So, we’re in the market for a new computer for home. In the process, I’ve envisioned what will be a media distribution center for our house. It should have a large enough hard drive to store my entire CD collection, a few potential ‘movies’ that could be coming down the pike and whatever other media that might pop up later. There will probably eventually be a wireless connection that will port this content to other places in the house.

Anyway, as a side note, I’ve started to digitize my CD collection. I posted on slashdot.org to see if anyone had any experience with this but given the turnaround on post submissions I’ve started to investigate things myself.

My first step was to determine format of the collection. Personally, I think .m4a files come off a bit cleaner that .mp3 files. I also am a big itunes user, so I leaned towards that. To me, it also seems like 192Kbps is the sweet spot for quality. Many of the places I’ve bought from run their downloads at 192Kbps, I’m not planning on listening to these on a system that I can detect the difference between 192 and higher bitrates so I think I’m straight there is as well.

I’m about 1/6th of the way in and I’m learning some things:

– itunes rips the discs incredibly easy. It’s literally just a click and you have it imported.
– I’m about 3 hours into the project and about 25ish CDs in. It takes a while.
– My itunes library was already large and now it’s growing :\.

Anyway, just thought I’d share. My plan is to have these on a mirrored drive in the new system to provide some sort of redundancy.