I would rip to FLAC, then transode to MP3, and archive the FLAC files.
If you decide that you want a higher quality, or lower quality, MP3 then
you can re-transcode the FLAC. Re-transcoding already compressed MP3
kind of sucks.
As for the solid state drives, don't you have another machine in the
house? You can host the audio files on regular hard drives on that
machine (much cheaper), where you won't hear the noise, and access the
files over a network connection.
BTW, FLAC is lossless, and doesn't compress as much as MP3 (roughly 50%,
not the 90+% compression you can expect with MP3). So each 700MB CD will
take-up about 350MB. Three hundred CDs should total around 100GB (give
or take). Then you would need room for the transcoded MP3s (unless you
player and LAN can handle FLAC directly).
--ronan
> I have a bunch of CDs (music, not money), and I'm going to inherit
> more (um, yippee, sorta). I have a 200-disc carousel, and it's full.
> So what do you folks recommend? I can keep on buying carousels (those
> that daisy-chain this time), or I can rip all the CDs into MP3 or ogg
> and build a Via-based machine to play them that has:
>
> a solid-state hard drive or three (I sleep in there, so noise is bad,
> mmmkay?)
> a reasonably pretty interface
> a halfway decent sound card (it's going to an amp, so one headphone
> output is all I need)
>
> I'm ripping a test CD into VBR MP3 at (up to) 128, 160, and 192 kbps
> to see how big it is. ... done:
>
> 51445905 mp3-128
> 53575870 mp3-160
> 53832276 mp3-192
> 618874624 wav
>
> At 2*2*44100 B/sec for CDs, that works out to 58:28 of music, which is
> reasonable. It's piano jazz.
>
> So it looks like 300 CDs into 192 kbps MP3 would take up 15 GiB.
>
> I could replace the solid-state drives with four DVD drives; that's
> much cheaper and easier to deal with, but the downside is that adding
> and removing music gets much harder.
>
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