Boy did I stick my hand in the crazy again

Back in 2006, I bought a 160 GB external hard drive and decided to rip my music collection into MP3. To optimize space, I decided to rip everything at a constant bitrate of 192kbps. I wanted to leave enough room on the drive for future releases.

Hard drive space is now entering into the terabytes, and yesterday’s 192kbps is today’s 320kbps. My friend chip had the foresight to rip his collection to a lossless format, then encode into a lossy format. I’m starting to feel the 192kbps rips wanting.

So I decided to do the tediously crazy — I’m re-ripping my CD collection. According to the software database I use to track my collection, I have 1,054 CD, spread among 1,700 discs. I’m not sure how accurate that disc number is, because I include other formats in the database.

And I’m following chip’s lead, first ripping to FLAC, then encoding to MP3. I’m even going for the "insane" settings on the LAME encoder in Winamp. Compound the process with tagging from Musicbrainz, and … it’s going to take a while.

At least now I have the space to do it … I finally bought a 1TB external drive.

Now I just have to resist the urge to get a USB turntable.