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I don't know where else I can put this, so here goes... I collect mp3s as a hobby, so, over the years I have built a considerable collection. Now my hard disks (2 of them) are full, and short of removing my DVD drive and CD-RW, I have no space left for another hard disks.
Now, my mp3s on the average are about 5MB in size playing at 128kbps.
Someone made a suggestion, he said I should buy a software called Konvertor, and reduce each mp3 to 32kbps. According to him, each file would then come to less than 2MB, saving me a lot of space.My question is this: How much of the sound quality do I stand to lose by taking his advice? Is it worth it?
At 128kbps you are on the minimum level of quality, bringing them down to 32kbps they are going to sound like crap.
What I would suggest is to start burning them to cd or even better dvd. Then you could remove the less frequently played mp3's from the drives. This is what I have done...
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There are no free lunches. The file at 128 is already a compromise between size and quality. I suggest you get an external USB drive. Conversely you could add a PCI based controller card or replace one of the hardrives with a larger one. Have you archived those files to CD or DVD yet? When one of your drives crashes you will wish you had. If you have 2 HDs full at 128 bitrate you either have really small HDs or you have tens of thousands of files. I have 4300 MP3 files and that is 15GBs. Nothing is less than 128 with many being higher. If you used bots to obtain the files you may have multiples of many of your tunes. I suggest you hunt for a program that will find duplicate MP3 files. They work pretty good.
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Dump the DVD and CD drives. Buy a combination DVD/CD RW drive and add a new (large)hard drive.
Then backup all your MP3s to DVDs before you have a hard drive failure and lose them.
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My hard drives are a combined total of 120GB. I have 9831 mp3s. Thanks for the advice people. Really appreciate.
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You can reduce the size to 96kbps stereo and they'll still sound fine. You should be able to put about 250 mp3's on a cdr, but I would suggest getting a DVD writer and replacing your DVD rom. I just bought a new internal LG double layer DVD writer (CD Writer) from computer Geeks and also had a spindle of 25 DVD+R media included for $59.00.
It works great!
I change my size using Goldwave.com which is a paid converter.It's hard to do a good job
When you have a monkey on your back
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Chxta
The numbers don't add up. 5MB x 9831 files is less than 50GB. You have lots of other stuff on those drives besides MP3 files or something else is wrong. What file format was you using on the drives? FAT32 or NTFS?
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Yes I have other stuff on the drives such as movies. But like I said earlier, the average size of the mo3 files is 5MB.
For example the file ITT.mp3 is 12MB.I am using NTFS.
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The solution would be a USB drive that you could take with you to share your files while away from home. I still recommend archiving the files before a harddrive goes out on you. If you use optical media and leave the files as limply data files you can get all those MP3s on maybe 12 DVDs.
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Oh if you are seeking for a program which can find duplicates in your systen I must suggest you Dupe Checker PRO 6.0. It's the last version of the program and the most convenient of all I've ever tested! You can find it here: http://www.atory.com/Dupe_Checker_PRO/
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Don't get me wrong, I am not a Windows or Bill Gates apoloist, as a matter of fact, I dislike the bugger for the fact that he has ripped all of us off.
But their WMA format is actually great for storing music, I must say better than mp3s.
Subsequent to my appeal, I found and bought a nice little piecce of software called Audio Conversin Wizard.
I then converted my entire library of mp3s to WMAs at 80 kbps (no mean feat). I went ahead with the conversion only after I had experimented with 10 different files of varying genres.
Suffice to say, I have no regrets because for the last 4 days listening to the songs, I haven't had any loss of quality to speak of, and best of all, my Hard Drive has [i]magically[/i] recovered almost 24 GB of space!
Thank you WMA!
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