h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

CDs are so last decade dahling. So I'm ripping mine onto the new laptop and shoving them in the loft. A bit more space created in the house.

May I suggest making sure you've got a back up on an external hard-drive, I had most of my music on my lap top, and my ipod, I switched computers but didn't put the music onto the new one thinking I was find because my ipod had it all...then its hard-drive conked out. I'm still putting all the music back and that's a couple of years later.

That way, if you're unlucky and your computer dies, you don't have to do the process all over again. Plus, you could run the music straight off the hard-drive and thus keep your computer from being too jam packed - a problem I'm currently struggling with.

Just my

And a lot less space in the loft

I've still got probably 95% of all the vinyl I've ever bought, even though I haven't had anything to play it on for at least 15 years. I couldn't bear to part with any of it, but CDs, and now even DVDs just don't have the same attraction. I never thought I'd be content with having purely digital versions of songs and albums and films with no hard copy, but when you look at the expanding size and decreasing cost of hard drives it gets a bit more worthwhile to keep them as lossless files.

But there'll always be a handful of albums I want to keep as a CD and films I want to keep as a DVD.

That's a seriously good idea Emily. Anything - absolutely *everything* - you couldn't bear to lose should be backed up to a second hard drive of some kind, a drive that wouldn't get wiped if you had to reinstall your operating system.

And then you have to have a third drive to back up the second drive in case the second drive fails, and a fourth...

I will backup the laptop to an external drive once I'm done, and I also expect to copy all the files onto the desktop PC. The ripped CDs on the desktop were done with standard Windows Media Player settings (WMA, 128Kbps I believe) so I'd been meaning to re-rip everything in higher quality for a while. Putting music on the laptop (whilst trying to tidy the house for Xmas) has prompted me to do just that. However, the drive in the laptop is finite so I've had to compromise between quality and file size, and am ripping them to mp3 at 320Kbps. I don't want to have to play music on the laptop from an external drive as it begins to negate the portability of a laptop when you have stuff wired to it! I bought a Creative D200 wireless bluetooth speaker recently for this very reason (the speakers in the laptop are awful). Eventually, I expect I will re-rip it all again in lossless format on the desktop, but there is no point in doing that until the system is connected up to a stunning sound system (which I have no money for right now).

I've still got all my vinyl too Gosho (such as I had), though I don't know what condition they are in. I think I've still got a portable mono record player in the loft(!) I used to have the most amazing stereogram (the size of your auntie's sideboard!) but I had to leave it behind when I moved house. The sound was incredible, so rich and deep. Listening to records was something you 'actively' engaged in. CDs/mp3s are something you put on in the background. My hifi packed up a couple of years ago and I got my first mp3 player. Since then, I don't listen to music nearly so much as I like to. Hence ripping everything to the laptop and getting a good quality portable speaker to listen to it on.

I've also got to the point where I'd feel reasonably happy to download all my music, films, TV etc and do away with the clutter that comes with buying DVDs and so forth. But my internet connection is not really up to downloading HD quality, so I shall be buying Blurays for a while yet, but rarely any more DVDs.

You're when I tell you this. After telling you yesterday to be safe and back everything up...my computer died.

Not completely, but enough to mean I've had to revert to the 2009 version of the C Drive. Luckily all my music was on the D drive, so it's been saved. But, I've been trying since about 10o'clock last night and then from 8 this morning to restore my lost files and the bookmarks for Chrome...

...it's 11.45 and I've only just managed it!

Suggestion, if you have a partitioned drive, don't put your music onto the main C drive, go for the one you don't use. It's just saved all my music! And while I have to download itunes again, at least I don't have to upload all that music.

I have now just backed up all my files and finally relaxed after hours and hours of stressing. I think I now deserve a before i head outside to try and chip the ice off the drive.

And I may be of the CD generation, but I have my vinyl taking up a couple of shelves, and if I could get into the loft, I'd have all my dads old ones down too. If only I had space for the record player!

Space is the final frontier! It's lack of space in my house that makes me do things like put CDs in the loft and get rid of great sound equipment.

for your computer problems. Have you managed to get everything back? It probably would have been a very good idea to partition the laptop's hard-drive. I did that for the new (secondary) drive in the desktop, but never even thought about partitioning the laptop drive.

Let me get this straight... problem with iTunes on your PC? Problem with your iPod's drive? Hmm, could there be a link there somewhere? I'm not fond of iCrap. But I do love Creative products, like my Zen X-Fi and aforementioned speaker.

My vinyl's in terrible shape I lived in a flat in London which was flooded by a burst pipe two floors above during the winter of... must have been '85. One Saturday night a seriously cold east wind came in off the continent and froze the whole of southern England. There was no-one living in the top flat two floors above so it wasn't heated, and when the thaw set in about a week later a pipe burst which flooded every flat below it (there were two more below us). I remember being in bed around 1am and hearing an odd noise, and after a few moments I recognised it as water pouring onto the floor in the flat above us. Five minutes late it was coming down our walls and through the ceiling, and that was the beginning of one of the most unpleasant months of my life

All my LPs got wet, and by the time I got around to them several of the sleeves had dried and stuck together, most of them were mouldy and it was just one big mess. On top of that, whenever a record gets wet all the dust that's in the grooves turns to mud and dries hard, so you have to get them cleaned professionally. That's expensive.

Le sigh

There was a funny side to it though. The fire brigade were called and the first thing they did was take up all the carpets (we didn't have fitted) and hang them up over the railings of the balcony because they hold so much water, and as they tugged at the bedroom carpet my little stash of about 200 quids-worth of tenners came floating up

8) floating tenners...nothing better than finding a random stash of cash...I once foudn £30 in pound coins in a shoe. Still have no idea why they were in there!

Gosho, if you still have you LPs there might be tutorials on how to get the mud out of the grooves on youtube. But then again quick fixes might lead to more damage to your poor drowned records.

Pegasus, my laptop came with a partition, and a couple of months back I was considering removing it to make some space on the hard-drive, now I am ever so glad I didn't.

iTunes, I admit, is sometimes more trouble than its worth, but I have become accustomed to its quirks. And despite not really wanting to buy into the world of Apple, I admit I probably won't change it. But how typical is it that just after telling you you should be careful my computer freaks out! At least my computer turned back on again, I was have serious panic attacks last night when it refused to do anything!

Ouch for your vinyl Gosho. Back in 'those' days I couldn't imagine anything worse than damage to my music collection. I think half my records are in the loft and the other half are in the shed. Loads of stuff got chucked in the shed 'temporarily' to reduce the volume of clutter in the house. I'm not sure how many years ago that was now. I am gradually working my way through all the clutter, but naturally, when you've taken years to accumulate it, it doesn't get sorted overnight. Sometimes I think what a relief it would be if the house burned down and I could start afresh with an insurance cheque. (NOTE: I don't really want my house burned down!)

iTunes is probably the most frustrating piece of software ever created, and I don't believe it can have been made that way by accident. Someone worked hard to make it so crappy and annoying.

I've lost £50 in cash somehow, so I'm off to flood the house now in the hope it will appear...

check your shoes

And down the back of the sofa.

and old wallets!

Don't forget the pockets of any coats you haven't worn since last winter.

Unless you lost it since then, of course.

I've lost it in the last month or so, and the worst part is, it's not my money. Bizarrely, 2 USB sticks and a wifi card have also vanished at the same time. Theft is highly unlikely. So I'm just

Uh oh, sounds like a case of the forgotten "safe place"

Yeah, I have any of those, all of them so safe even I can't find them!

In our house, we always put things in a "dangerous place" as things in safe places are never found again - indeed that is a treat in our house - "behave or I'll put your in a safe place"

Back to ripping, I'e gone through my collection 3 times now, once at low MP3, then as Ogg Vorbis, then again at higher, VBR MP3,using the latest LAME in CDEX, so good luck - the collection is now about 60 GB.

As to itunes, it was designed by the arrogant ******* at Apple, so what do you expect - if you don't do it the Apple way forget it - all other software players allow you to watch a folder to see if new music appear, not so iTunes, the very thought that you'd rip/buy music from outside the Apple environment is an Alien concept for the turtle necked wearing clones at Apple.

I don't like Apple - can you tell?

CHawke

You have an ally here. Can't stand 'em either. They're far too controlling.

Pegasus, I lost an expensive chefs knife for a whole year. I put it in a box when I was packing up to move to another town, got there, started unpacking and couldn't find it anywhere. A year later I'm packing up to move again and what do I find in a box I'd left unpacked, but which I knew I'd looked in when I was unpacking the first time?

Yep