So I made the big step yesterday of beginning to MP3-ize my entire CD collection. This was largely a result of having found my two missing CD wallets containing the bulk of my CD collection, mostly from the highschool and college eras.

At the end of college, I was thrust into a low-pay grad student environment, a dorm room with a 100bT connection, a university with two OC3 connections to the backbone, and Napster. Since 1998 I have purchased about 10 CDs. Between 1994 and 1998, my college years, I bought about 200 CDs. As much as the RIAA would like to make the connection, this dramatic drop in music purchasing had a lot more to do with my music listening habits than it did to the arrival of Napster.

Anyway, looking back at the CDs I own and haven't seen in years, the vast majority of them are rather embarrassing. Maybe I'll post a list of the 10 worst CDs I own. But some of them are treasures that I can't believe I haven't listened to for all these years. Land of the Loops comes to mind.

Currently I'm using CDex to rip my music to MP3 at 256kbps. The decision not to go with Ogg Vorbis was strictly based on current hardware ogg compatibility. I went ahead with the high bandwidth encoding because harddrives are getting obscenely cheap. I'm averaging about 150M per full-length album encoded, and it takes about five minutes to encode a single CD using my current setup. CDex makes it pretty painless, all I have to do is wander over to the computer every now and again, grab the CD out of the open tray and replace it with a new one, then hit a single key and it takes care of the rest.

Of course I'm going to have to get rid of one of the redundant ROM backups I have taking up 20GB of space if I want to encode all 300 or so CDs that I have...

[UPDATE]
Thanks to technical discussions with some friends (thanks Aaron, Adrian, and Dan), I've changed my digitizing routine a bit. I'm now doing VBR encoding and I've jacked the quality all the way up to maximum so it takes forever to encode a single disc (well, more like a factor of four longer). Still going MP3 instead of OGG since my car stereo can't read OGG.