Chovy’s Blog

Well, after talking about it for the last year and a half, I’ve finally gotten everything in place to rip my entire cd collection!

For starters, I had to setup a reliable file server running Gentoo Linux with Samba file sharing services for Windows clients.

Once I set that up, I bought a 300GB western digital harddrive, with removable drive kit. I wanted to be able to remove the drive and keep it in the trunk of my car incase of disaster (fire, etc.) so I won’t loose all my hard work.

The main drive is 250gb maxtor. Using rsnapshot for Linux, I am able to backup the main drive to my removable drive via cronjob on an hourly basis (not to mention all my remotely hosted databases and web sites).

The best CD-ripper, Lame MP3 encoder I’ve found for Windows XP is BonkEnc which supports Variable Bitrate and is Open Source GPL’d (ensuring you never have to pay for anything). I have the setting at VBR-MTRH, which rips the cds extremely fast (under 5 minutes). I set no minimun quality, with a target rate of 192kb, and maximun bitrate at 320kb. This will get the most out of the compression, as the quiet areas of the song are encoded at a lower bitrate, saving valuable harddisk space.

I tested ripping at Quality level 5 (middle) and Quality Level 0 (best), and the size of the album “Paul Simon – Graceland” went from 39MB to 75MB, and when listening, I noticed virtually no difference. So I’ll be keeping it the middle level to save disk space (not to mention more mp3s will fit on my iPod).

I also recently hooked up my 15GB iPod to my car stereo deck, which is an Alpine supporting iPod connections, with 2×10 inch subwoofers in the trunk of my Corolla! The next thing to do is replace the stock corolla speakers with some nice ones.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 25th, 2005 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.