Rip

Beginning in the summer of 1999 I have slowly been adding music to my digital collection. As I wanted to listen to a particular CD I’d rip a copy of it to my PC and then I could play it while at work. Those early rips were done at a fairly low sound quality and are painful to listen to now. The random rip paradigm also left something to be desired as not all of my music made the jump.

Starting last week I’ve undertaken the task of re-importing all my music to MP3 format. The first step was to back up all the music on one machine and delete it, so as to have a clean slate. Step two is to grab a stack of CDs and rip them, one by one. Its mindless work and I can easily multitask while the iMac grabs the audio format bits and converts them into MP3 format bits.

I’ve completed about 120 CDs so far, which I think is a third, maybe a tad more, of my collection. A couple are so badly scratched now that I haven’t been able to import them successfully, but the rest are working fine. When all the CDs I have (or at least all the ones I can find in the storage locker) have been imported my plan is to burn a data copy of the files to DVD for archival. That way I can just have the music I want on a machine but still have all my music available.

The trick to this project will be incorporating iTunes purchased music from two different accounts. Both the Powerbook and the iMac have purchased music, which can be shared over the network, but not copied without conversion to audio CD and back again. Since the iMac has far fewer DRM protected tracks (20-odd rather then 100+) I’ll burn those and then re-import them.

Lastly I’ll need to delete all the music (except purchased) from my daily use machine (the Powerbook) and import all the newly ripped music from the iMac. Then I’ll finally have all my music, at a consistent quality, properly tagged (including album art) on one machine.

Rock on.