This thread is about the best way to store one's music collection. Let us begin with the stages of our own history:

1) a pile of long-playing recordings - no more than fifty (these, including Craft's complete Webern, were mostly abstracted long ago)

2) about fifty seven-inch magnetic tapes recorded from the wireless, many of which are now crumbling away

3) about two hundred "cassette" tapes, mostly recorded from the wireless, but a few purchased. The quality was not up to the standard of the reel tapes, but they were more convenient. Most of these survive (they occupy about three shoe-boxes), but some of the machines for playing them have become strangely sluggish. Is it simply question of oiling the mechanism?

4) about 2,700 playable compact discs, mostly recorded on our computer from the wireless, and subsequently assembled and "burnt"; only about fifty of them were purchased. These occupy forty or so shoe-boxes. They are mostly reliable, but one or two have given trouble.

5) for the past two or three years we have no longer been burning playable compact discs, but have turned to DVDs, which we use to save music directly in the form in which we obtain it - that is to say in a range of formats such as APE, FLAC, RA, and even MP3. If we wish to hear a particular piece we convert it only at that time and burn a rewritable compact disc. Because DVDs have a larger capacity - that is to say there is more to lose - we keep three copies of everything.

All the contents of these five collections are well catalogued in a computerized "data-base." But there are three problems: it takes time to access a particular work (to look it up in the data-base and to find the compact disc); the works of any one composer are scattered throughout the collection; and the collection (although comparable we dare say with those of many other members) is inconveniently large in the physical sense.

Let us now consider the next step. We wish to find a new, sixth medium of storage. Our modest requirements are:

• something much smaller than forty shoe-boxes, and preferably portable
• a self-indexing system of storage, under composers' names, easily extendible
• very fast access
• a silent medium

How much data is there in our average collection? A compact disc holds around 700 Megabytes, so if we "multiply" that by the equivalent of about 3,000 compact discs (allowing for the tapes and DVDs), the quantum of their contents comes to around 2,100,000,000,000 bytes, 2,100,000 Megabytes, or 2.1 Terabytes.

There are a number of lossless ways in which audio data can be compressed. Both FLAC and Monkey's Audio (APE) achieve a file size of around 52 per centum of the original, and there is a slightly better method known as Tak, even - invented by a clever German. For all these methods appropriate players already exist. So we no longer need 2.1 Terabytes storage, only 1.1 Terabytes.

Now how can we store that in a small silent space? We incline towards a lap-top computer (they are usually very quiet), fitted with a good sound-card, and with good quality external speakers attached. There are at least five possible storage media:

1) a large external drive attached to a lap-top computer. The largest we have seen has a 1.5 2 Terabyte capacity, although 1.5 would suit very well. These are in dimension about six inches by eight inches by five inches - quite bulky that is to say. One possible drawback is that such a drive is likely to be noisy; but it could be sited or situated in another room and connected to our lap-top by an ethernet cable. We would have to purchase three of these, one of which would be the working drive, and two of which would be "back-ups."

2) the internal drive of the lap-top computer. These are usually silent. The highest capacity now available seems to be 350 Gigabytes, but we have heard that a 500 Gigabyte drive is expected to be available later this year. Even that will not be enough, but it might be possible - pro tempore while we await 1.5 Terabytes perhaps next year - to use one in conjunction with the external drive "back-ups" mentioned above.

3) USB memory sticks for a lap-top computer. These are the size of one's thumb but at present hold only 32 Gigabytes. Although our laptop might have two USB ports, giving a capacity of 64 Gigabytes, we would still need a lot of sticks (too many) to hold the complete (and growing) collection. In theory, though, these USB thumbs are preferable to disc drives because they do not contain moving parts. The end of the rotating disc must come soon must not it?

4) then there are we understand super DVD things called "blue-ray" discs, but their capacity is something like sixty Gigabytes, and they revolve, and they are not always silent, so they do not really sound like a suitable solution

5) we vaguely remember reading about stand-alone music players with USB and ethernet connections, which handle the FLAC format. We know little about them but for our purposes they appear to offer no advantage over a lap-top with external speakers.

After all this we are inclined for the present to choose a compromise system based upon method 2: that is to say a high-capacity hard drive in a lap-top, with three large external drives as "back-up," to be connected and switched on as required.

Are we sufficiently up-to-date do members think?

Most of mine (big surprise) is still on cassettes. Some of which have vanished into the netherworld (aka the basement apartment cum cave where the chiddlers nest) but they don't get listened to. (Is the term "square" still current?)

Further to the above, do members have any recommendations for
 a) a good quality sound-card for a lap-top computer, either built in or external, and
 b) good quality speakers which can be plugged in to a lap-top?

Before I answer, Mr Grew, would the the laptop be furnished with either a PCMCIA slot or FireWire socket, and if the latter, is it a six- or four-pin connection? Either will afford a considerable advantage over USB outputs so far as sound cards are concerned.

Since you have the PCMCIA bus available, then the Echo Indigo I/O is one distinct possibility:

http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/CardBus/IndigoIO/index.php

I've been using this with my laptop for a couple of years, very happily.

The second (and possibly even better) option is to use the IEEE 1394 port with the Behringer FCA:

http://www.behringer.com/FCA202/

I'm using one of these as one of the cards shared between my other computers (the other being a far costlier M-Audio beastie). They are just ridiculous for the money at about half the price of the Echo (RRP in the UK is around £50, but they can be obtained for far less). Sonically there's not much between this and the Echo since both are at the lower end of professional spec., which puts them both light years ahead of the standard domestic consumer opposition; but from a user's point of view it is far more flexible. It accepts 1/4 inch jacks throughout, rather than the little stereo mini-jacks used by the Echo, and has a separate headphone output with a decent volume control: should you need to use adaptors for the RCA cynch-plug which is the standard domestic audio connector, these are easily obtained, and being far larger than the stereo mini-jacks, maintain a better connection.

If you use a four-pin FireWire port, then you'll need to use the power supply, which is included in the package: a neater trick still is to obtain a PCMCIA FireWire adaptor with six-pin ports. The advantages of this option are that the fifth and six pins carry bus power, enabling the FCA202 to operate without the additional PSU, and that you will also be provided with further six-pin ports for further FireWire accessories. On top of this, the two units together will still cost less than an Echo Indigo, and whereas the Indigo will suit only PCMCIA machines, the FireWire Behringer will work with any computer or ancillary similarly provisioned: the vast majority nowadays. As well as working with my equipment, mine is often hooked-up to other computers. It's very reliable, extremely easy to set-up and operate, is small and neat and sounds far more expensive than one has any right to expect for the cost. There are a few members here who are already aware just how sweet a sound I am able to coax from this little box fed from a good FM tuner; it was actually bought as a stop-gap, but I've since discovered that spending four or six times the price on a replacement would yield scant sonic improvement.

As you might already have gathered, it comes with my ringing endorsement.
 

I rather thought there might be Behringer dealers not too far from you, Mr Grew: I did a quick check of global availability before going into details.

One last important point (which I can hardly emphasise enough) is that digital sound equipment takes time to 'play in': generally, the better its specification, the longer it will take to reach its full specified frequency response. In the FCA202's case, the sound was very slightly unfocussed and 'spitchy' on higher frequencies out of the box, while the lower-mid frequencies were a tad warm and fuzzy: this is absolutely classic behaviour for decent ADC-DACs (Analogue to Digital, Digital to Analogue Converters), and by the time I'd spent a couple of days trying it with the various ancillaries, it was completely burnt-in, and sounding excellent.

Remember that you may need some phono to 1/4" adaptors, too, while you're out: two might suffice for the inputs, but since you intend to drive speakers as well, a second set will be mandatory. The variety of equipment used with mine at home and on location means that I always keep a handful in my audio toolbox.   

Thanks Ron, I always wondered what this socket



was on the front panel of my desktop!

Don't think I'm likely to have any use for it in the near future, can't see myself going down the recording route you use, not just yet anyway. I'm sticking to minidiscs!