DOWN: I recently upgraded my desktop media machine from the decade-old graphite iMac G3/400 to an only-half-decade-old G4/1.25 eMac. The problem, of course, occurred when moving my music library. Granted, the vast majority of it was on an external FireWire hard drive, but I had started ripping my CDs on the old machine straight to the itty-bitty 13Gb internal drive. The sequence went something like this:
- Start ripping CDs to hard drive.
- Panic when you realize that you are going to fill the whole thing up. Only rip "favorite songs" off albums.
- Buy external drive. Continue ripping "favorites" by reflex.
- Realize that new external drive has ample room for entire CD collection; resume ripping complete CDs.
13 comments:
I hear ya on the music thing. I spent a couple weeks last fall ripping all my CDs to my laptop, only to have it go all blue and screeny and eat half the collection. Still haven't gotten that missing half ripped to the new one yet.
Just out of curiosity, why rip complete CDs at all? If you know there are songs on there you'll never listen to, why waste disk space on them?
There are some songs I never would have discovered as "favorites" if they hadn't been served up by a CD changer set on "shuffle".
The iPod is like that, but to the Nth power.
I hit that, and finally just re-ripped everything. Lots easier to sort dupes out later than it is to do it beforehand.
So, if you insert a CD and try to rip it, will the program (iTunes, or whatever) tell you that you already have a ripped copy of the CD?
I would try that with one that you know you have ripped, and keep iterating until you find one you don't have ripped.
(Might fail if you have a partial rip anywhere...)
It's only slightly less work than re-ripping the whole thing, though.
Unless you have your CD-shelf alphabetized, and then tell iTunes to sort the list alphabetically by album so you can compare quickly.
Just import everything from the external and the imac. Sort out the dupes afterwards. IIRC iTunes has an option to do that for you. This is what I've done in the past.
Disk space is so cheap now its silly to waste time only ripping a couple songs off a CD, its easier to just set it up to automatically import the CD when you put it in and spit it out when its done, repeat.
Tam,
I ran into a similar situation about a year ago. If you still have the old machine, just copy the music folder of that old machine onto the removable hard drive. If you have iTunes set up to copy imported songs into the iTunes folder, when you drag that folder of older songs into iTunes, it will just copy all of the songs to the appropriate folders. Once you're done, just delete the transitional folder you made for that music.
However, if you got rid of the old computer already, you're kind of screwed.
On a related note, you do have all of that music you care about backed up on another hard drive as well, right?
Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything.....cough, cough.
Can you just start the G3 in Target Disk mode and just copy the folder over Firewire? I know my G3-500 iMac could do that but I don't know when that was feature was added.
Boot it in Target mode and copy everything off it!
Anonymous: I think all the Firewire macs had Target mode support.
(Turns out I think wrong, but I was close. I think all the ones that can BOOT from Firewire can, thus not the B+W or Yikes! G4.
Tam's iMac should work if it's got the firmware update.
If not, well... I'd be tempted to pull the drive and put it in an external enclosure.)
Yeah, the iMac DV SE can boot in target disc mode, but that would involve dragging it down from the attic, finding a place to put it, hooking it up, and... screw it.
It still wouldn't solve the problem of partial albums.
I'm just going to do this the hard way.
Now noticing that for some reason I had REM's Monster, Green, and Document, but not Automatic For The People or Eponymous.
Bite the bullet and just re-rip everything again, this time making sure to do everything on every CD. I started the same process a couple years ago but found it faster to just re-rip everything again. The obsessive - compulsive part of my personality was quite pleased that I did it that way, it never had to question if I missed anything or not... :P
Music storage tech stuff blah blah. (Strictly personal reaction, of course.)
But that quiche sounds freaking delicious.
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