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Wednesday, January 11, 2006

All the music in the world, in a tiny box

I'm convinced that one day data storage will catch up with the volume of music worth listening to and it'll all co-exist on one device (hopefully not like these). That is the ultimate goal, isn't it?

With all the mp3 players and backup drives, more and more folks are going digital with their music. I'd say for every 30 albums I hear on my computer, I pop just 1 CD into my stereo now. My CD shelves are beginning to look strange to me. Like some antiquated way of storing collectibles, or a conduit for just moving the music from the physical to the digital. But I still love my CD collection - and you can always make the argument that the physicality of the CD plus artwork and packaging are superior to digital - but most of my CDs are starting to become wallflowers. No, not The Wallflowers. Ick.

Anyway, what fueled my thoughts about this came from browsing the comments of Todd Dominey's post about ripping his entire music collection. People shared some good ideas about how best to rip, store, and backup music. It's astounding what some people have done to organize their collections (like scanning liner notes using optical character recognition in order to store and retrieve information using a homegrown database. Sheesh!)

Meanwhile I am far from a perfect solution. Some of my collection is just on CD, some just digital, and others both. Of the digital collection, some are in mp3 format (ripped using my PC), while others are in AAC format (now that I have a PowerBook). One day though, it'll all come together, and I'll be able to fit the entirety of my music obsession into the tiny change pocket of my jeans.