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

I've been toying with the idea of getting a Creative Zen media player (found an 80 gig model for a mere $400) for my birthday.

But, obviously if I'm going to invest in a portable media player, I'll need to get a tera byte external hard drive. My next question is this: how do I find the time to back all that stuff up? Backing up vinyl and cassette has taken me months already, and I've barely put a dent in it. And we've got ten times as much on CD.

(And I still have several hundred video tapes to back up, too)

How on earth will I get it all on there?

iPod Classic 80GB, $249? THat would give you enough change left over to pay someone to do at least *some* of the backing up.

The way to do it is to just get into the habbit of feeding in a disc whenever you're passing. However...I often find that it's more convenient to get a bunch of torrents going.

No, I don't want an iPod. I have my reasons- and they're not to do with product quality. I have "other issues".

The money's not really an issue- I wouldn't want someone else handling my stuff to bac it up, anyway. Too much of it's too hard to replace.

And the Zen has the bigger viewing screen.

I haven't gotten into torrenting. There isn't much I want that I'm not willing to buy the actual album, and not having kids I can do it on a whim if the mood strikes. And it's not like I want to back up entire albums... just a track here and there.

I agree, the way to do it is to pop in a disc whenever. I could easily copy a dozen discs in a single evening just during dinner and a movie- it takes an average of 10 minutes per album. (Copying cassettes, vinyl and VHS takes a little longer 'cause you have to copy the whole thing, though that can be done while doing other things, too) I'm just too shiftless or something to "remember" to get around to it.

Just to show you what a dork I am... a few weeks ago I went through every music file on the hard drive, and put them all into folders organized by artist name. It took me a day and a half.

The up side is that now I can find stuff rather than backing it up more than once in multiple locations.

Wheras if you'd kept ID3 data against the tracks, you could have had a machine organise it for you...

Well, I do use the standard tags (and ID3 is the default for the programs I use, AFAIK), but things like "various artists" and whatnot wind up cataloged incorrectly. But it would've been cool to have the computer do it for me, yeah. I should look into how that's done... though some programs people have developed are so complicated to learn it's sometimes easier to do stuff on your own.

Plus... if you know how to disable the "genre" tags- they're almost always wrong. I needed a Blink 182 clip for an audio card for a friend's kid, and they were tagged as "punk" rather than "pop". Obviously I know how to change them manually, but it'd be cool to turn that off entirely and just use the artist/album/release date tags (though often the release dates are wrong as well).

Oh, you just ignore genres. Otherwise you could waste a lot of mental energy trying to work out what the **** is meant by things like 'Anti-Folk' 0r 'Nu-Trance'.

What the hell is Nu-Trance?

MusicMatch has something called "Super Tagging", which I loved. You can tag all songs from a particular artist in "bulk" batches. But unfortunately, since I last upgraded, there are all kinds of glitches in the program, which makes using it annoying... so I've been using Nero for the most part.