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Help solve my DJ dad's stupid problem.
General_Win
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So my dad, god bless him, is old, and a DJ.
My dad has tons of CDs more than a million...probably. And poor old dad carries this huge cases of millions of cds to all his gigs.
Recently the old guy discovered MP3 cds. So now in his infinite wisdom he's going to take all his regular cds and convert them to mp3 cds, putting 2 cds into 1!
This as you can imagine is a horrible idea.
What would be the best and cheapest solution to this?
Obviously we're talking 1 or more iPods or MP3 players.
He's got a pretty killer setup other than his dependency on CDs so whatever we use would have to be putting out high quality sound, which I think excludes an iPod. Also it has to be easy to use and easy to search through huge catalogs.
He's old so a big ol screen would help too.
My dad has tons of CDs more than a million...probably. And poor old dad carries this huge cases of millions of cds to all his gigs.
Recently the old guy discovered MP3 cds. So now in his infinite wisdom he's going to take all his regular cds and convert them to mp3 cds, putting 2 cds into 1!
This as you can imagine is a horrible idea.
What would be the best and cheapest solution to this?
Obviously we're talking 1 or more iPods or MP3 players.
He's got a pretty killer setup other than his dependency on CDs so whatever we use would have to be putting out high quality sound, which I think excludes an iPod. Also it has to be easy to use and easy to search through huge catalogs.
He's old so a big ol screen would help too.
General_Win on
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After that, there's plenty of programs that index and cross check mp3s that aren't itunes or anything like that.
This... but I think a much better solution than just a bigass hard drive would be to get one of those external NAS enclosures, and drop 3 1.5 or 2 TB drives in there, in a raid-5 config. That way all his music could probably get ripped lossless, and you have redundancy to handle any one drive going bad on you.
I promise he will not want to rip all that music a second time should a drive go tits up.
Small investment for a DJ, especially considering how much he spent on music.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
This is definitely the proper way to do it. Whether you can get your dad to go along with it is another question.
well how much music does he actually need to carry around? You can get a 120+ GB ipod for a few hundred bucks, and keep a second copy of the music on your home PC. You can manage the backups and data security yourself and he won't have to drag around a bunch of bulky external hard drives that can easily break.
However, as a DJ he's probably going to want more control than what is offered by a single iPod. Most DJs these days use one or more laptops. Backup is a whole other consideration.
1 Cheap ass, small laptop. Honestly, a 13" one or even a netbook with an ethernet port will suffice.
1 NAS box with many terabytes of redundant storage.
this will weigh 1/10th the weight of his CD collection, and will be far more manageable to quickly move in to whatever song he wants to play... hell, using a well indexed piece of software like itunes, zune or somesuch thing he can let smart playlists / genius go to town and essentially fill in for him if he is taking a break.
No reason he shouldn't do this, it's what all the cool kids are doing.
edit: pretty sure there are DJ software suites out there to handle large libraries, and offer crossfade, mixing in real time, etc... just saying that he would be saving himself a lot of trouble to go the true digital route.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
The issue comes in with the volume of music he has; ripping this music is going to take hundreds of man-hours. I assume people view their time as more valuable than a buck an hour, so buying a redundant system makes sense at this point. Everyone suggesting a single-drive solution for a project of this scope has never been in a data loss situation before on job-critical components.
edit: ESPECIALLY components that are being lugged around all the time and getting set up at parties where people I assume are dancing and moving around a lot.
Shit breaks.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
He needs to back up his data but I don't know that he needs to bring his backup with him on gigs. Also RAID is not backup since you could still delete all that data with one mistake.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
But at a gig? One drive fails, and you have no music. That's a bad place to be as a DJ. RAID fixes that.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Or he can just install a decent sized hdd into the laptop and keep a stash of commonly used music on there as a backup. A 2TB external drive should hold about 4000 cds in lossless format. That is 32 cubic feet worth of cds in their cases, likely more than he brings to a show. No need to waste money on a crappy NAS solution.
Or he can just get a Mediasmart WHS, pack it full of drives, let it handle the redundancy, and bring it along to gigs with a laptop and stream directly over a gigabit connection between the two. The WHS can keep an image of the laptop as well in case anything happens to it.
And ripping cds doesn't take that long on modern hardware, 2 minutes tops and more likely 1 min. It'll take longer to pull the cd off the shelf, take it out of the case, put it in the drive and reverse the process.
lets say he has 4000 CDs this is not an unreasonable number AT ALL for a good DJ.
3 minutes to pull the disc, load it, burn it, confirm ID3 tags (quick glance but still time used), then go to the next disc.
12000 minutes, or 200 hours of his life. You take steps to protect that work.
edit: you do realize that the Mediasmart WHS is basically an NAS with some extra features right? That you are advocating exactly what I have been saying.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Tracktor DJ or Serato, a control surface for either, and a PC loaded with all of the songs.
In the time your dad takes to rip everything to an MP3 Disc, he could have done it to a laptop hard-drive.
In the long run it's quicker to rip it to MP3 than make MP3 discs.
The typical external NAS enclosure is a pos compared to a Mediasmart. Yeah, if you want to back up your porn or other crap fine, buy whatever NAS enclosure is on sale that week, but I think he needs a more professional solution that comes with dedicated support.
And as far as the 200 hours, your point? He can just bring a laptop along to his jobs now, every time he finishes using a cd for the job, toss it in the laptop, rip it, then put it away. Confirming tags takes a quick glance at the screen, otherwise everything is automated if you set it up properly. I just got done re-ripping my entire cd collection, its not like I spent 200 hours sitting there doing nothing else. Every time you sit down to check your email toss in a cd; keep the laptop on the coffee table and rip cds while you watch football; you'd be surprised how quickly you can rip all your media by just doing it in short bursts.
This is what most modern DJ's use. A big giant HDD on a notebook. Or they simply store all their music at home on a PC and then bring the tracks they will be using for the night pre-set up to the gig on their notebook. I mean thats what programs like Serrato are for.
Also when you have 5k+ cds it takes a while to rip. Also when many of those don't have track info online it can be a very painful process.
Thanks all for the suggestions.
Also, even though you can watch TV, masturbate or eat a sandwich while you are ripping a CD, I personally don't feel like I would ever want to do repeat that effort again when done, so I would make sure to be really good about having redundant backups, as I value my time too much to have to repeat boring stuff like that.
ESPECIALLY if he has to enter ID3 info for a bunch of them manually, as the guy here implied.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...