External Hard Drive

VoucherMan

I bought a second hand Ipod (120GB) on eBay & one of these

It's got all my music on it, over 9000 tracks with plenty of space for more & I can listen to it anywhere that I've got access to an FM radio . So car stereo, hi-fi, surround amp & uses the existing speakers so no need to buy any more.

Fifer

I think the most cost effective solution (assuming you aren't looking for stellar music quality, wifi or networking capabilities which you will struggle for with a £100 budget) would be to buy a Sansa Clip Zip 8GB MP3 player for around £35-£40 (better music quality than an iPod IMO, cheaper and no need to use iTunes). This will store around 2000 tracks compressed to MP3 128 kbps. If you want more storage (for more music or better quality, lessy lossy compression), you can triple the storage capacity to 24GB by adding a £5 microSD card.

The Sana will either plug into your existing midi hifi with a cable (from the headphone socket on the Sansa to an aux in socket on th hifi if it has one) or by using an FM transmitter like the one linked to in the post above, although that will reduce sound quality somewhat.

This solution provides the added advantage that you get a 'free' portable MP3 player and radio and a very nice quality one too.

Now you just have to think about ripping 200 CDs ...

Let us know if you are willing to spend a little more money (and time) and we can talk about Vortexbox servers.

bridgedino

Thanks everybody.

Appreciate the ideas. The cost effective idea of a mp3 player connected through the spare input on our hifi is probably the way to go. Having said that I will probably wait a while and splash out on something like a Brennan. Love the simple idea of a stand alone hifi that stores all my music neatly and looks good too. I googled and found that Sony also do a similar hard drive hifi system at £249. A more sensible price than a Brennan and probably easier to afford without crying

hanwellmike

Fifer wrote: »

I think the most cost effective solution (assuming you aren't looking for stellar music quality, wifi or networking capabilities which you will struggle for with a £100 budget) would be to buy a Sansa Clip Zip 8GB MP3 player for around £35-£40 (better music quality than an iPod IMO, cheaper and no need to use iTunes). This will store around 2000 tracks compressed to MP3 128 kbps. If you want more storage (for more music or better quality, lessy lossy compression), you can triple the storage capacity to 24GB by adding a £5 microSD card.

The Sana will either plug into your existing midi hifi with a cable (from the headphone socket on the Sansa to an aux in socket on th hifi if it has one)

This solution provides the added advantage that you get a 'free' portable MP3 player and radio and a very nice quality one too.
.

I completely agree. This is what I have done and am very happy with the results. I have also copied the mp3's to a flash drive which I can now play via my new tv (which is hooked up to my hi-fi). The advantage with this is being able to see all the track info on the tv as against the small screen on the Sansa.

The other proposed solution using DVD's will also work and would be the cheapest if you have a DVD player connected to your hi-fi.

Don't forget to keep a master copy of all your MP3's somewhere safe (eg DVD).

jayme1

I personally would urge you to rip all your CDs in a lossless format, simply because you will never need to rip them ever again in the future, which lossless format depends on what you are then going to do with the files.

You say you have an iPad therefore you could rip all the CDs to Apple Lossless using iTunes, from there you could use an Apple Airport Express connected to your HiFi, and your iPad as the Remote control, if you didn't want to buy an Airport Express you can still play all the files on the iPad using Home Sharing and through the HiFi with the headphone jack. The only problem with this is you would need your computer on with iTunes open to be able to stream the music.
Or, like VoucherMan said, buy an iPod Classic put all the files on there and use that connected to your HiFi, that way you wouldn't need to buy an Airport Express or have the computer on while you listen to the music.
Apple Lossless as you can see has tight integration into Apple products but since it has been open sourced anyone is free to use it now, programs like VLC can play the files and if you ever wanted to upgrade to a Sonos or Squeezebox they can also play the files.

FLAC has pretty much universal support from everyone apart from Apple, it won't work in iTunes or natively on your iPad, but will work on some of the Sansa players, some TV boxes (like the WD TV) and will still work on the Sonos and Squeezebox.
To rip the CDs to FLAC you can use Exact Audio Copy, which will test the CDs against an online database to ensure you get a perfect copy.

But the beauty of lossless is if you rip to FLAC today then find out that Apple Lossless (or vice versa) would have been a better all you need to do is convert them, it will retain all the metadata and album artwork.
if you rip to mp3 and then want to change to lossy AAC, or upgrade to lossless you have to spend time re-ripping the CDs and adding all the album art and any missed metadata again.

For about 200CDs you are probably looking at about 30GBs of data in 320kbs mp3 and 80GB in lossless not really a difference nowadays, you're very unlikely to be able to hear any difference in sound quality between mp3 320kbs and lossless, but one conversion or anything lower than 320kbs mp3 I personally can her the difference it's not that bad on 256kbs but I can easily on 128kbs.

this is way longer than I imagined, but the main point is, rip to lossless, it's pretty much a waste of time ripping to anything else.

googler

jayme1 wrote: »

To rip the CDs to FLAC you can use Exact Audio Copy, which will test the CDs against an online database to ensure you get a perfect copy.

It will also look up another online database to automatically fill in the track titles etc.

Once you've ripped to FLAC with EAC, use Trader's Little Helper to convert the FLACs to mp3 if needed

Linbox

jayme1 wrote: »

I personally would urge you to rip all your CDs in a lossless format, simply because you will never need to rip them ever again in the future, which lossless format depends on what you are then going to do with the files.

..., but the main point is, rip to lossless, it's pretty much a waste of time ripping to anything else.

I Agree lossless is the way to go. You can buy an external hard drive to store them on, then copy them to your Ipad or play them through the PC if you decide to get a good 5.1 speaker setup . Should be less than £150 and have a permanent expandable collection.

jayme1

also to get album art I use http://www.albumartexchange.com/ it has good high quality pictures which can be sometimes hard to find on google, but I use google as a fallback if that site doesn't have the artwork.

Fifer

Another vote for lossless as you'll never need to rip again (barring disasters) and you can transcode to MP3 or any other lossy format if desired. You can definitely get a 750GB USB hard drive, a Sansa Clip Zip 8GB and a 16GB microSD card for your £100 and that budget might just stretch to a 1 TB drive with careful shopping. A 750GB drive will hold over 2000 CDs. (Maybe that's overkill for your 200CD collection).

Avoriaz

I use FreeRip to rip to lossless FLAC.

It can also rip to lossy mp3, WAV, WMA etc.

It only takes a few minutes to rip a CD and it is pretty good at CD identification. It uses OpenCd and Freedb to identify CDs.