July 29, 2004
How Big Is Yours?
With the addition of the Apple AirPort Express to my home network, I no longer have the requirement to have all my music encoded as MP3. Like most people, I have ripped each album I buy shortly after I buy it. Over the years, I have switched between several computers and several pieces of ripping software. The result is an MP3 collection that is somewhat “choppy” as you listen to it. I mean that the sound levels are sometimes widely different from album to album depending on when I ripped it. Some of the bit rates are high while others are low, etc. So now was the time to re-encode all my music to one format. But which?
I am no audiophile by any stretch but I can tell the difference in some low bit rate songs vs. higher ones when I blast them in the truck. I did some searching and found most people believing this encoding report by Marc Heijligers. In it, he compares MP3 vs. AAC. If you aren’t familiar, AAC is like the next-generation of MP3 in most some people’s eyes — except Microsoft. I want Microsoft in my music like I want…oh, nevermind. Anyway, so I decided on AAC 192 kbit/sec and started re-encoding.
So upon completion, I have 3011 songs with a total run time of 9 days, 1 hour 45 minutes and 16 seconds at a size of 15.88 GB. The largest artist in that was Metallica with 311 songs. So how big is yours? This seems like a lot to me but I guess if you are a person buying a 40 GB iPod it might not be enough. So how big is your collection? (I have a feeling that todd is going to win this one.)
