Vinyl, CD's and Digital Files Accumulated Over A Lifetime

I've all my downloads copied onto USB which goes in the cars. Helps rack up some hours of listening time. 

That's why I enjoy making a playlist of a few thousand of my favorite songs and then letting them run through on 'shuffle' - that way I'll hear things I never would have gotten around to otherwise. Obviously I still won't be able to hear everything, but I like the randomness of it...

Yes, burning CDs to a server can be a daunting task, particularly editing metadata that is wrong or not found by whatever service you use for the task.  I have a lot of classical CDs and many have no automatically populating data about the CD; it is no fun filling in 30 different tracks on an opera CD in a foreign language.  When I got my first server, I had about 3,000 CDs to load.  This took about a month of evenings.  I now have about 5,000.  You can bet I have a number of back up hard drives because I am not loading this many CDs manually again.

I have far too much physical media, both cd's and vinyl. I was culling the cd collection a few years ago, too daunting a task to organize everything, and don't have the time. Perhaps when I retire, whenever that is, no intentions of ever retiring, love my job too much.

I got about 1000 LPs and 1500 CDs.  Going to be a chore burning all the CDs to my server and cleaning all my LPs with the new model Degritter coming out soon.

3000 CD's, 800 SACD's, 12,000 records, 250 master dub RTR albums (most 2 reel).

18tb of music files; (50% 16/44, 50% higher rez).

streaming with 'infinity' amount of files.....

still adding vinyl and files. but not more silver discs. i don't think about music i might not listen to again. not yet at that point of down-sizing. not sure i'll ever get there. it might be my kids problem.

Well, just on case I'm not around to celebrate with you, early congratulations on your 592nd birthday. 

I keep my CDs—this means I keep the art, notes, libretti, etc.—but it is certainly the case that it is FAR easier to browse the digital files of the CDs than the CD’s themselves.  I can browse by genre, by artist, composers, etc.; I can quickly sample recordings, I can find other related recordings much more easily than squinting at the spines of my 5,000 CDs.

I will never give up my CDs LPs DVDs, etc. Some of my CDs are from the early 80s and still play perfectly. How many hard drives do you own that lasted 40 years, or even 10 years? Hard drives are not archival. HDs crash, and sometimes we don’t back things up properly. Also personally when I have all my music tucked away on hard drives I stopped listening to it. Out of sight out of mind. Seeing all my CDs lined up on my bookshelf draws me in and I get excited about putting an album on, looking at the cover art, reading the liner notes. The ritual of putting the disc in the CD changer or the vinyl on the turntable just adds to the pleasure of listening to music, not pushing a mouse button.

But hey if anyone is trying to unload their CDs drop me a line.

@larryi, either your math skills aren't to the par or reading skills.

It's actually 500 media sources (LP/CD) + everything else on 8TB.

“8 TB for 500 albums?”

@larryi

The 500 is the number for my ‘elite’ physical media that is in addition to what’s on my 8TB’s SSD. The bulk of SSD drives holds SACD’s rips, DSD downloads and 1000+ CD rips. I didn’t ripped everything collected over the years, if it didn’t sound good; it was tossed over to Goodwill.

And I buy on average 8-10 DSD downloads each month which eats up lots of storage :-)

I don’t think the 8TB is full. It’s just the total space @lalitk has. I do own some DSD albums that are about 2-4GB each.

I’ve gone the same route where I went from 600 to 400 vinyl about six months ago. Luckily I’ve kept my digital library well organized and am selective about the quality of the music and the quality of the file, probably at 1000 albums or less. The usability of a network player’s search and browse functions become very important in delivering a frictionless experience. 

8 TB for 500 albums?  I have not filled 8 TB for 5,000 cds ripped to WAV files.  I know someone who went through his record collection in order to pare it down to the "essential" 15,000.

I am not a hoarder (no pun intended) so I have downsized my Vinyl and CD collection to under 500. Everything else is now digitized and neatly stored in a 8 TB’s of SSD storage. They get more playing time now than ever in physical form. Couldn’t be any happier with lots of extra space and quick accessibility to my favorite albums.

Just enjoy music regardless of how and where it’s stored!

Yes. I gave up and am getting rid of my CDs. Keeping my vinyl (2,000)… I should be able to do that… now, streaming that is a problem.