MP3 Collection
I finally bit the bullet and started encoding my whole CD collection. I have 4,201 songs ripped with about 50 CDs to go. Mary’s happy, because in the process I threw out all the jewel cases and put the ripped CDs in relatively compact binders.
Waiting until I was in my mid-30s was the way to go. Extensive A/B testing
proved that I can’t hear as well as I could in my youth, and this saves me
hard drive space because I can pick a lower encoding quality. The setting I’m
using is lame -h -V 5 sample.wav sample.mp3. This means variable bit rate
(VBR) at level 5 (0 is highest, 9 is lowest). I also normalize the audio level
to 100% after ripping, and strip leading/trailing silence. For 17,763 minutes
of music, I have averaged 0.999286 MB (MB = 2^20 bytes) per minute.
iTunes can organize your directory and filename structure, and it has a good UI for fixing ID3 tags.
Other tips:
- Don’t let albums titled “Greatest Hits” slip though. Change to “Britney Spears Greatest Hits,” so your MP3 player doesn’t try to play one week-long album entitled “Greatest Hits.”
- Try to limit your genres. Who gives a crap if that Cure album from high school is “Darkwave,” “Alternirock,” or “Goth”? Just call it “Pop” along with virtually everything else you own. Picking broad genres saves a lot of tedious debates with yourself in your head.
- It’s tempting to get the ID3 year correct for each song in greatest hits albums, but honestly, will you ever really need to make a playlist consisting only of songs from 1986?
- For God’s sake, this is the time to start backing up your data. I’m not sure how I would react at this point if I suddenly lost 18 gigabytes of MP3s. If nothing else, at least copy your music folder to another place on the same hard drive from time to time, so that one stray mouse click doesn’t delete the whole thing.