Reply To: Let’s talk collections and listening habits!
Oh gosh, that brings back memories, Nick.
A few years ago, I had to wipe my ex-laptop clean due to some issue. Before that, I transferred all my music to an external harddrive. Once wiped, I was about to import the music again when the external harddrive fell to the floor and was ruined. Totally devastating, I lost my entire music collection!
Of course, I still had my CDs, which made up about a third of the collection, but the laptop didn’t have any CD-ROM drive. I could have bought an external CD-ROM drive, of course, but the thought of re-importing about 1000 CDs was gruelling. I remember it took me about half a year importing all my CDs to iTunes in the first place, with correct tagging etc.. What came to the rescue was my old iPod, of all things, which had maybe a third of the collection on it. But beyond that, I had to rely on help from fellow fans to rebuild it (chief among them FalkirkBairn, who once posted here).
I’ve learnt from my mistakes. In addition to a new external harddrive, I also have my music collection stored on my dad’s NAS. Thankfully, I’m content with 320kps mp3s, I don’t need fancy-schmanzy lossless files that take up enormous amount of space. My tinnitus-affected ears wouldn’t be able to hear the difference, anyway. So the collection can – so far – all fit on my 1TB external harddrive, as well as my dad’s NAS server.
Best of luck in the process, Nick!