Maybe not. Sony makes a CD carousel that holds 300 CDs. I have two. You can hook up to three together and control them from one of them. One trick I like is to play shuffle, alternately between the two, so with no pause to seek the next song. You can assign CDs to groups, so if you want to listen to all your Blues, that works great. It’s a CD player, not an all-in-one, so you need all the other stereo equipment separately.
They also make a 200 and a 400 CD version. The 400 is pretty deep, so make sure it fits your shelf (it would stick out too far on mine).
You might want to take a minute to consider formats. FLAC is the most straightforward and seems to be considered the best. If you expect the vast majority of the playing to be done via a PC or streamed via PC to a receiver then FLAC is probably a good place to start. You can use those files to convert to whatever suits you as technology progresses.
However, if you decide that you are bound and determined to be a Apple/iPod user and aren’t particularly concerned about cross-platform use then perhaps Apple Lossless is the better way to go. Similarly if you are attracted to the Zune and Windows Media Center WMA Lossless might be the way to go as it’ll be playable across pretty much every Microsoft system without any conversion or modification. Considering the ubiquity of PCs with Media Center and how excellent the Zune HD is this might be an attractive option.
I’m not sure if FLAC has any obvious benefits over those other two lossless formats, since neither iTunes or Zune support it. However it’s open source and free so hopefully one day it’ll be cross platform and universal, but that hasn’t happened yet and with the typical stubbornness of MS and Apple it might never happen.
IANAL, so I am not speaking from a position of authority, but it is my layman’s understanding that you must make backup copies using the actual CD in your possession. As far as I know, using torrents for copyrighted material is not legal (in the U. S., anyway), even if you do own the disc you want to download the music on.
But again, if I’m wrong, I’m happy to be corrected by someone who has an expert understanding of copyright law.
Too late to edit, but here’s a cite in which a New York attorney and a California attorney both confirm that one can not legally download copyrighted music from a source that is not licensed to carry it, even if you own the original CD.
On the flipside, the RIAA has said they’re no longer going to prosecute individual end-users, so this becomes a case in which you’re doing something illegal but NOT (in my mind) unethical, and with no meaningful risk of prosecution.
The truth is that, for lossless formats, it doesn’t matter what you rip to. They’re all TRULY lossless, which means you can convert from one to the other without losing a single bit of data (and there’s tools like MediaMonkey that can make converting an entire collection surprisingly quick and easy).
I recommend WMA-L simply because PCs can use it without downloading a codec, For Apple users, Apple Lossless makes sense for the same reason.
That was a chronic problem for me in the past, but modern operating systems (Windows XP or higher) and a healthy amount of RAM have made it so I can do just about anything while ripping a CD or DVD with no skips or problems. Just beware of screen savers, idle, and/or hibernate modes kicking in, these can still muck up my discs.
There’s more to choosing a format than the audio quality, obviously this is more apparent in lossless formats since they are all theoretically the same in that regard. Theoretically because there might be some debate if they are all truly lossless and if their sound reproduction is true, its possible there is disagreement on that point.
There very well could be benefits to one format over another in regards to compression, rate of conversion, data integrity, tagging options and future scalability. It’s worth asking which is ideal all things being equal.
As a PC user, Zune user, XBox owner and one-day Windows Media Center user I’d choose WMA-L too, but some people may never be interested in getting a PMP or firmly in the Apple camp and therefore might choose something else. Saying it’s irrelevant because they are all lossless misses the point.
While you are not wrong, FLAC is so common there’s no real issue with, nor for WavPack either.
Here is a site that lists “front ends.” They are all free and excellent.
What a front end is a GUI (graphical user interface), that will allow you to use a command line and put it into an easy to use form to convert WAV to other codecs.
Another thing you’re going to want is MP3-Tag. This is a free program and is excellent. This will allow you to tag the songs you rip. Of course you’ll want to automatically tag them as you rip them, but if you need to change or want to add any, this tool is great and it’s free.
There are no benefits of WMA lossess over FLAC or WavPack or Ape. Lossless is lossless and they all are equal in terms of quality. The difference is the file size.
APE compresses the best, but it’s decompression time is a lot worse than the others. WavPack compressess and decompresses the best of all the popular formats. FLAC is popular due to file sharing.
True Audio (TTK) and TAK are new lossless, codecs that are better than WavPack, FLAC, WMA lossless, ALAC and others.
I found that when ripping a CD WavPack will save me from 2 to 5MB a CD. Now that is not a lot with today’s hard drive but if you have say 500 CDs it’s 2.5GB
I find when ripping to lossless the thing is any computer will support any lossless format, you need to download the correct codec to make it work.
When you have a Zune or iPod you have issues. Apple Lossless Audio Codec, ALAC will play on an iPod and WMA lossless will play on a Zune.
But here’s the thing, you probably don’t want that. Lossless takes up a huge amout of space compared to lossy. For instance, Lossless will save you 35% to 50% from the original CD, but lossy will save you about 85%.
If you’re using an iPod or Zune, you probably use headphones, which make hearing the difference that much harder.
So what I do is simply rip the CDs to WavPack and then when I need to put it on my iPod (which won’t play WavPack) simply convert those songs to aac (mp4) and put them on my iPod then delete the mp4 off my computer. Now I have an iPod full of mp4 tunes and the original in lossless on my computer.
Foobar will easily convert one format to another and it’s free
There are companies that rip CDs for you: you mail them in and they rip them and mail them back. I think I’ve seen prices quoted as $1 per CD. Not sure if they’ll do lossless ripping, but I bet some do.
True, the RIAA is really only cracking down on people who share music with other users. But as they mentioned, the bigger point is, why would you want to look for music online if you have the CD in the first place? It takes no longer to rip a CD than it does to locate a file online and download it.
My point wasn’t that the formats don’t have any advantages over one another – my point is that it doesn’t matter which you RIP to. If you decide you’d prefer a different format later, it’s pretty easy to quickly transcode from one lossless format to another.
Zune, at least, can automatically convert WMA-L files to lossy WMA on sync (and pretty quickly, too). In such a case, it’s worth keeping your archive in WMA-L.
I believe iTunes can do the same (transcode on sync) with ALAC, but I’ve never tried.
As for headphones, I find that an odd statement. It’s a lot cheaper to get high quality headphones than high quality speakers.
It’s really not that complicated. You use Itunes, set it to “Import CD and eject” and pick a format. AAC is best if you’re just using it with Itunes/Ipod. Use the largest bit rate that will fit on the Ipod and still leave some room for podcasts and some more music in the next few years. Put a CD in. When it ejects, put the next one in. That’s all. Do this while you’re reading the Dope or doing anything else on the computer.
If you’re putting it on an Ipod, you’re going to want lossy compression. If you want to also have a lossless backup of everything, then you’ll have to make it into two steps. I don’t know if there’s a very easy way to rip into lossy AND lossless in Itunes and also move the lossless where it won’t try to put it on the Ipod.
They could always rip them again if Ipods get big enough to hold 900 lossless CDs. However, I think that by the time that happens, they’ll be better off switching to a 128GB solid-state Ipod which will surely be available then, instead of carrying around a terabyte hard-drive Ipod which will be more fragile.