# How Do You Store All Your Music?



## Centropolis

I am wondering how you guys store and backup your classical music collection.

Do you guys have all CDs, then rip them flac to an external hard drive? Do you make exact copies of each CD and that's it? Do you only buy downloads and just make duplicate copies onto external hard drives? Or only burn to DVDs? Rip FLACs and keep them mirrored on NAS? A combination of everything?

I assume most of you purchase just music files and sometimes CDs? Or do some of you only buy high bitrate MP3s?


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## Ukko

Mostly, I own CDs and LPs, and don't 'back them up'. Given reasonable care, they are very durable. I usually make CD-Rs from the music on the LPs, then store the LPs 'just in case'. When I do download music (FLACs or high bitrate MP3s) I burn the music to CD-Rs. All of this can be classified as medium geezerish practice.


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## brotagonist

I won't touch LPs or digital files. I've been there, done that, on both counts.

I have CDs only and take good care of them. Like Hilltroll72 says, they will last. I have some that were purchased in the early 1990s and, despite regular use, they are still immaculate, although the booklets are yellowing, in some instances. I am gambling on being able to replace them, if the need should arise, for decades to come: 78s and LPs are still around, too.

I never play my albums outside the home. Car stereos and portable players will put nicks, pits and scuffs on your treasures and wear them out. I have a Sony Walkman for portable use. I rip mp3 files from my discs and put them onto the portable player. It holds about 7Gb of files, so that's enough for at least a week. I rip others and overwrite the ones on the player when I have heard them often enough, so capacity is not an issue.

I store my albums on modular shelving units from IKEA (Mosjö). They are a bit too deep, but this has advantages, too. I do not need to brace them to prevent tipping when stacked 3 (possibly 4) high, and I could start a second row behind the front one.


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## KenOC

I use exclusively high bit rate MP3s, wither ripped from my own CDs or purchased. The contents of my two 160 GB iPods (both pretty full) are on the iPods themselves, on the main hard drive of my computer, and auto-backed up daily to an external hard drive. A pretty extensive library of other files is kept on the external hard drive and backed up every few days to another hard drive.

All pretty much of a routine. No fuss, no bother. There are at least two and usually three copies of every file, on physically separate discs. My CDs are stored away somewhere.....


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## Guest

I do as Hilltroll does, A few Vinyl and the rest are CD, I do have an mp3 player which is loaded with selections from my collection and converted to [email protected], I do not back up at all, also convert CDs to mp3 and burn to CD for in car use, you can get a lot of works on 1 CD and my car system is a 6CD capacity.


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## opus55

I store them on CD storage towers








I have plenty of rooms to cover the walls with those towers.


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## Guest

I reckon another interesting point is how do you file them, I go by composer unless it is a recital I avoid compilations like the plague but I still loose the blessed things.


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## DavidA

I have a storage cabinet which is quite ingeniously designed and stores about 800 of my CDs. Unfortunately there are a few weak points in the structure which keeps me from recommending it. The rest I keep on shelves in my office.


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## Guest

My storage units are fine the weak points are with me.....I can't get down to the bottom shelf


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## Itullian

CD's only on wooden shelves in my den.


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## kv466

On cd, cassette and record racks.


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## Pantheon

I have a big shelf for CDs, all put in alphabetical order by composer, I also have them stored on the computer through iTunes and on an external disc. I sometimes have downloads but it's rare. I usually borrow CDs from friends or listen to them at the library. 
My iPod can store 32GB and so can my mobile phone, but they are completely full.


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## ptr

DIY purpose built shelves for all old world media and a 2X12Tb RAID 0 NAS for all ripped and downloaded music.

/ptr


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## Schumann

I buy or legally download all my classical collections and put them all on iTunes and make perfect and accurate lists of all my music.


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## Vesteralen

brotagonist said:


> I never play my albums outside the home. Car stereos and portable players will put nicks, pits and scuffs on your treasures and wear them out.


Gulp.....didn't know that. Guess I now have use for those unused spindles of CD-Rs after all.


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## apricissimus

I have two large-ish custom made shelves for my CD's (my father and my father-in-law each made one for me!). I was running out of room on the shelves, so a while back I ditched all my jewel cases, and now I store my CD's in little plastic sleeves. At the time, I was sad to see the jewel cases go because I thought they looked nice on the shelves, but the plastic sleeves freed up so much extra space that it was well worth it. (When I made the switch, my CD collection took up about a third of the amount of space that they did previously.)

I also rip all my music to my computer as FLAC files. Well, I should say I'm in the process of ripping it all. I started about three years ago, and I'm maybe 60% complete (and I'm acquiring new CD's all the time). The reason it is taking me so long is that I'm manually entering all the metadata myself, and I'm being sort of fanatic and particular about how it's done. It's a lot of work, but the payoff is great. The ability to quickly search my collection, easily make playlists, queue up anything at a moment's notice makes all the work well-worth it. (My music player of choice, quodlibet, also makes it very easy to take advantage of my particular metadata tagging practices.)

The main drawback (besides all the labor involved) is worrying about hard drive failures, which would be a disaster. I do have back ups, but it's hard not to feel some anxiety about it when I've put so much time into it.


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## Ukko

opus55 said:


> I store them on CD storage towers
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> I have plenty of rooms to cover the walls with those towers.


I do the same, except use much wider cases. Do you anchor the tops of those towers to the wall?


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## Ukko

Vesteralen said:


> Gulp.....didn't know that. Guess I now have use for those unused spindles of CD-Rs after all.


I think the main problem with car CD players nowadays is that the transport doesn't come out to receive the CD. Instead, the CD is inhaled past a 'hairy' strip that is supposed to... do something besides collect dust and grit. I tend to wince every time I see it, even though the CD is really a 'Car CD-R'.


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## Itullian

deleted, wrong thread..........


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## Centropolis

It's nice to see most of your still use CDs as your main source of music. I am relatively young and computer-savvy but for some reason, I just don't like using my computer as a source when playing music to my main audio system. Sure I have speakers with my laptop but for the main system, I would only want to use CDs and/or MP3s/FLACs on a USD drive or external hard drive to play music files. I don't like connecting a computer to a fancy external DAC.


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## Centropolis

ptr said:


> DIY purpose built shelves for all old world media and a 2X12Tb RAID 0 NAS for all ripped and downloaded music.
> 
> /ptr


You can buy a lot of CDs with the money you spent on the RAID system.  But I guess you use it for other purposes too. I would love to have a RAID setup for my photos.


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## realdealblues

My collection is mostly CD's and LP's. I have them all backed up on hard drives in lossless.

Box Sets all get stored on Shelves in media centers, etc.

Single albums I've been migrating to JewelSleeves and then putting in Drawers. They're expensive but after doing a lot of research I decided I liked their design the best. I just have too many CD's and I don't have room to store them in cases any more. I could line every wall in my place with shelving and I still would have stack after stack on the floor. It just got to ridiculous. I can use a dresser now and put about 5,000 in there. Eventually I want to custom build one that will hold about 20,000 which is roughly where I'm at right now. I've been trying to get rid of some old CD's and as new box sets have been coming out I've been selling off old bulky sets or single albums in favor of space savers.


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## apricissimus

realdealblues said:


> My collection is mostly CD's and LP's. I have them all backed up on hard drives in lossless.


Nowadays I tend to think of the CD's as backups to the files on my hard drive(s). (The CD's will certainly last much longer than the hard drives will anyway.)


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## ptr

Centropolis said:


> You can buy a lot of CDs with the money you spent on the RAID system.  But I guess you use it for other purposes too. I would love to have a RAID setup for my photos.


Well, I buy a lot of CD's already and for me those are different budgets (IT vs entertainment) and personally I don't care much for CD's (small plastic devises with no soul! I much prefer Vinyl, bigger plastic devices with loads of soul ), I plan to store my CD's in a separate storage outside my listening room as soon as I've built the extension to my house! 

/ptr


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## realdealblues

apricissimus said:


> Nowadays I tend to think of the CD's as backups to the files on my hard drive(s). (The CD's will certainly last much longer than the hard drives will anyway.)


I use the lossless files for "quick reference" or for adding music to my ipod for quick listening. I leave my CD's at home and will transfer the lossless stuff to take to work to listen to or in my car.


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## JCarmel

I also don't take my cds out of the home...I make a cd-r copy for the car or to take on holiday. I have a disparate collection of storage places, where the cds and LP's are stored in alphabetical order (kind-of!...) So I have to remember, when trying to find something specific, where each chunk of Musica-Alphabetica is stored. Very often, I just go & open a drawer & pick a few things I fancy listening-to at random, according to how I feel on the day & this kind of makes me forget any limitations that my collection may have. But as I get older, the piles of cds that are 'on the side' needing to be re-housed in their proper places....gets taller and taller. I have a very bad attack of Piles at the moment!!


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## Bix

I store everything on shelves in alphabetical composer order. Each disc has a CD-R copy which is used to play out of the house and each disc is backed up on the Mac, which is externally backed up and on a cloud drive.

I use a CLZ software to catalogue the music I own, for fun of course, also to make sure that I don't double buy and for insurance purposes. The software is also on the iPad and iPhone so I can see what I already have if I'm out cd shopping.


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## mtmailey

I find cd or LP forms better mp3 may get left on computer when it crashes,i use also like 2 cd towers.


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## realdealblues

Parachute said:


> (because of an illness I've had when I was 3 year old I can't listen to the same record twice)


I'm glad I didn't have that one...I'd have long since ceased to exist.


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## jimsumner

I store my CDs in a dedicated storage area on dedicated storage shelves.

And on the floor. And the couch. And every table in the house. Actually, every spare inch. I think there may be some in the refrigerator. 

FWIW, I've been playing CDs in a car since the early 1990s and have never had one damaged. Just lucky, I suppose.


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## Nereffid

Until last year I was very much of the belief that "if it's not on CD, it's not real", so all downloads would be burned to CD and stored on the shelves. Then I hit an impressive trifecta of completely filled shelf space, declining income, and a broken CD burner. So the several-years-long campaign to get my CDs into MP3 format stepped up a notch, and I no longer burn anything. Everything's on my computer and a backup external drive; for listening elsewhere, USB keys are a godsend.


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## mleghorn

I rip all my CDs to uncompressed AIFF. I use iTunes to manage my collection, and Foobar200 to listen (I just point Foobar to the root folder where all my music is). All of my music is on a 2-TB hard drive + two more drives for backup. 

To achieve complete audio Nirvana, I use the digital out of my computer to my Burson Audio Conductor, and use Sennheiser HD800 headphones (with the best Cardas replacement cable); and I use the Remote app on my iPhone to select what to play. Any questions?


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## mleghorn

I should also mention, mp3 does not cut it -- it's inferior, even at 320 kbps. I'll only settle for lossless FLAC or uncompressed (WAV, AIFF). I've found that streaming audio from my computer (source being uncompressed or lossless audio files) is better than using a CD player, i.e. has less jitter -- so there's no point in burning audio files to CDs. I do it the other way around: I rip CDs to my hard drive.


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## bigshot

Jitter in the levels it occurs in even the most humble audio equipment is inaudible. In most cases, it is 100 times below the threshold of human audibility.

Ironically, the worst jitter on record was an audiophile streaming music server made by the high end amp company MacIntosh. It received rave reviews from stereo magazines, nonetheless.

Jitter is a complete hoodoo. Sales pitch to get you to spend more than you need to.


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## Conor71

I have a mixture of CD's and downloads - I store all the CD's in boxes in my bedroom. My collection is all on iTunes and is a mixture of MP3's at 320 and 256K. I have 3 160GB iPods to play my music - I take an iPod with me everywhere.


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## cwarchc

Lovely, cracklpop, vinyl
cds in tower racks, as earlier in the thread
mp3 on the laptop & for listening whilst outside
flac on external hardrive (though it's not all on there yet)


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## opus55

Hilltroll72 said:


> I do the same, except use much wider cases. Do you anchor the tops of those towers to the wall?


No, I don't achor them because I'm lazy. I folded some cardboard and stuck them underneath in front so that they don't collapse on me while I'm reaching for Bach CDs.



Conor71 said:


> I have a mixture of CD's and downloads - I store all the CD's in boxes in my bedroom. My collection is all on iTunes and is a mixture of MP3's at 320 and 256K. I have 3 160GB iPods to play my music - I take an iPod with me everywhere.


Three iPod classics! My 80GB iPod broke but my good friend just told me today he'll give me a 160GB one for free. I'll buy him some beer.

As for playing CD's in my car - my only concern is that they might warp/deteriorate if I leave them inside in hot summer weather..


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## Guest

opus55 said:


> No, I don't achor them because I'm lazy. I folded some cardboard and stuck them underneath in front so that they don't collapse on me while I'm reaching for Bach CDs.
> ..


Hope you don't get any earth quakes.


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## Centropolis

So most of you have a mix bag of CDs, LPs and MP3s/FLACs, some are backups and some are your purchased files. The question now is, how do you track where you have when you have a few different medias? Do you guys have a running list on Google Drive or something?


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## bigshot

For me, once something is digitized and added to the library on my music server, I don't need to keep track of the original any more. It goes into a box in the garage with a date on it. I've filled a whole gorilla rack with them so far and I'm working on the second one.


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## Tero

It's all CDs. Some were burned copies of libraries. But if the music was any good, I bought the CD used off Amazon.

Rock by artist alphabetical.
Baroque music by composer/ country. All the Russians are together, Germanics together.


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## jtbell

Most of my music is on CDs, stored in wooden racks scattered through the house (one six-footer in the living room, two three-footers in the dining room, two six-footers in the "breakfast room". Those are all "old purchases" from 1985-2011.

However, for the last 2.5 years I've listened almost exclusively to lossless files ripped from old and new CDs, or downloaded. The ripped files are in iTunes, with backup copies on an external hard disk, on DVD-ROMs, and of course on the original CDs which are now in shoeboxes in a closet. The downloads are also in iTunes, with backup copies (in ALAC format) on external hard disk and DVD-ROMS, plus the original FLACs on a second set of DVD-ROMs. So I have four copies of all my digital files in some form.


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## opus55

I organize them in alphabetical order by composer last name of the first work that appears on the track list. I've been entertaining other ideas of organizing by genre, label, etc just for fun.


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## Jaredpi

Flash drives, hard drives, cd's, mp3's. No more than one copy of anything though. I need to back-up everything soon.


> The ripped files are in iTunes, with backup copies on an external hard disk, on DVD-ROMs, and of course on the original CDs which are now in shoeboxes in a closet. The downloads are also in iTunes, with backup copies (in ALAC format) on external hard disk and DVD-ROMS, plus the original FLACs on a second set of DVD-ROMs. So I have four copies of all my digital files in some form.


I like that idea. How long did it take you though?


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## jtbell

The backups actually don't take up much time. When I rip a CD, most of the time is in scanning the booklet cover and fixing the tags in iTunes so I get a nice display on my Apple TV when I play it. After I've fixed everything up, I drag a copy of the re-tagged tracks into a folder on my Mac's hard disk, inside another folder that's intended for the next DVD-ROM backup. When that folder is "full" (fills a DVD), I attach the external hard disk and drag a copy over (takes a couple of minutes), then burn a DVD (about 20 minutes including verifying the disc) and file it in a binder.

With downloads it's similar except there's an extra step in converting FLAC to ALAC (Apple lossless), and I have two backup folders, one for the FLACs and one for the re-tagged ALACs. At least I don't have to scan the artwork, because I can usually download it along with the music.

Usually I can get about 12-14 CDs worth of music on one DVD-ROM.


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## Vaneyes

CM critic and author Alex Ross does it the old-fashioned way (photo linked), which I like. :lol:

http://operachic.typepad.com/opera_...elpful-to-you-amazons-mélomanes.html#comments


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## SixFootScowl

Most of my CDs are in boxes. The few times I downloaded music, I have burned it to a disc as a backup. I also backup my music to a 1TB external hard drive, and a thumb drive and keep all my classical on my two computers. Non classical is only on the external hard drive and a thumb drive.

Unless I just bought a disc and want to hear it on the way home, I always burn a copy to play in the car. At home I mostly listen on a single earbud, unless watching an opera DVD and then I only use the computer speakers.

If I had time and space, I would probably build wooden shelves (rough, not painted) to store my CDs. I would sort them by composer, but all operas would be in a separate location. Sets with multiple composers' works would be in a separate area, unless they are in my collection primarily for a single composer's works, then they would be with that composer. Non classical would be sorted by artist and might be in a completely different location and set of shelves, or more likely remain in boxes.

EDIT: forgot to mention that I have a lot of music backed up onto my Google Drive space too


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## Albert7

I store my iTunes purchases onto 3 hard drive backups and 2 laptops. CD rips same. Also backed up on Google Music now too.

CD physically are stored in the TV cabinet and a bookshelf. Not very organized however.


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## bigshot

If I had everything on shelves on a wall, I'd probably end up only listening to a tiny fraction of my collection. Having it as digital files makes it much more accessible.


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## SixFootScowl

bigshot said:


> If I had everything on shelves on a wall, I'd probably end up only listening to a tiny fraction of my collection. Having it as digital files makes it much more accessible.


Have both. I find myself frequently wanting to pull out a CD to look at the booklet. Shelves would make it convenient.


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## Eramirez156

I buy mainly CDs which I keep on ikea bookcases. LPs which I still purchase on occasion are stored on shelves built into a closet.


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## Jos

Meet "the crates" , all stored in my mancave. Another 250 elpees with electronica in the deejaybooth.
And I'm allowed 100 albums in the livingroom so they are in constant roulation. 
No backups anywhere, it's streaming or vinyl. A few cd's stayed after the great cleanup for use in the car.


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## Albert7

Jos said:


> Meet "the crates" , all stored in my mancave. Another 250 elpees with electronica in the deejaybooth.
> And I'm allowed 100 albums in the livingroom so they are in constant roulation.
> No backups anywhere, it's streaming or vinyl. A few cd's stayed after the great cleanup for use in the car.
> 
> View attachment 68461


Now that is awesome. You are a turntablist I hope?


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## Guest

My Cds are stacked all over the place in a ridiculous mess. When I buy a CD, I rip it onto a 3 TB portable hard drive and usually never look at the CD again so I don't know or care where I stack it. Then I can take my laptop anywhere, plug in my drive and listen to just about any music I want because I have hundreds of CDs, a good couple of thousand really, ripped onto this drive. At home, I run my computer through my sound system which is quite massive.


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## Eramirez156

Here is pic of my man cave /library.


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## Guest

This wee box contains all of my music, with room for all of my images and all of my writing as well.


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