I need to know what back up device you use.

Long story short, after weeding through everything I will have amassed about 5-6 Gigs of music (roughly 1500-2000 songs) that I have in my ITunes library. I sold off all of my equipment last summer and I am now finally getting around to taking all of my music off of wav file CDs (roughly 300 CDs I hope to retire for good and never have to pull out again).

My OEM truck stereo CD player doesn't work, and didn't play MP3s anyway. Plus, I never had a nice home audio system and Christmas is right around the corner. :santa:

Ideally, I would love to play this music in as many places as possible. So, should I get an IPod and convert it all to MP3s, and make sure my truck has and my home system are compatable Or is there a better set up? What do you guys do

 

So it sounds like you're looking for a music playing device right?

Well the quality isn't the greatest from these if you're an audiophile, but looking at an iPod isn't a half bad idea. I have an 80 gig iPod Video, I have 6632 songs (29GB), 253 Video Items, mixed movies and short clips (40.5GB), and about 400 Pictures which is around 350MB. You can use pretty much any audio codec except for FLAC and OGG, basically any lossless files besides Apple's own flavour.

My songs are an average of 192kbps, which is a decent quality. Just hook it up to a sound system and you're good to go.



To back up all my music and movies etc. I have a 500GB external hard drive from Western Digital. Works great and it's USB/Firewire compatible.

 

Wow. See, with the amount of songs I have, and more to come as time goes on, I know I'll rarely listen to all of them. So while I did DJ, I would get as much as possible. Now I'm sure I'll probably never listen to half these songs. But, I gotta have them on hand just in case I get the urge to hear something My wife and I throw a lot of summer parties.

So I think an Ipod and MP3 set up aould be the way to go. Now if I can just figure out how to do it the least conjested way. Kind of like having 1 universal remote but still needing 3 regular remotes to make everything work.

 

Just make a couple playlists, and you can start them up depending on the mood of the party or something. So you don't have to touch it the whole party.

(I would be able to play my music straight for 30 days and not hear a single song twice lol) I've listened to maybe 80% of it.

 

That's just too much music. I could never find the time to listen to all of that. I am thoroughly impressed with your collection though.

Thanks for the help.

 

Here's what I've got right now...

I have a portable 160GB hard drive and the wife has an 80GB portable hard drive. I have all my CD's plus many I've borrowed, or downloaded from here and there... all told I have around 13,000 songs. I have all 13k songs on both our hard drives, but hers is arranged so that she can easily get to all the country. I may end up taking most of the other off hers...

Well, I generally leave my hard drive here at work where I can access it with either a decent set of Sony desktop speakers, when no one else is around, or my Bluetooth headphones. and for tunes on the road we have a Kenwood CD player in the Civic with a USB input in the back (plus Sirius, if I ever get around to hooking it back up), that reads either hard drive. Generally her 80GB is in the Civic. As far as tunes in the Element (our other daily driver) I was listening to XM, but that has since expired, so now I just burn MP3 CD's to listen to in there...

The trouble now is we're thinking about trading the Civic for something new come Spring. and I'm kinda tired of messing with aftermarket headunits, etc... I want to be able to find a vehicle with a nice soundsystem, and just live with it, and I'm pretty sure every new "premium" sound system has iPod controls. So, I'm tempted to just pick up a 160GB iPod Classic, and dump my hard drive on to it (after converting it all to MP4, of course). I'm also hoping that maybe by then they'll have an iPhone with more memory...

 

I was using MP3 when it required a computer to play the songs (files). I'm from the days of WinAmp and MusicMatch. That being said, IPods scare me. They require you to use iTunes and then all your rights to your music are factored in. I've heard horror stories about people loosing their hard drive and subsequently their rights to music THEY OWN. I guess if you back up your iTunes directories, you might be ok. I'm just leary of DRM w/ an IPod.

Now, I have a Creative Zen W, the wife has a Zen Vision M. Windows Vista recognizes both devices as an external hard drive, ie no software needed to load the music. The downside to the Creative products is that they are HDD based. IPods do have an advantage there, as they are flash based.

As far as backing up my music, I have a WD 320GB external HD that is USB based.

Now, having said that, I may just be a somewhat uneducated consumer. So, I guess what I should do is tell you to do some research on Cnet or other sources, and then I should follow my own advice as well.

 

This is great info guys. I really appreciate it. This certainly gives me an idea of how I want to proceed.

 

I've always been a fan of Creative's players, and currently have a 60GB Nomad Zen Xtra. I never really needed the claimed "sexiness" of an iPod, and I hate being locked into iTunes (though I know you can get plugins for other media apps). My Zen is probably nearing the end of it's expected life, so I've been looking lately at a 160GB Archos 605. It's a bit pricey, but I think the sound quality is excellent (though no support yet for Ogg or FLAC). I currently have about 150GB of audio files and the one thing I like is the ability to have my entire catalog at my fingertips no matter where I go. If I'm at work, and I want to listen to Joe's Garage, I can. If I'm in the truck and I want to switch over to an audiobook, I can do that too.

I also keep a backup on a 300GB external HDD at home.

Good luck.

 

My apologies - posted twice.

 

The only iPods that are flashed based are the Shuffle and the Mini. All the full sized ones (iPod Videos) are HDD based as well.

If you have one, select a song then put the back of the iPod to your ear, you'll hear the clicking and spinning up of a hard drive. 80GB of flash memory would cost an enormous amount.

 

Alright, sorry to keep asking questions about this but I am have been out of the loop on Ipods in general.

All of my music is now in Itunes and I have burned a couple of DVD back ups. So everything is off of Audio CDs now. All the files are saved as MPEG4s.

I just researched the whole DRM copyright protection thing and now I'm scared. I directly imported my CDs into Itunes.

My wife tried to put a song on her MP3 player and the DRM copyright wouldn't allow it. So, if I get an Ipod, will I be able to play these protected tracks? Is there anyway around this for my wife...

 

I'm not too familiar with iTunes, but DRM should only be on tracks you've purchased from iTunes or another service, not on music you've ripped from your own cds (unless the CD itself was DRM-encoded). If you've purchased stuff from iTunes, you can play those DRM-protected tracks on up to 5 players, I think.

That being said, I don't think that's your problem here. iTunes, by default, rips MP4 files, not MP3 files. MP4 files will play on an iPod, but not on MP3 players. You can change the settings so iTunes will rip to MP3 files, which can be played on iPods and other players, but it sounds like you've already ripped a ton of stuff.

Like I said in an earlier post, I'm not an iPod fan, but people who own them love them and there are literally thousands of accessories you can get for them so you can move from your car to your house to the gym, etc. And you see a lot of stereos with iPod controlling functionality, but none that'll control a Nomad. Just make sure you get one with enough space to grow.

 

C'est la vie.