Digital to magnetic

This last weekend I started the somewhat ambitious project (or daunting task?) of moving our entire CD collection to hard drive in order to get all our music on computer and make it a little more accessible. We still don't have a portable music player, but I anticipate we may purchase one in the next little while. (Most people I know have gone with the iPod; I'm still hoping they release a video-capable one soon.) At the same time, we've moved all our CDs from the hard plastic jewel cases they come in to thin plastic sleeves. This has taken our 3 or 4 boxes of CDs down to just one, which is very nice.

After much research and debating, I decided to rip the music into the WMA Lossless format to create a lossless backup of our music collection. Hard drive space is very inexpensive (I'm using a 160GB Maxtor drive for the music), WMP10 makes it very easy to rip/import all your music, the lossless format gives us a complete backup of our collection (except for those few discs which have been damaged over time), and from those WMA lossless files, we can create MP3 files, AAC files, etc. as needed to get the music into a smaller, more manageable (and portable) format.

I'm about 60% done ripping into the lossless format, and then I anticipate it will take our home computer a day or two to convert all the lossless WMAs into MP3. Hopefully it's up to the task. :) We'll then be able to store all the CDs out of the way, and use the computer as the central music repository.

Two other projects I'm hoping to get to in the next little while (read: months or years): 1) transfer all of those old mix tapes we have lying around (oh the glory days of mix tapes!) to mp3 as well, and 2) scanning in all of our old non-digital photos as JPEGs so that we can also have those on computer. I'd also like to help my dad get around to scanning all of his slides, though that really will be a major endeavor.

Of course, as it relates to pictures, the most reliable backup/archive is still a good quality print of the picture, especially as magnetic media (as convenient as they are) deteriorate with time....