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Music Media

High Density CD-Audio Solutions? 57

Posted by michael from the record-industry-loves-you dept.
Deagol writes "Like many of you, I've got a fairly good-sized music CD collection. I'm having a problem with managing the sheer number of CD's (about 350, which I know isn't a lot by some standards). My current setup consists of a Pioneer 6-CD changer CD player and 50 of the cartridges, each numbered, and a tome affectionately known as the "List O' Music" which is a 3-ring binder listing the contents of these 50 cartridges. Not horribly efficient, but the best I could manage when I started. I've recently began cloning my CDs, and using my burned copies for every-day use and keeping the rest in storage -- this came about after having to use paranoia to recover some child-scratched CDs. Along the way, I decided that the 6-CD cartridge thing isn't satisfactory anymore. I've thought about those 200-CD changers and maybe having a couple, and I've also thought about the MP3-type stereo components, though sound quality matters (I use flac for my CD archiving). For those of you with 100's to 1000's of CDs, how do you store and index them, either on the shelf or in the player?" Most of the questions like this involve managing large quantities of mp3's rather than disks.
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High Density CD-Audio Solutions? More

High Density CD-Audio Solutions?

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  • Managing CDs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by renehollan ( 138013 ) <[rhollan] [at] [clearwire.net]> on Thursday March 28, 2002 @04:49AM (#3239739) Homepage Journal
    Storage of the physical media isn't too much of a problem: there are rather dense shelving arrangements available. The real problem, IMHO, is online access and indexing.

    I would suggest getting rid of any jukebox style approach: they require you to commit your storage of your precious media to them, and can be somewhat rough in handling. Instead, consider ripping them (uncompressed, if you're a purist, to a hard disk). 100 Gb drives are reasonably priced, and will store about 120 CDs, uncompressed. I'm told that the lossless compression shorten (.shn) format is half decent, compression-wise, and will give you a bit more space.

    As for indexing, I tend to use an Artist/Album/track scheme, with permutations of symlink trees thus: Artists/Artist/Album/track, Albums/Album/Artist/track, Genre/Artist/Album/track, etc.

  • My management solution.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Patman ( 32745 ) <pmgeahan-slashdot AT thepatcave DOT org> on Thursday March 28, 2002 @05:10AM (#3239834) Homepage
    ...is twofold.

    Number one: CD changer, enough to hold ALL of my CD's. Sony's 400-disc changer would be enough to hold your current collection with some room for growth.

    Number two: Turtle Beach's Audiotron MP3 player. No onboard storage, it pulls directly from your SMB-enabled shares. Very cool piece of tech.

    These are linked together with a MySQL database. This database holds the information on all 130 of my CCD's, and all 1200 of my MP3's. A simple web interface allows me to search by title, artist, etc. Thanks to the Audiotron's API, a hit on an MP3 in my database can be immediately played via the AT. With this, I can search for a song, find it on CD or MP3, and get a list of exactly where in my carousel or where on my server I can find it.

    If you're really interested, I can let you have the scripts. They're pretty basic.
    • Sony's 400-disc changer would be enough to hold your current collection with some room for growth.

      Sony's system also daisychains so when you have two hooked up, the numbers just go to 800. That's my currect CD setup (well, I'm currently packed to move, but that's what I normally use). However, they are a pain to use, plus I've got hundreds of CDs outside the changers. I'm looking at getting a RAID of a few large capacity drives, and making high quality MP3s of every disc. That will allow me much more flexibility. I've already experimented with directories and how to handle autogeneration of thematic playlists, and I think I've got some good solutions - i.e., I decided *not* to use discs at all. 256k is pretty close to CD, anyway, and if I really want to, I'll have all my CDs in binders, alphabatized (I've long since gotten rid of the jewel cases, and gone to binders with the CD and cover).

      --
      Evan

  • Store them on shelves, not in a changer (Score:4, Informative)

    by Cuthalion ( 65550 ) on Thursday March 28, 2002 @05:15AM (#3239858) Homepage
    I have over 800 cds (811 [ducker.org] at the time of this posting). I use a 1 disc player in my office, a 1 disc player in my bedroom (plus another cd player in my alarm clock!), and a 5 disc changer downstairs in the living room, and a 1 disc player (well apex dvd player) in the kitchen. I do NOT use a 200 disc changer, because I hate them. I hate them because unless you actually want to store your music in them and never remove them, they're a huge pain in the ass. If you have more than 200 cds, they're not a viable option (you could get multiple changes are use S-Link or something to connect them, but $$$). If you have more than one listening location, they're not a viable option (centralized audio is not a solution in a house with roommates). If you listen in your car cd player, if you bring them into the office, if you like the liner notes & packaging, ...

    For actual storage, I use shelves. Boltz [boltz.com] makes some truly great cd racks [boltz.com] that hold about 600 jewel cases. Run out of room? You can expand it to 1200, though it takes up a fair amount of wall space in this configuration.

    I have several pieces of furniture by these guys, and they're great. Sturdy, attractive, and their customer relations policies can't be beat - They've actually changed their product line because of someone I know's feedback. Their prices INCLUDE shipping and tax. And so on. They're not dirt cheap or anything, but they're worth more than what they cost. I don't work for them or anything, but they get the highest recommendation I have.

    If you really are strapped for space, you could use those caselogic books, but they're a big pain if you want to keep your music sorted (with shelves with a little extra room, insertion is basically O(1) rather than O(n) ).
    • I just picked up some CD shelving from Media Play last weekend that stores 532 CDs and cost me twenty dollars. But if you feel like paying that much, feel free to send me the extra money instead . . .
    • I have about 300 CD's and, for the longest time, I completely agreed with you about CD changers. They never helped with multiple locations, and unless you can store all of your CDs in one at one time, they are a waste. No one is ever goign to sit down and replace all 200 CD's in a changer.

      With CD buners and larger changers, though, the choice is starting to come back. I know that a lot of my CD's will never be played in my car or in my bedroom. Ones that I will listen to in multiple places you can either burn or rip to an MP3 player.

      That said, I am still using single CD players in multiple places. I would like to get a 5 disk changer for my main listening environment (currently making due with a DVD player), but having single players is definitely still the way to go.

      Now VHS and DVD's are a complete other story. I have about 125 VHS tapes, about 30 DVD's (and climbing weekly), and about 20 Laserdisk. All of those are a pain to store for easy retreival since they take up so much room.

    • Bantha poodoo. Get some of these 3 ring notebook pages [casedirect.com], and use a bookshelf. Much prettier and denser than storing in those stupid jewel cases. I've got about 800 CDs currently housed in 3 or 4 feet of shelf space. The 3ring solution is cheaper, too.
      • That's awesome - I've looked for a long time for reasonably-priced binder pages. Thanks!

        Still, though, even these aren't really all that cheap. Ballpark $500 for 2000 decent-quality blank CDs and $100 for binders, and that's $900 for 1.4 TB of storage. Not bad, but with 120gig hard drives going for $160 and all the "just-around-the-corner" massive mass storage devices they keep promising, I hope something better comes along soon. A 3-ft shelf of CD binders just reminds me of a wall of cassette tapes... soon to be obsolete and, if you move a lot, just one more PITA.

        Where's my $50 terabyte storage card, dammit?!?
        • Note that I said cheap-ER. I hear you, but the other problem is that something's going to come along and replace mp3 (or ogg, or whatever), so you're probably going to have to go back to the source material anyway.

          Another thing to check out is whether you can get them in 25-packs from a retail outlet. It'll be a little pricier, but they were $15 @ BestBuy here in Austin, TX, and $15 every couple of weeks as you gradually migrate is a LOT easier to swallow than $300 all at once.

  • ¼ terabit music jukebox (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Thursday March 28, 2002 @07:54AM (#3240233) Homepage Journal
    the drive space required to hold 350 cds uncompressed cost about $400. Add another $200 for a ATA 100 controller card and a 5.1 soundcard with spdif outputs. Be the first kid on your block with a ¼ terabit music jukebox. I'm assuming you have a rack system with spdif in. Otherwise tack on another $300-$400 for THX certified 250 watt speakers. Still, $1000 beats burning copies on cdr to stick in two 200 disk changers, still without a decent interface to search and find specific songs and compile playlists by point and click.
    • 3jane:/shn 291891992 146780768 121759872 55% /store/shn
      3jane:/mp3 116358328 64690856 42358808 60% /mp3

      The first one is RAID 5, the second is crappy vinum-based RAID 0. The important stuff is all compressed losslessly with Shorten (SHN). The other stuff is MP3, encoded at 256+ Kbit/second. Everything gets played on another machine (Ultra 30) connected to my DJ system and a high-quality headphone amp (with either a pair of Senn 580s or a pair of ER-4Ss [etymotic.com].

      The only suggestion I have is to buy a real IDE RAID card [3ware.com] and don't toss all your data on a single, non-mirrored disk. Also, make backups every once in a while.

      - A.P.

  • I've heard this question from *loads* of folks... and my answer is always the same. Just get a DVD player with MP3 play capability! You can get great units for both in-dash car operation and/or home audio use
    Here's some links:

    Samsung Player [futurelooks.com]
    Apex Player ($70!!!) [circuitcity.com]

    Have a good day!

    • There's a thought. Does the Apex support DVD-R?

      • Very good point... the unit would have to support DVD-R in order to be truly useful. Pioneer appears to have a nice unit that does CD-R/CD-RW, DVD-R/DVD-RW here: Pioneer DVR-A03 [pioneerelectronics.com].

        Checking around a bit, it would appear that this model retails for around $399 USD. Not a bad price to pay, really.

        Now, I'd probably go for that plus the $70 drive (playback/retrieval only) for a complete solution. Tack on a MySQL database and a couple of perl scripts (maybe even over a local web server) to control the playback operations, and you're set! :)

  • Hard Drives are cheep!!!

    You can then listen to all of your music, make playlists, play by artist, genre, album. The 200 disk changers don't give you easy access to your music by anything other than album.

    If sound quality is important you can do really high bitrate mp3s or even wav files. It has optical output so the nice dac in your reciever can do the converion not some crappy soundcard.

    Plus the best customer service I have ever seen with any product.

    Don't work for em, just own one and like it!!
    • Oh the best part is that if you have two you can listen to the same cd in two rooms of your house without moving it.

      If it only had syncro playback it would be perfect.
    • Assuming 1:2 compression with flac, each CD is going to be 325 megabytes. Multiply that by 400 CDs, you get 130 gigabytes. So the question becomes, what's more expensive; a decent 400 CD changer, or a decent 130 or so gigabyte hard drive?

      • Re:Get an AudioTron (Score:2, Interesting)

        by cs668 ( 89484 )
        It's not only about expense. The changers I have seen don't give you the same flexibility.

        All my music has the id3 tags set thanks to freecddb. That lets me access and play my music in a way that no CD changer can. Plus I have one in my family room and one in the basement, which gives me access to my music simultaniously in both places( something a CD changer can not do ).

        Third I don't actully use my CDs. They are in a box packed up so that they don't get wrecked by the kids.

        The final benifit is that in their last firmware release they added a network API to control it. I wrapped it with a Java wrapper and can now make the AudioTron do things that the designers had not even anticipated.

        I hate keep going on and on about it, but a cd changer can't touch it.

  • 350 CD's? (Score:3, Informative)

    by torinth ( 216077 ) on Thursday March 28, 2002 @09:54AM (#3240594) Homepage
    With 350 CD's your a prime candidate for Sony's 400 CD changer. They have a couple models and they all work like a charm. They're also outfitted with Sony's S-Link technology which allows you to chain the units seamlessly when you get your 51st new CD. There's also a gadget out there called the S-link-e (Slinky, get it?) or some such that you can find out there on the internet. It uses S-Link, IR, and a PC interface to automate as much of your AV devices as you want, and it only costs about $50. My friend hooked it up to an old laptop he got for $100 bucks from Ebay, and has his whole music collection catalog with a great interface for building and running playlists and what not.

    -Andrew
    • I agree that it's a pretty sweet setup, but I don't think he uses it quite so much anymore. Which is probably a good thing, since in his (relatively) new place, his living room is so small that the laptop is about as far away from the couch as the CD changer is.

  • Changers (Score:3, Informative)

    by erasmus_ ( 119185 ) on Thursday March 28, 2002 @10:02AM (#3240646)
    I never understood anyone who would want to keep their entire music collection in a cd-changer. As someone with hundreds of cds, I can say that I love my 200 cd changer, but only because it allows me to load twenty or so cds at a time and to have continuous music play as I'm working at home or studying. 3-cd changers run out too fast and require constant tending to, and also make it impractical to listen to singles, which may have some great b-side tracks.

    As for the organization, I recently invested in some oustanding free-standing shelves, initially getting 2 and then quickly realizing I'm going to need a 3rd very fast. They were only about $25 online, and I'm very happy with them, though my memory fails me at the moment. When I get home, and if I remember, I'll try to post the brand or even a link to these shelves. Regardless, after a few hours of alphabetizing, I was able to get rid of all my old plastic single-insert storage, and now have shelves that allow for easy insertion of new titles. I'm very happy with my current arrangement, and would choose it over any cd-changer-loading, cross-linking, or database-catalog solution.
    • Of course if I just searched for a minute more, I would've found it. They're LaserLine brand, and I'm not going to provide any vendor link, b/c you can easily find them through Google, but the model number is "MMW250DSS." Here is the link to LaserLine's site [meadweb.com] - it's the first rack they list.
  • Having finally gotten control over my ever-burgeoning CD collection, I can offer a few humble suggestions:

    As far as the actual jewel cases/booklets themselves there are many ways you can go, depending on your lifestyle and the size of your wallet. For a few years I was quite content to store my CD's in a combination of shoeboxes and the cheap CD racks you can find for $10 at the CD store. Which works fine up to a point, although it makes organization difficult and it isn't exactly attractive. So, unless you're living in a dorm or your parents' basement you're probably looking for something a little nicer. I recently made the purchase of one of these [stacksandstacks.com], which also comes in smaller sizes as well, although I found the large version nice as I can also store my cassette's and DVD's in it as well. In addition it's very attractive and doesn't look out of place in my den.

    I store my CD's in alphabetical order by artist, then by album name. It takes some patience initially to get everything in order but it's a lifesaver once you're finished. I also find that using a program such as Music Collector [collectorz.com] helps keep things organized.

    Finally, as far as playing the CD's goes, I like the big jukeboxes such as Sony's CDP-CX450 which holds 400 CD's and can be daisychained with another for a total capacity of 800 CD's. As with anything there are advantages and disadvantages to the jukebox system, but it works well for me. YMMV.

  • For storing CDs - mediazone [amazon.com] cases. Very slim. I hold over 400 CDs in the shelves of my regular-sized (for a 27" TV) entertainment center.

    For flexible listening solution - rip with EAC [exactaudiocopy.de] and encode with LAME [sourceforge.net] at 192 or 256 vbr. Unless you spent over, say, 20 grand on your stereo, you simply will be unable to hear the difference. Store them on a modest 30-40 GB hard drive and access them via Netjuke [sourceforge.net], sending digital outputs of your sound card to your receiver.
  • I think your simplist move would be to archive them on a PC. There are plenty of choices for lossless compressors out there, and they all result in a reduction of 40-50%. As another comment mentions, drives are cheap. Back of the envelope math says your entire collection should fit in just over 200gig's.

    As for playback, get either a very high quality playback card (midiman, hoontech), or use digital output to a reciever with digital input. Use a video card with tv out and a wireless keyboard with built in pointing device to control it. I believe there's software out there for automagickly grabbing the cd/song titles from cddb or freedb and providing indexing capability for easy playback.

    It's perhaps not the cheapest solution, and doesn't have quite the appeal of a consumerized all in one device. But then again, someone with 350 cd's obviously has some disposable income and is pretty agressive about enjoying music on their terms.
  • my CD collection is approaching 500 now and I've found that the easist way to deal with them is to get (cds/264) case logic [caselogic.com] cd "wallets". (there more like binders). and then pick up a smaller one for the cds you listen to on a daily basis.
  • 120GB WD Hard Drive

    $140

    WinAmp

    Free

    Not having to dig through CD's again?

    Priceless
  • I keep my collection of over 700 roughly alphabetized in a dresser from Ikea. As long as they get put back I'm OK.

    For playback I use RioCar/Empeg players (they were recently blown out for $199/10G units) and provide excellent sound. Ebay is where you'll find them now... or The Empeg BBS [comms.net]
  • I got a much of packs of the caselogic pages that hold 8 cd's (w/o inserts) on a page. Picked up 6 5" binders and migrated 1300+ cd's there.

    Since I have players in the cars, various rooms, and at work a big changer is not a real option.

    I keep all of the inserts in a few floppy disk holders, so I can reference them whenever I want.

    Now I am starting ripping all of them, and am hunting for good indexing software that will let me manage them by the CD, track, playlist, and mp3 archive cd for things like artist, composer (for classical), song title, classification (allowing for multiple), etc.

    Anyone seen anything that does that reasonably well. I am thinking a mySQL database, but ideas on schemas and naming criteria are the fun part :-)

  • sell out (Score:1)

    by dru ( 4742 )
    why not sell some? less is more: you don't need to listen to Britney Spears more than once.
  • First off, my 300-disc Sony changer has been well worth the money. I only wish it had a serial interface so I could easily command it by computer. Many have complained about the poor interface, but a couple hours of work was enough to put together a Postgres database and an HTTP servlet interface. YMMV based on programming experience ;-).

    Once all my CDs were stored centrally, I really just wanted to put the cases out of the way, but keep them easily accessible. I found the wonderful storage boxes at Bags Unlimited [bagsunlimited.com]. I purchased a couple of the plastic 100-CD boxes and alphabetized my CDs into them. Now they're nice and organized. I never have trouble finding the liner I want in a minute or two, and they don't take up much space.

  • This comment is late, so probably won't get seen. I was just going through this last weekend. (My son finally got ig enough to start pulling them off of the IKEA shelves in the living room.) So, I finally bit the bullet and bought a Sony 400 CD changer to store a good chunk of my collection of ~650 CDs. (Probably soon he'll be reaching for the buttons on that.) I pulled out the largest set of discs that both my wide and I enjoy and stored them in the changer. The rest I grouped in categories and stored in CaseLogic 92 CD binders with the front jewel case inserts i.e a maximum of 46 CDs per case (I find any of the double wide binders, like the 264 too unwieldly, but still use of for my data CDs). Looking on USENET for solutions I found numerous mentions of sratching on CDs stores in CaseLogic binders/sleeves and it does kind of make sense since there is no protection in these sleeves where the cutout is, and CDs will sit back to back in the case. Probably OK if you just keep it on a shelf... Anyhow, I found mentions of DiscSox [discsox.com] and Jewelsleeves [jewelsleeve.com]. These both seem to have better protection for the discs front and back, as well as being able to store the front and back jewel box inserts. I ordered some samples of each. I haven't seen either of these mentioned in eralier posts. I'm also looking ath teh Jukebox sleeves from discsox to store the jewle box art in a much smaller area than required by jewel boxes... Ultimately I think I will slowly archive my collection over to DVD+RWs using EAC and FLAC, just to have a backup... I know some older CDs seem to skip in the car. :-( Anyhow, it also sounds like Sony will soon have a 400 disc MP3 and CDR/CDRW compatible changer. This sounds REALLY cool! http://www.videodirect.com/sony/cdplayers/cdpcx455 .html [videodirect.com] Too bad I couldn't wait. No information on it direct from Sony though... Balam
    • "the largest set of discs that both my wide and I enjoy "

      love the freudian slips....
      • OK. So I can't type, or remember to use HTML tags. What's even more amusing about the original slip is that, between the two of us, I'm the wide one...

        On the original topic, and for the record. I received my sample DiscSox and JewelSleeves. Here's a quick comaprison. They are very similar in size and overall appearance, but have enough minor differences that may matter to some...

        DiscSox Pros: The plastic over the front/back jewel case inserts is a bit clearer. The opening are along the longer ends of the sleeves with partial cutouts on one corner for easy removal of the CD and booklet.

        Jewelsleeve Pros: For single CD storage, both sides of the CD are in contact only with soft Tyvek like material (cf. only one side for the DiscSox).

        So, I would tend to think that for archiving discs that have been ripped the JewelSleeves might be better. However, for a collection that is regularly used, the DiscSox might cause less aggravation.

        Balam

  • I'm an avid music collector with over 1200 CD's (and growing!). For a long time, I kept them organized alphabetically, in binders, without the jewelcases - and used a 6 disc changer for playback. Even with careful alphabetizing, the addition of new discs (and the corresponding binder shuffle) was a real PITA, and finding a particular disc was cumbersome and slow. I purchased an Audiotron (http://www.audiotron.net/audiotron/producthome.as p) almost a year ago - and I can't tell you how much it has improved my enjoyment of my music collection.

    Several key points:
    1) I can find, access and play any song in my collection in less than 10 seconds, from my couch, with a remote;
    2) I can easily (3 button presses) create a playlist by genre, artist, album, or any combination of the above;
    3) Since the storage is external to the Audiotron, I can easily, and cheaply, expand my storage capacity;
    4) Turtlebeach has one of the *best* support mailinglists, and consistantly responds to user and developer requests.

    Yes, there is the initial overhead of ripping a pre-exisiting collection; but after that point the system more or less maintains itself.

    Yes, people will complain about the quality of compressed audio - but hey, even on my Atlantic Technologies speakers, 256Kbps is fine for my casual listening, and I keep my Opera and Classical discs accessible for when I want the pristine experience.

    And before folks say 'but you could just build a cheap box and put it next to your stereo' - yes you could, but the Audiotron is fanless, remote control accessible, and comes in a pretty 1U package.

    It's the best audio purchase I've made in years, and no, I don't work for Turtle beach!

    --
    stubbie
  • Store your CD's in the cases they came in. When you want to listen to one, take it out of the case and put it in the CD player. It's not hard to find the CD because you can read the title on the case.
    :)

    If sound quality matters, forget mp3 completely

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