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Questions regarding streaming and digital archiving

Hi everyone,

 

I’m in the process of down-sizing my system consolidating my music collection. Records and CDs comprise my collection but due to physical space at a new house in Florida I won’t have room for record and CD storage. In order to have continuous access to music I am considering streaming all music or archiving what I have and what I will want (downloading). Streaming seems to be the best way to go and from what I have heard I can get just about anything via streaming. Archiving means I can store anything, catalog it my particular way and make life easy for myself. Please note that I am talking about digital archiving. Since I really don’t know anything about the pros and cons of streaming and archiving I have many questions:

 

1.       Should I archive my entire music collection and other future music purchases?

2.       If I archive should I buy a dedicated server or should I archive to a laptop?

3.       Is there particular equipment I need to archive music?

4.       Do I need to be concerned with tons of software uploads for streaming or archiving?

5.       Should I stream via Pandora, Spotify, etc.?

6.       If I stream what equipment do I need to stream?

7.       Are there cost considerations between archiving and streaming?

8.       On the ethical side, what considerations should I have via how artists receive payment and how much payment artists receive for my archiving/streaming of future music purchases?

9.       What other initial questions should I ask you, the collective audio community, and myself?

10.   Do the above questions make sense or am I missing something?

 

My down-sized system will be a two channel rig with the latest Sanders amp, the latest Sanders preamp, speakers of unknown make or model (likely Maggie 3.7i replacing 20.1 speakers) and a Marantz SA-8004 SACD player with USB input (this could be a huge benefit considering what I want to do).

 

Your suggestions, comments and ideas are EXTREMELY appreciated.

 

 


rayd

Showing 2 responses by onhwy61

onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,137 posts
 
Digitizing vinyl is a time consuming tasks that requires specialized equipment to do adequately.  I don't recommend it unless it's something you really want to do.

Rip your CDs to a dedicated computer.  I don't think NAS storage is necessary, but others will disagree.  It does add flexibility, but it is also complex.  The think to remember is that RAID storage is not absolutely data loss free.  Keep multiple backup drives of your data.  Ideally keep your CDs.  (Not keeping your CDs raises ethical issues.)

Streaming is different than downloading files and the streams may not be up to the sound quality you are used to.

Before you make any equipment decision you should test drive streaming.  At this point the sound quality is unimportant, what you should be examining is which services offer music you like and whether you enjoy browsing for music with their interfaces.  For some having a really, really large library is frustrating because there are too many choices.

Question for you, will going to the 3.7s really take up that much less space than the 20s?
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,137 posts
 
There are legitimate questions about Tidal's long term viability, but to suggest YouTube as a sonic alternative is a non-starter.  I've never heard a YouTube clip where the sound quality was anything but poor.
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