RFC - Archiving Music CDs for Backup Purposes

[Steve]

On Sat, 12 Dec 2009 12:01:25 -0000, Joep L. Blom <jlblom at neuroweave.nl>  
wrote:

> Justin Gruenberg wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 1:38 AM, Amichai Rotman <amichai at iglu.org.il>  
>> wrote:
>>> My questions:
>>>
>>> 1. Is it the right way to go?
>>> 2. Will I be able to "play" the CD in Amarok (or any other audio  
>>> player, for
>>> that matter)?
>>> 3. If this isn't the right idea - can you give me some others?
>>>
>>> My main goal is to store them in digital format that is easy to manage  
>>> and
>>> reproduce in case the original CD gets unusable. Disk space is also an
>>> issue. My original idea was to convert them all to FLAC format - but  
>>> that's
>>> about 250 MB per CD...
>>
>> You aren't going to have any space savings over FLAC if you're making
>> exact bit-for-bit copies of the CDs, although you would be able to
>> mount them and play them in any application that plays cd audio.  Each
>> CD will be as big as 700mb (so you're wasting a lot of space).
>>
>> Honestly, I'd just rip to mp3 unless you're a serious audiophile.
>> You have the benefit of adding metadata to all the files, making it
>> easier to find music instantly.  mp3 plays on just about any device.
>> If the lossless bit is really important to you, go for flac... enough
>> hard drive for your 100 cds is pretty inexpensive now.
>>
> You don't need to be an audiophile to not use mp3 as serious backup for
> CD's. It depends on the sort of music you want to backup. NEVER use it
> for classical music and jazz. I have no experience with other kinds of
> music.
> Joep (musician)
>
>
A true audiophile would never listen to digitised music anyway:-)

Just rip the CDs to ogg, flac, mp3, whatever, listen to them and carefully  
store the CDs away.  If a CD, or any other original media, gets damaged  
beyond use you have to replace it anyway. Do  you backup books.

-- 
Steve