A few weeks ago, we picked up an FM transmitter for our iPods, which has eliminated our need for CDs in the car. That was the last place we were listening to CDs at all, so at this point our music collection is just taking up space and collecting dust.
On Saturday we went through our CD collection and ensured that all of the music had been burned and saved to our hard drives. We boxed them all up and we’ll be taking them to the record store this weekend to sell what we can.We hung on to a handful of box sets and albums that we think might be worth a little more than we could get at the record store. We’ll try to sell them on Amazon or eBay. Anything too old or embarrassing for anyone to buy will go to Goodwill.
There are a ton of benefits to going digital with our music. The most obvious one is that we’re clearing the clutter in our apartment. But we also won’t have to move them again, and we’ll earn a little money for savings. Bonus! :)
My next step is going through my iTunes library, deleting duplicates, and organizing everything by album. Some of my music was burned with a different program years ago that required manual input of song information. I was lazy about it, so anything imported into my library before I got my iPod 3 years ago is a big old mess.
I’m considering trying one of the programs I found that automatically organizes songs, fills in missing file information, and deletes duplicates from the library: TidySongs or TuneUp. Both offer a free trial, but you have to pay $20-$30 if you want to edit more than 100 songs. Anyone had any luck with these programs? Or can you recommend a free alternative?
I’ll probably decide it’s not worth the cost and manually organize my collection, but that could take some time with almost 5,000 songs in my library.
How do you handle your music? Do you still listen to CDs or have you gone digital?
Definitely create some sort of backup for all your music. Maybe burn them to CDs as files (you can fit a few hundred per CD). Or maybe burn them to DVD like that. Or an external hard drive. Or something. K?
.-= Kacie´s last blog ..Buying a GoPhone to use with my regular plan =-.
Tag & Rename is the only program I’ll use to rename Mp3 files. It pulls album information from Amazon and updates your filenames and tags. Not automatic, but I manually set the Genre tag on each album for consistency.
Ha, Kacie! Thanks for the tip! All of our music is backed up on an external hard drive, and our MOST important stuff is actually saved on BOTH of our laptop hard drives. Hopefully we’ll be okay!
Very cool Karen. We went all digital a couple years ago and never looked back. We’ve moved 3 or 4 times since we got together and lugging around CD’s everywhere just seemed pointless. So I ripped em and sold them on.
We started doing the same thing with DVD’s. I don’t really see a point in having a shelf full of DVD’s anymore when you can have everything digital on a hard drive that looks just as good. We bought a WDTV from Western Digital that plays pretty much any video file and ripped all our favorite movies and sold the rest.
Digital is the minimalist and affordable way to go.
.-= jonathanwthomas´s last blog ..New York British Airways Face to Face Contest Winners Get an Awesome Send Off =-.