Going digital at last - my plan is...

[sosidge]

So, almost a decade late, I'm pondering switching over to a digital music player.

I have lots of physical media on minidisc, vinyl and even a couple of tapes.

Because of house moves and small children there is no way I can play vinyl so I'm probably going to say goodbye to the seperates system. Can still play CD's.

Before I do I plan to...

1. Record my favourite music to a high quality digital file. Plan is to get a cable to connect my amps tape loops to the line in on my laptop, then use software like Audacity to save it to the hard drive.

2. Use a fairly simple Mp3/media player to carry a selection of my library around with me. Drawn to the Sansa Fuze and Sony S638 in my price range. Looking for good sound quality first and foremost and easy file transfer.

3. Get an external hard drive to keep at home for backing up my music library once the originals are gone. Intrigued by the ClickFree system or may go down the conventional drive/software route.

Does this sound like a sensible approach?

[pushpull]

If you are going to convert your analog to digital you should put it into flac format as that is considered archival. You can use dbpoweramp to convert it to another format for your digital player depending on what codecs they support and their capacity. For organizing your collection I would recommend mediamonkey. The standard version is free. There is also VLC media player as well as others out there. I have all my cds ripped to a computer that is attached to my home stereo system. I can control it from any computer on my network and it will even mute when the phone rings. I get listen to my radio stations over the internet on this computer as well. As far as the players you mentioned I cannot advise you on these. I am a Cowon user so I am biased that way anyhow. They meet my needs, yours may be different.

[dfkt]

I record my Vinyl to 24bit/96kHz via an Echo AudioFire4 sound card from a Pro-Ject 1.5 turntable with Goldring Elan cartridge. Remove clicks/crackle/pop/50Hz-hum with Waves VST plugins in Sound Forge, and store them in FLAC. Then I convert them to whatever I just need (at the moment LAME 3.98.2 -v 0). Just the way I do it, FYI...

[pcman]

hmm.. dfkt your music is lame.

[Nicole]

I agree that if you are ripping fresh, go with FLAC and then downsample to MP3. Be forewarned that if your collection is large, you will need a lot of digital storage space. Then double it -- so you can store a copy offsite.

The only problem I see with your approach is that your laptop probably has a crappy sound card. If you have a relatively new receiver that supports digital, it may have a much better analog to digital converter built in. Once it goes to MP3 there's no chance you'll hear the difference, but if you are archiving to FLAC it makes sense to get the best sound you can the first time around.

[bassbinotoko]

Anything I digitize I also burn to DVD-R for backup, with two copies, preferably on different brands of media. No hard drive lives forever. I don't have a good system for organizing stuff, though, but a good start would be a couple of well-cooled and mirrored 500gig or 1 TB drives.

Consider the ADSTech "Instant Music"; it uses the same chip as some "high end" USB audio interfaces, and is only about $60. As well as line level input and output, it does S/PDIF (optical), which may allow you to connect your Minidisc for direct digital captures. That S/PDIF link may also allow you to use the Minidisc deck as an outboard ADC, which would give you analog gain control and level monitoring. (For my analog captures, I use a Behringer SRC2496 as an outboard ADC, and capture either with the "Instant Music" for portable work, or to an Audigy 2 ZS at home (set to bit-accurate mode).

Use the latest "beta" version of Audacity, because it supports timed recording - this means you don't have to wait around to click "stop". Maybe that's not such a big deal when grabbing a 22 minute LP side, but on a 74 minute MiniDisc or 6 hour VHS HiFi recording it is very useful.

[Nicole]

"Burned" optical media has a very short life expectancy. I agree it makes a good backup, but you need to check your backups periodically and not assume they are as long-lived as pressed optical media, like a commercial music CD.

Personally, I use cummulative DVD backups -- basically I never throw them out and periodically I burn a whole new set. Roughly bi-annually. This, in addition to the hard drive backup and the flash backups, which are kept up to date. Music is also burned to audio CD as it comes in.

I am thinking about purchasing a high capacity array in order to make FLAC backups of my purchased CDs. I'm still kinda noodling with the idea. I have everything in multiple MP3 copies, but...

I didn't think any of the portable MiniDisc players ever came with a digital output? I know the component players and studio versions did, but if memory serves, I think Sony got all RIAA on their customers. Even the NetMD that had a mike input didn't have an digital output.

[sosidge]

Thanks a lot for the feedback so far, it has thrown up some very useful software/hardware ideas.

I realise that the sound card on my laptop is probably going to limit sound quality, I do have an old desktop on 98SE with a decent early-2000's Sound Blaster card (although that also only has 3.5mm line in), however I dont think that will be a great solution either due to likely software compatability problems.

To be honest I don't take a particular "audiophile" approach to my music, so I'll just have to see what the line-in recordings sound like first.

For minidisc I do have a seperates deck with optical digital out, so that helps. My amp is not digital.

Will definitely be going for backed-up FLAC masters though, which suggests buying the Sansa Fuze as it supports this format.

[The DarkSide]

If your going to use FLAC as your main codec, might I suggest either the Cowon D2, or the newer Cowon S9. Both players have amazing sound quality, besting the Sansa line, as well as spectacular battery life to boot!!!

And, even though it's a bit late, welcome to ABI>>>!!! Enjoy a long and crazy ride!!!

[jbc]

Excellent plans. Two things first: 1) I know nothing about the sony so I will not speak to it, but the fuze is an excellent player for what you have planned; 2) I know more about the storage mechanisms that you intend to use then the recording formats that you are considering using.

External hard drive is probably the best thing for you when you convert the vinal and tapes to digital formats. I would recommend that you buy the largest hard drive that you can stand and/or afford. Thirty years of the PC business has taught me that PCs tend to space hogs and that one should always have the largest hard disk on hand that one can afford to buy. Right now with hard drive prices per gigabyte falling like a fat woman standing on the top of a tall sky scraper after binge drinking there is no reason to put off buying a one terabyte drive and if you have a large audio library as i suspect that you do you will need it.

You should also get a backup software package for the entire PC. Install the backup software before you start converting the audio library and make sure that the software specifically sees the external hard drive that you installed, wouldn't want to have a PC troubble and loose the entire digial library. Then you go convert the audio library and put it on the external hard drive. I would also recommend that you consult with the folks over at tech-forums.net/pc on which brand of external hard drive to buy, they know way more than I on this matter and is where I get my opinions from.

Also from the looks of things it looks like you could use some indexing software to index the audiofiles that you store on that hard drive. At the moment I do not know of any software in this area but will write in again once I research the matter a little bit.

[jbc]

Found it voidtools.com should be able to help you with the audio library. This is a free software that will go out into the new external drive and index the entire library no matter how it is organized and present an index of the entire thing so that you can find what ever you need. Indexes are essential for those that have large audio libraries and will not otherwise be able to find the audio files that you need. Mine is very small by comparison, 2gb, so I can use the windows folder structure to help do that, but for those that have larger libraries this is not practical so this is where voidtool's product called Everything comes in creating the index so you do not have to go searching for things.