J-Walk The Ripper
(with comments)

Mission accomplished. Today at 5:00 pm I finished my CD ripping project, which I started on 19 January. It took only 20 days, much less time than I had originally thought.

The final tally on my digital music collection:

• CDs ripped = 1,123 (average = 56 per day)
• Downloaded albums = 152
• Total albums = 1,275
• Total songs = 15,238
• Hours of music = 1,090
• Storage used =  94Gb

For the past three weeks, I've just been shuffling CDs in and out of my CD drive whenever I was home and awake. Pamn pitched in towards the stretch. At times, we had three computers ripping away.

For the file format, I chose MP3, with a variable bitrate (192-320 kpbs). That gives me reasonably good quality (good enough for my old ears), with an average file size of about 6 Mb.

The toughest part of this task was assigning each album to a genre. I decided on 24 genres, and I created a subdirectory for each. Then, within each genre, there's an artist directory. Within each artist directory, there's one or more album directories. The song files are stored in the album directories. This makes it very easy to create on-the-fly playlists (e.g., let's hear some 'Country Female' combined with 'Folk Female' tonight). It's likely that I'll be tweaking the genre assignments as we listen to the music.

Perhaps the best part of this project is rediscovering old music that I've either forgotten about, or just never play. We normally just play a genre in random order, and it's amazing how much good music we have that never gets played.

Thanks again to my loyal readers who contributed to my birthday present -- a 200 Gb Maxtor Onetouch II drive. This is where the music resides, and I bought a second one for a backup.

Oh, and if anyone is interested, you can download a 39-page report (230K PDF file) that lists all of the albums by artist and genre. Because the music files and directories are so well-structured, it was easy to create an Excel macro to generate this report (it's a pivot table).

If anyone is considering doing such a project, I provide living proof that it's indeed possible -- and it really wasn't that bad.