I’m moving in with my SO in a couple months and I’ve frankly got too much crap. A big piece of the crap pile is my OCD music collection and I need some advice on how to archive it before I toss it all into storage. There are two parts to it, the CDs and the sheet music.
The CDs take up 34 books that hold 220 CDs a piece. They’re filling up a big part of a bookcase (I ditched the jewel cases on 'em years ago). My computer has .5 TB of storage on it and it’s 3/4ths full with music as well. So I’ve been organizing them alphabetically and ripping the CDs and just finished with artists that begin with the letter “A” this weekend. They’re taking up 30.4GBs of space alone, so this is going to be a rather big project. My thought is to burn the MP3s (yes other formats would be better, but I’m OK with it) to high quality DVDs. I’m using Nero to burn and I’m thinking of using Taiyo Yuden DVD+Rs for storage, good idea?
Now, my sheet music. I’ve got about 1300 books that are taking up two bookshelves. I bought an A4 Scanner as the pages are 9"x12" but I haven’t figured out a quick/easy/good way to convert these individual images into one .pdf. Ideas?
And yes, my time could be spent doing much better things.
I think your CD ripping plan is pretty good, but if just the A’s is 30 GB, I’d forget about DVDs. I’d get two terabyte hard drives. Maybe one internal and one external for backup.
As far as combining images into PDF files, do you need OCR or not? If you’re wanting to buy an OCR program, the best I’ve found is ABBYY. It will scan images or combine them into text/images/PDF files. Otherwise you can find free programs to combine images into a PDF file. I don’t recall what I used off the top of my head, but I can find it at work.