This week I achieved a major milestone in my personal audio encoding project -- after a longer period of time than I planned. Other than a few stragglers, I have managed to completely encode all of my compact discs, including creating use copies and fully describing the objects using embedded metadata. These are all stored on a 0.75 TB NAS appliance configured in a RAID 5 array. Additionally, I have ingested (using the term rather loosely) the use copies into an access system, Ampache [3].
When I embarked on this project, I estimated [4] that my entire collection -- CDs, albums, and cassettes -- would amount to about 300GB in total. The lossless formats in the corpus currently comprise approximately 230GB across 7500 distinct objects. Once I finish encoding the analog formats I expect to more than exceed my 300GB initial estimate. Incidentally, the total corpus including use copies amounts to about 280GB across 14,500 objects*.
The next step, other than sweeping up the straggler CDs, is to move to encoding my cassettes. I have fewer cassettes than vinyl records and, since there are fewer noise reduction and quality issues to address, I figure that encoding them is the logical next step.
*Note: Although one might think the number of objects would simply be double the number of lossless objects, some releases were live or mixed which I encoded as one track for the use copy, rather than as individual tracks as they appeared on the CD. This approach preserves the work as a unitary effort for access while maintaining the original order and structure in the lossless format.
