Independent Leyton Orient Forum

Dizzying amounts of info on this out there, so I thought I’d reach out on a lower divisions football club message board - what better place etc etc?

I’m looking to rip a large-ish (700) cd collection to FLAC, then likely store on an external drive to go into a network streamer via likely a USB.

My laptop is very old and likely not long for this world so I want to get the data onto a drive.

Anyone got any experience of this please?

Is there any audio based benefit to doing this- I have a decent cd player- I just want the convenience, and to be able to store the cds in the shed or similar.
I’ve been using Spotify via Ethernet into the streamer and a lot of the output sounds very compressed. Of course, Tidal is better but I have lots of stuff on cd that doesn’t exist on either of these platforms anyway..

Is it better to grab an HDD or SSD, or is there little difference?

Thanks for any info.
Up The O’s

I think this would take you a long time.

You'd need a big drive, maybe more than one. For this reason it'd be much cheaper to go with a HDD. SSD would be faster and more reliable but speed not really a requirement in this case.

I will bet the cost of sending it off to be done that in a blind test you can't tell the difference between flac file and 320 kbs mp3. You can even pick the music.

If the average song is say 15mb in flac, and you have 700cds with an average of 14 songs per cd, you'd need an ssd of at least 150gb. The biggest problem you'll have is that It'll take about 15mins per cd to rip to flac, so you're looking at 175 hours to do all cds. Personally I'd go SSD over HDD. Prices are good, spin up time is much better, and they last longer. Copying the whole lot to SSD would only take a few minutes after the conversion.

It’ll be far, far easier to just torrent everything you want, MM is right about quality, but if you care enough you’ll find high quality files too.

Adz wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2024 8:36 am If the average song is say 15mb in flac, and you have 700cds with an average of 14 songs per cd, you'd need an ssd of at least 150gb. The biggest problem you'll have is that It'll take about 15mins per cd to rip to flac, so you're looking at 175 hours to do all cds. Personally I'd go SSD over HDD. Prices are good, spin up time is much better, and they last longer. Copying the whole lot to SSD would only take a few minutes after the conversion.

Is that all? I couldnt be bothered to do the math.

In that case you may as well get an SSD.

Its still going to take you an age though.

Have you tried asking the question through Google. In my experience, you'll find companies via that route who can do what you want done.

Thank you all for the insight/experience.

Exactly what I was hoping for so I’m most grateful.
Leads me to realise just how far behind the times I am.!

I didn’t understand a single word you said, trust me, you are not behind the times.