Music

viclaw

I want to sort out my whole music listening including what I do with my physical CD's and the music that is in my iTunes.
I am very behind the times with storage of my CD's. I used to load them onto iTunes and found a few years ago I couldn't access all the ones I downloaded, I was told there was not much I could do about it unless I downloaded the CD's again, lots of which I got rid of. Since then I have delayed sorting it out as it I am not up on techie stuff.
For the CD's I still have I saw someone suggested a Brennan but this is too expensive for me. I don't mind downloading the CD's I have again, I would say I have 100's of them. I don't have much storage on my laptop so thinking it would have to be cloud storage.
I am thinking of getting a streaming service for listening to music, I don't have much data on my monthly data plan and storage on my phone is not that much.
My questions are;
Can I do anything about the music I have in my iTunes?
Best way to digitise my CD's, store them and play them?
Best streaming service?
Sorry lots of things to think about all at once, I would like ensure I sort it whilst thinking about the whole music picture.

dipsomaniac

firstly if you are going to permanently subscribe to a streaming service there is no point in digitising your music unless you just want to get rid of the clutter gathering dust.

i don't subscribe to any music streaming service but use google play to play/backup my music. i uploaded all of my ripped (windows media player) cd's from my pc/nas drive.

don't know about itunes as i stopped using apple product around 2003 after they stole all my music due apples drm rules

EssexExile

Younger more techie people will come up with better answers but I just copied all my CDs to the computer then copied them all to the phone. They don't take up much space. Now at home I plug the phone into the hifi with a cable I got from Maplin (remember them), cheaper than buying a Brennan. When away I plug the phone into whatever is available.

steviebabes

I subscribe to Spotify Premium, you can get 3 months for 99p at the moment then £99 a year. Its well worth it to me as you can listen off line on 3 devices, Just download on wifi and play anywhere, albums/playlists don't take up much space. I have several Alexa devices around the house and they're compatible with Spotify. I still have hundreds of CD's in storage just in case the digital world ends!

emptybox

Depending on what format you rip your CDs to, they shouldn't take up too much space.

If you rip them as MP3s at 320 Kb/s, an album would take up approx 100 MB, so something like 10 albums to the GB.
IF you ripped them as lossless FLAC files an album would take up maybe 600 MB, so would need more storage space.

I have about 200 albums digitised in various formats, and they take up something like 50 GBs. I've a lot more to rip yet though.
I've got copies of them on all my PCs and a NAS drive, and also in the cloud on Google Play and One Drive. So would be very hard for me to lose my collection.