Question re: iTunes and external HDD

I thought this would be the best place to ask about this.

I am trying to help my parents with their CD collection. A couple of years ago, my dad bought this ridiculous CD player that holds 400 CDs. What should have been a foreseeable problem is that there's really no real way of having any idea which CDs correspond to which numbers. As of right now they lined up the cases and made a photocopy and then numbered the paper printout, but it's just silly and I want to make it simpler.

What I want to do is just put everything into an iTunes library, but since I want it all at audio quality (which iTunes can do, yes?) then I need to keep the library on an external drive. How do I set this up, so that uploaded CDs are automatically store on the external HDD?

 

You should be able to change the default directory where the iTunes library is stored (point it to the external drive). That should take care of it

 

Any recommendations for HDDs from the apple store? 500GB will probably do.... I mean it would take like 700 full CDs to fill that up.

 

Well if your wanting to rip in losses Audio, the bigger the better, I would look at a 750 or 1Tb drive, these would be your sweet spots for price/gb right now.
For brand stick with Seagate or WD.
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ps personally, I think a good rip at 200-250 kbps in ACC or mp3 is good enough, unless you have a really high end sound system you wont be able to hear the difference above this bit rate anyways.

 

They have 6 speaker surround sound ridiculousness at the moment, so I'd just go for the best possible. And I'm still not sure why more than 500GB would be necessary, since they barely have half of the 700 capacity for that kind of storage space.


I just realized, though, that the laptop that would be used as the interface only has USB 2.0

Would that be fast enough to stream the audio files?

 

Yes heaps fast enough. The reason for a bigger hdd is to allow for future expansion, and hdd work better when they still have some spare space available.
Also by my rough calculation, average Apple Lossless is about 25Mb, normally about 10 songs/album X 400 albums is around 1,000,000 Mb or 1TB but maybe I'm over estimating a bit?
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400 CDs ripped into a lossless audio format will eat up a lot of hard drive space. One 7 minute track that I have in a lossless audio format called FLAC requires 55MB of disk space.

 

Hmm.... Ok, well this is good, because I need to know this kind of stuff... but isnt it true that CDs have a ~700MB capacity? Ok, wikipedia says that's data, and that audio at 700MB CD = 850MB. Doesnt that mean that even if every single CD were entirely full, that the most space it would take up is 850x400 / 1024 = 332 GB? Or am I missing important information?

If I am mistaken, then I'll have to return the one I bought a couple of hours ago and get a 1TB instead, but I have to return a DVD player anyway.


Question: for the purpose of efficiency, does the rate at which iTunes can upload a CD into the library depend largely on the drive? Also, is there a way to edit the CD data before uploading it? That is, modify the artist or whatever on all tracks (without inserting the CD, changing the data, ejecting, and then reinserting the CD).


Thanks!

 

You'll probably be fine with the smaller drive. Just bigger is always better no?
As for the CD tagging. This is done automatically by itunes when you insert the CD, by looking up the CDDB database (as long as you have internet on).
Otherwise you can manually add the info at this step.
The rate of import depends on how fast your pc is and the speed you set the drive too. Note that the faster it goes the more chance of encoding errors. On average about 2-3 min per CD would be normal for a newish pc.
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ps for more info on importing CDs go here