We really enjoy listening to our music. Many years ago I started converting most of my vinyl records and tapes to digital, loading them onto an external hard drive. The conversions aren't completed but I've added all my CDs to the drive as well. Today I passed 19,000 tracks in the collection, which amounts to 50 days of continuous music. Most are in FLAC format but a lot are in mp3.

The collection covers a little bit of everything beginning with a 1920 recording of Enrico Caruso.

It's been a lot of fun the last few years browsing through the CDs every time I find myself in a thrift shop. There are some real gems to be found as long as one is careful to make sure the correct disc is in the jewel case and the disc is in good condition.

The CD that just put me over the 19k mark was the 2016 2CD set Pure McCartney from Paul McCartney. I was shocked to find that one yesterday for $2.

You gotta get those rookie numbers up

I have 20,153 as I look at my collection now. Some are repeats as some songs are on multiple albums/soundtracks/best-of, etc. About half is in FLAC format. Some are ripped right from my dad's vinyl collection as it was a project of his a few years ago. This makes it difficult to fit my collection on my phone's 128GB MicroSD card so I have to pick-and-choose.

Looks like you've got me for the time being. I need to find an in-line ground loop filter that works before I can convert more tapes and vinyl. Since I switched to a new computer I'm getting too much electrical feedback.

It's really frustrating since a close friend just gave me his old 45 rpm collection. It's in beautiful condition and contains a bunch of Elvis Presley, Don Ho, Connie Francis, etc.

My dad used a turntable that was made to do digital recording via USB and some software. He used his laptop to do it over a few months. Quality came out fairly good, but it's still better straight from the turntable through a Marantz receiver/amplifier.

A helpful hint if you don't do it already....
BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP

I've lost my collection once before (when it was much smaller and I was rocking a 9GB HDD). Never again. Now all my media is on RAID and backed up off-site. The house can burn down, but I'll still have my damn music and movies

I tried a USB turntable to laptop and had similar results. Much better quality when I went with a quality turntable and ran it through my Kenwood amplifier to my now deceased desktop with a high quality motherboard and sound card. So far I haven't had much luck with this Acer all-in-one.

You're right that back up is critical. The collection is on a 2 TB external and copied to a 1 TB drive. The backup gets updated every 2 or 3 months.

ArmedAviator wrote:You gotta get those rookie numbers up

I have 20,153 as I look at my collection now. Some are repeats as some songs are on multiple albums/soundtracks/best-of, etc. About half is in FLAC format. Some are ripped right from my dad's vinyl collection as it was a project of his a few years ago. This makes it difficult to fit my collection on my phone's 128GB MicroSD card so I have to pick-and-choose.

The chase is on. I opened up 20 CDs as Christmas gifts this morning. We added around 15 CDs with holiday music this month so the count is currently 19,323 with 24 albums still to load. . Christmas music now spans an even 100 years starting with a 1916 recording of Enrico Caruso performing Cantique de Noel to the Pentatonix and Oak Ridge Boys' latest releases.

I know what you mean about duplicates. For the most part I try to avoid loading them but some seem to slip through. I do load different versions of the same song from the same performer(s). I consider the same song done on both a studio album and a live performance album as two different songs. Also, among the live performance recordings there are differences if they were recorded at different places or times so I add all of those.

Have you done much in the way of adding or changing tags (adding featured artists, adding comments, changing individual years on songs from "best of" albums, etc.)? I try to do that but I still have a lot of blank slots for details, particularly on those converted from vinyl or tape.

Sadly, I let my collection grow too large before becoming interested in maintaining a strict method of tagging. Furthermore, my collection folders are terribly cluttered. Only in the past 3 years have I added music in a tidy fashion, that's merely some 3,000 song's at best. The rest are sorted poorly in folders, however, the years (by album), artist, and title tags are pretty well cleaned up throughout the collection. It could still take a good run-through, but I rather spend the time listening to music with my eyes closed than do that chore.

Me too. I don't have things like recording label, producer, etc. filled in on all the things I've converted from vinyl, tape and older CDs. I try to fix errors if I see them onscreen while they are playing but It would take a lot of effort and time to go through it all for the off-screen tags. On the hard drive I have it all in folders by artist, then album, then song tracks. Compilation albums are all in a folder marked "Various Artists".

I'm using the J River Media Jukebox to manage the collection, tags, playlists, etc. and I love it. Very simple, thorough and flexible to work with. Much better than iTunes or Media Player.

One of these days I might be bored enough to experiment with creating a little BASH script to sort files by tags (Artist, Album, Year, etc.). I use Amarok using a MySQL database backend to play my music collection. The database and file collections are shared among multiple computers/HTPCs in my house.

I just looked at Amarok (I wasn't familiar with it) and it looks a lot like the free version I'm using from J River. I do like that Amarok is integrated with Jamendo. I've used Jamendo over the years for some nice free and legal music. You have to look and listen to a lot of pretty awful music to find the real gems there but it's been worth it.

BTW, do you listen to your own music in the car? I used to make CDs of my favorite tape and vinyl conversions as well as some Jamendo things but now I'm able to just drop a bunch of them on a micro SD card and plug my tablet into the car stereo in the Prius. I still carry some CDs in the car to use in the CD changer but not many.

On our cross-country travels it's nice to pick up local radio stations to get the "flavor" of different places but with the tablet we have a ton of music with us we can listen to in those remote spots and poor reception areas. It takes a lot less room that way.

I have a Galaxy S5 with a 128GB MicroSD card. I filled up the card with my favorite tracks. Unfortunately, having alot in FLAC, limited me to only getting about 1/3 to 1/2 of my collection on there. I rotate music periodically. I just listen to it over Bluetooth and have a few different playlists but often just use Random on all of the tracks.

That sounds great. I have the same storage problem due to the FLAC format being a little larger. I thought about putting the whole collection on multiple micro cards but right now I don't think it's really worth it. The one 64GB card is more than adequate to keep us entertained from California to North Carolina and back.

Just when I thought things might slow down another friend of mine just dropped off 2 boxes of old '45s and a box of cassettes here. Most of them are in "like new" condition as they were hardly played and then stored for 35 years He asked me to convert them and put them on compilation CDs for him. I get to keep the records and cassettes.

Taking a quick look at these things the '45s are mostly another group of Elvis Presley, Connie Francis, Frankie Avalon, Don Ho, etc. from way back. About half of the tapes are Readers Digest collections containing old country music, Elvis and hits of the '40s, ''50s and '60s. I'll be able to fill some of the gaps I have from past eras.

I know what I'm budgeting time for the rest of the year......

Well, with Lindsey Stirling's new holiday album it's up to 21,607 tracks and counting......