Well, I digitized most of my collection (and I used to manage a used CD store) and I must say, it is one of the best things I have ever done. Any song I want to listen to is a double-click away, and if I want to take it into my car, I can either rip it to my iPod, or burn it to CD.

Oh yeah. Since I just moved to Orlando from Detroit, it allowed me to leave all of my CDs back in D-Town (I'm moving back in a year). Do you have any idea how much room 2,000+ CD's take up? A lot. Not to mention how much they weigh. Yeah, it took a long time for me to get the majority onto my hard drive, but it was well worth it in my opinion.

Cheers!

P.S.- I used multiple Macs to burn into my library, ie. two macs ripping to one drive (over Airport). Not very elegant, but it cut the time almost in half.

Edited by author 07-31-2003 10:15 AM
Even though hard drives are cheap, what the move to mp3 has taught me is how smart Apple is in launching the music store: being able to buy just one track is beautiful! I must have 40 cds I bought for just one or two tracks - the rest of the album is mediocre or garbage. I have managed to rip the vast majority of my collection, but only picking and choosing the songs that I really want to listen to!

I don't think I'll ever rip all 2400+ audio CDs that I "own". When the collection was at about 1800, I had run all the discs thru Audiophile to get track info from the CDDB into a FileMaker Pro database. My poor DVD/CD-ROM drive was never the same... it died!

I guess I have been trying to rip my music collection since itunes 1. I still have a ways to go. I mostly forget to rip when I have the time. I love the smart playlists in itunes as it makes getting through my collection almost manageable.