:

a 4 minute song is roughly 4 mb when encoded at about 128-192 kbps. you'll be looking at double that size if it's encoded at 256-320 kbps. a lossless or flac version of a 4 minute song is 40 mb or so.

an hour long cd will be about 50-60 mb at 128-192 kbps. you can copy the cd as a wav or uncompressed file (those are still playable on itunes/ipods...flac and ogg files won't) but then that hour long cd will take up 500-600 mb.

so 400 cds + whatever loads of mp3s you have, most of that should be able to fit in a 160 GB player if you encode at 320kbps or lower. but if you're planning on having your entire collection as a lossless or uncompressed audio files, then that stuff won't fit a 160 GB player.

[King of Snake]

Originally Posted by Leon

The D2 is like a dream. 16GB capacity, expandable with SD-card (which go up to 32GB). When you charge the battery (won't take more than a few hours) you can enjoy about 50 HOURS of music before you have to recharge again. The LCD-screen is nice and the touch-screen works like it should, quick, responsive and no loading times. It supports different file formats (one of them being .flac, which is important for me) and you can just copy & paste your collection to the D2 without using some shitty program. You can play movies and pictures on it as well, although that is no priority to me. The D2 player has everything I want from an mp3-player and it works great. It never freezes or anything. It's really cheap as well.

I know this is completely off-topic and I sound like a Cowon salesman, but that's what the D2 does to me.

yes that's what attracted me to the m5l as well. Plays FLAC, long battery life, and loading music on it is just a matter of copy and paste. The only problem I have with it is that the headphone jack is kinda broken. I've resoldered it to the circuit board a couple of times already but it keeps coming loose so I might have to upgrade the whole thing at some point. If that happens I will definitely check out the D2. How much did you pay for it?

[stimpee]

iTunes: on Windows it really is absolutely shit bloatware. On the Mac its a different story. If you import a huge collection it will take DAYS to calculate the gapless playback data. You can use Winamp with iPods (or even better use the ml_ipod plugin).

Cowon: I had an M3 and it rocked. They make some of the best players out there IMO. The FLAC support was great tho it didnt seem to handle compression level 8 as well. The M5L has an amazing battery life, pity they dont make it anymore! They do make the X5L tho which is similar. 60GB only tho. Cowon/iAudio's in general have great battery life.

Zune: Ive heard good things but its not available outside the USA.

The 160GB ipod is an amazing amount of storage. If thats what you want then go for it because I'm not sure how long its gonna be around. The flash players are catching up in terms of storage, and its not just the ipod touch. Sony have release a ridiculously thin Walkman with 64gb.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mp3/ne...est-to-Date/p1

Archos make what looks like a great Android based mp3/video player with 64GB flash ram too. Its expensive but looks pretty awesome.
http://www.advancedmp3players.co.uk/...blet.4008.html (theres also a 160GB/320GB/500GB HDD version). The 64gb and 160gb are the same price as the ipod touch 64gb.. about 299gbp.

Advancedmp3players.co.uk is where i bought my Cowon M3, theyre very good and have good prices and a big selection. Storage space isnt such a big deal these days. I have an iPhone 3GS/32GB and thats enough. The rest is stored on a 2TB NAS at home. I dont think theres any need to carry all your music around.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by King of Snake

yes that's what attracted me to the m5l as well. Plays FLAC, long battery life, and loading music on it is just a matter of copy and paste. The only problem I have with it is that the headphone jack is kinda broken. I've resoldered it to the circuit board a couple of times already but it keeps coming loose so I might have to upgrade the whole thing at some point. If that happens I will definitely check out the D2. How much did you pay for it?

I bought the original D2 for 200 euro's, but I think the D2+ (a "newer" model, although only firmware is upgraded and it's available in different colors) can be found for under that price now (for a 16GB model). So a good chance the original D2 is even cheaper at the moment.

[Tiger]

ok so i got my 160gb ipod last week, late birthday/early xmas present and i have a few questions which hopefully peeps here may be able to help with.

when you download a cd mainly by one artist but has some collaborations, itunes doesn't create one album, but creates individual ones for the collaboration. for example the basement jaxx singles album shows up as 6 seperate albums on itunes, one main one, and 5 others for the collaborations. is their a way to get round this, so i have one album with all the songs in correct running order?

a number of my older cds son't have artwork, not a huge issue, but can you cut and paste images from the internet for this?

i downloaded about 100 albums from an external hard drive onto itunes, and in the main it seemed to work ok. however when i tried to play these or sync with my ipod it said 'computer says no' or 'the song could not be used as the original file could not be found. would you like to locate? do i simply get round this by having my hard drive plugged in when i sync with itunes? also what about when i want to play these albums on my computer on itunes, as it doesn't suffer this issue when you want to play a cd you've uploaded? i'm a little confused here so any advice/helps/tips would be greatly appreciated

also when downloading these albums from the external harddrive some were mixes, and instead of it loading one mix, it loaded all the individual tracks. i know when its cd you can join tracks, but is there a way to manually do this?

some of these downloaded songs/mixes have just gone into a catch all file of unknown artist/unknown album. i can't change them as its the locate issue i mentioned two paragraphs. but when i've got them properly downloaded is it just a case of clicking the get info tab and adding their name/artist and they automatically get moved into the main list?

finally i have a number of bands who i multiple ep/single releases by and i don't want all these listed as individual albums. can i just create a b-sides/misc album and put them all in this?

thanks

[kagenaki koe]

Originally Posted by Tiger

when you download a cd mainly by one artist but has some collaborations, itunes doesn't create one album, but creates individual ones for the collaboration.

there is a field for ARTIST and a field for ALBUM ARTIST (under get info). itunes organizes it on the hard drive by ALBUM ARTIST (if that field is filled) otherwise it uses ARTIST (except when songs have PART OF A COMPILATION clicked...more on that later). You can leave the ARTIST field by itself (ex. Black Sun Empire and Evol Intent) and type in Black Sun Empire in ALBUM ARTIST (this way the primary album artist will have that album under it's folder...it won't show up under Evol Intent however). If it's an actual compilation, if PART OF A COMPILATION is clicked (or YES), the album will show up in a folder called COMPILATIONS (or Various Artists depending on what is listed in ALBUM ARTIST). I personally prefer to have compilation songs organized with the actual artist(s), so i have PART OF A COMPILATION clicked off (or NO) and i make sure to leave ALBUM ARTIST blank (this ensures that the album gets filed under the artist). For guest vocalists etc, i remove their name from the artist field and add their name to the song title instead (or anywhere as long as it isnt the artist or album artist field). ex. you don't want multiple folders for Tricky feat. Martina Topley-Bird, Tricky feat. Alison Moyet, Tricky feat. Terry Hall,..you can just have it under Tricky since he's the main artist.

a number of my older cds son't have artwork, not a huge issue, but can you cut and paste images from the internet for this?

yes. there's also a "automatically find artwork feature", but sometimes it doesnt grab the right artwork. i think there are artwork grabber apps you can use outside of itunes (but i've never used them).

i downloaded about 100 albums from an external hard drive onto itunes, and in the main it seemed to work ok. however when i tried to play these or sync with my ipod it said 'computer says no' or 'the song could not be used as the original file could not be found. would you like to locate? do i simply get round this by having my hard drive plugged in when i sync with itunes?

if you want files to reside on the external, then the external needs to be plugged in to use those files. if you wanted them to reside on your main drive, in preferences under ADVANCED, click on COPY FILES to itunes media folder. you can also specify where the itunes media folder resides (default is in your user/main drive...but you can have it link to an external...the etxernal ALWAYS has to be plugged in for you to use files on it)

also when downloading these albums from the external harddrive some were mixes, and instead of it loading one mix, it loaded all the individual tracks. i know when its cd you can join tracks, but is there a way to manually do this?

some of these downloaded songs/mixes have just gone into a catch all file of unknown artist/unknown album. i can't change them as its the locate issue i mentioned two paragraphs. but when i've got them properly downloaded is it just a case of clicking the get info tab and adding their name/artist and they automatically get moved into the main list?

burn them to a cd and join the tracks. you'll end up with one file of the entire mix and you'll still have the individual files if you wanted to listen to each track separately

finally i have a number of bands who i multiple ep/single releases by and i don't want all these listed as individual albums. can i just create a b-sides/misc album and put them all in this?

just change the album name on all of them

[bas_I_am]

Originally Posted by kagenaki koe

there is a field for ARTIST and a field for ALBUM ARTIST (under get info). itunes organizes it on the hard drive by ALBUM ARTIST (if that field is filled) otherwise it uses ARTIST (except when songs have PART OF A COMPILATION clicked...more on that later). You can leave the ARTIST field by itself (ex. Black Sun Empire and Evol Intent) and type in Black Sun Empire in ALBUM ARTIST (this way the primary album artist will have that album under it's folder...it won't show up under Evol Intent however). If it's an actual compilation, if PART OF A COMPILATION is clicked (or YES), the album will show up in a folder called COMPILATIONS (or Various Artists depending on what is listed in ALBUM ARTIST). I personally prefer to have compilation songs organized with the actual artist(s), so i have PART OF A COMPILATION clicked off (or NO) and i make sure to leave ALBUM ARTIST blank (this ensures that the album gets filed under the artist). For guest vocalists etc, i remove their name from the artist field and add their name to the song title instead (or anywhere as long as it isnt the artist or album artist field). ex. you don't want multiple folders for Tricky feat. Martina Topley-Bird, Tricky feat. Alison Moyet, Tricky feat. Terry Hall,..you can just have it under Tricky since he's the main artist.




yes. there's also a "automatically find artwork feature", but sometimes it doesnt grab the right artwork. i think there are artwork grabber apps you can use outside of itunes (but i've never used them).



if you want files to reside on the external, then the external needs to be plugged in to use those files. if you wanted them to reside on your main drive, in preferences under ADVANCED, click on COPY FILES to itunes media folder. you can also specify where the itunes media folder resides (default is in your user/main drive...but you can have it link to an external...the etxernal ALWAYS has to be plugged in for you to use files on it)

just change the album name on all of them

Or you could just use windows media player and drag and drop