In my old age, I'm just getting sick of a bunch of crap lying around. I don't have thousands of CDs, cassettes and LPS, but I have enough that if the CIA came for me today, I couldn't just swiftly and effortlessly get out of the country with it all.

Anyway, I want to streamline my life. Has anyone here consolidated their media collection onto a harddrive, to MP3, etc? What are the pros and cons? What formats have you used?

Talk to me, y'all.

I've downloaded most of the albums I own through bitorrent. I could have ripped them directly from my own CDs, but most of them are scratched so I didn't bother. I can't wait till someday we are able to just send tracks from our home computer to our car deck wirelessly or something like that. I hate fumbling around with CDs in my car.

I transferred all my cassetes to mp3, sold or gave them away and a few months later lost it all when my hard drive crashed. I lost over 500 albums. Thousands of dollars down the drain. My Spread Eagle and Bullet Boys collection gone forever.
[Edited 1/16/06 9:38am]

I've burned all the tracks I want for my iPod onto CD-Roms, so if anything ever goes wrong (again) I don't have to rip them all over again, but I'd never get rid of my actual CDs.

lilgish said:

You didn't back them up?

i have just about all of my CD collection on my mp3 player now, but i'm not about to get rid of my CDs.

Lammastide said:

I was planning to

lilgish said:

pfff. i've put my entire Prince collection on my pc in mp3, including
all the singles and b-sides, outtakes and lots of associates etc (all
of this with a large helping hand from Gooey).

of all my other discs, i only put the tracks i loved most from each
album onto my drive in mp3 format. after that i put all the albums in
storage in the attic.

converting all discs entirely to mp3 would take too long and would
lead to a lot of stuff on my drive that i'll never listen to anyway.