There’s a way to get a media centre PC for zero cost. Simply copy your CD collection to a hard drive and then sell the CDs (and the CD player and the storage rack) on eBay. With the money you earn from the sale of the CDs, buy a media centre PC to play the music that you copied. Sounds daft – then read on and you’ll see that it’s not as daft as you might think.
Let’s address the technical aspects for the audiophiles and sceptics. Audiophiles will grumble that a CD played on a dedicated CD player through your hi-fi is going to sound much better than a MP3 played from a media centre PC through the same hi-fi. Of course the dedicated CD played music will sound better if you use use the MP3 file format, because MP3 files strip-out music information. So, forget about MP3 when copying music from CDs unless the music is destined for an iPod. You need to copy the music to your computer using what is called a "lossless" file format (or WAV files if you’ve loads of spare disk space, although there’s no real advantage in using this format).
Lossless file formats, as the clumsy name implies, do not remove any music information. The music is capable of being converted back to an exact copy of the original CD track. Some up-market on-line music stores (e.g. Linn Records) are already distributing music over the Internet as lossless files.
When you copy a CD to your computer (a process called ripping if you didn’t know) you need to set your software to save the music in a lossless format. For iTunes users there is Apple Lossless. Windows Media Player users need to select WMA Lossless. For computer geeks there is the FLAC format, an open source lossless format. There are other lossless formats, but for most people these will be the main contenders. If you ever want to re-create the CD, simply burn a CD from your lossless files to create a perfect copy of the original CD.
Next the audiophiles will gripe that even using lossless file formats, music played on your media centre will not sound as “good” as music from a dedicated CD player. But this doesn’t ring true. The digital stream from the lossless file is to all intents the same as the digital stream from the CD. I’m not going to use this article for a technical discussion on the merits of a CD player’s DAC (Digital to Audio converter) versus the DAC on a high-specification PC sound card. In many cases, a high-specification PC sound card’s DAC will be better specified than a dedicated CD player’s DAC. Sufficed to say that to most people’s ears the sound will be no better or worse from a PC. (And if you’re a seasoned audiophile, you’ll of course know that the sound from a CD pales anyway in comparison to the sound from vinyl).
The actual process of ripping your CDs will be tedious if you have a lot of CDs.
I ripped nearly 400 CDs and it was a drag. But once you get into a rhythm it can be done over a period of days or weeks to ease the pain. And if you have two or more CD drives on your computer you can rip multiple disks at the same time.
Astute readers will realise that there is a fatal flaw in this article thus far. How can you rip your CD collection to your media centre PC if you need to sell the CDs to buy the media centre PC in the first place? The solution is to rip the music to your desktop or laptop as a temporary measure.
Here’s some numbers to help you in deciding how much disk you will need. A four minute CD track will need about 25MB to store in a lossless format (compared with 4MB for an MP3, and 50MB for a WAV file). You should get three to four CDs per gigabyte, although this will vary depending on the music and the compression algorithm used. My 400 CDs needed 80GB using WMA Lossless.
A concern that readers might have is security – a villain can easily nick your PC and hence your music collection, but will think twice about nicking hundreds of CDs. Or, more likely, your hard drive might give up the ghost leaving you seething. There’s a simple if somewhat tedious solution to this – once you’ve ripped your music, backup the files to DVDs and store the DVDs in your desk at work. But be warned – burning 400 CDs worth onto single-sided DVDs will need 19 DVDs and will take about 24 hours using Nero!
Nostalgia is another concern – CDs bring back memories of when you bought them. There’s no need to be a zealot – lay aside the CDs you want to cherish and don’t sell them. And for those who like to look at the pretty picture on the CD album art, most media software will download the album art from the Internet and display it on your TV whilst the music is playing.
So there you have it. Realise some cash by selling-off your CDs and CD player and buy yourself a media centre PC – or at least make a sizeable contribution towards the purchase. And once you’ve set up playlists on your media centre PC and done all of the other cool things you can do you will wonder why you ever bothered with CDs in the first place.
Get A HTPC For Zero Cost
