Operation Digital is in Effect

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to go as digital as I can — this means moving my music, movies, books and photos into the computer. In preparation for this, I built myself a four-terabyte drive RAID in a big yellow full-sized tower that has been since dubbed “Moonpie.”

Currently I am copying all my mp3s up to Moonpie, one CD at a time. Each CD can take up to five minutes and I have 500+ CDs of music archived, so it’s going to take a few weeks. If you’re thinking, “there’s no way anyone could listen to that much music,” you’re probably right. Still, I like having it, and it will be nice to have it all available to me instantly without going and rummaging through CD binders. When I am through I will box up all my physical music CDs (around 1,200 or so) and either put them away or get rid of them (har, har).

If you’re thinking all of this sounds familiar, you’re right. Earlier this year I spent about month essentially doing the same thing, copying all my mp3s to a single USB terabyte drive. Unfortunately either the drive itself was bad, the connection was too slow, or something else on my network was corrupting the files. All of those variables have been removed from the picture with Moonpie; between its fast SATA 2.0 connectivity, RAID drive redundancy and my new backup scheme, corrupting and losing files should be a thing of the past for me (ha, look at me, tempting fate). I also have a hunch part of my problem was storing all of my albums within a single directory; I have corrected that problem this go-around by splitting them up into groups by letter (A-E, F-J, etc.)

As of this morning I have moved over 180 CDs worth of mp3s. Here are a few numbers for you stat junkies:

– 26,250 files, 1,780 folders.
– 103 GB.
– 4 corrupted albums.
– 34 artists start with a number.
– Smallest directory: “U-Z” (123 albums, 9.5 GB)
– Largest directory: “P-T” (394 albums, 26 GB)
– Orphan (Singles) directory: 2,233 files, 8.5 GB.

Making a few assumptions, by the time I’m done I expect to have 482 GB of mp3 files. That’s 482,000 meg. Divide that by an average of 3 meg per song and that gives me 160,666.666 (Rock!) songs. Using another average of 4 minutes per song, that’s 642,664 minutes|10,711 hours|446 days worth of music. This is a low estimate, as I have another 600-800 CDs that I need to rip. (Some percentage of those are no doubt duplicates, thus the large gap in the number.)

If someone will remind me in a month or so, I will compare the final numbers to my predictions.

5 comments to Operation Digital is in Effect

  • lethargic

    I started moving my movie collection from VHS to DVD in November. Since starting to record on DVDs a couple of years ago I’ve thrown in a tape here and there to copy over but not a lot. But I got tired of doing it that way. So now instead of actually recording the crappy VHS versions to DVD I’ve been getting everything I can again from Netflix, the library and TV. 2 months or so in and I’ve only completely finished off 15 tapes. 1800 more to go.

  • Fraze

    I went through this exercise about a year ago…if you haven’t thought of/or planned this already I recommend the following; After I archived my mp3 collection (~525GB/78,806 files) to an external 1TB sata drive, my buddy copied it….and then my other buddy copied it. Hard drives fail…but knowing that my 2 closest friends also have a copy is peace of mind. It took me waaaay too long to amass this collection of music, I would die if I lost it.

  • jimbo

    Nice! I have about 65,000 songs in my collection, but its probably only about 400 gigs. 75%+ of the collection is early punk, 60’s garage, 60’s soul, etc etc, so actually most of those songs never eclipse 3 minutes in length. so it makes sense. i am not sure of the point of this post, but good luck!

  • jimbo

    oh, i did remember the point! when people say “you could never listen to that much music”, they are wrong. on this install of itunes i’ve listened to about 40,000 of the songs in my collection in about a year and a half. since sept 2004 according to my last.fm i’ve listened to 130,000 songs. never underestimate a person who listens to music at 8 hours every working day, plus tons of other various times when listening to music is needed.

    http://www.last.fm/user/wiskate

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