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I have too much music. Help!

medwa

medwa

Well-Known Member
My music library is completely bogging my PC down. I'm looking for another way to safely store and play my music. I've considered a large flash drive or external HD, but I'm worried about losing my library if the device gets damaged or misplaced.

I Aldo considered cloud storage, but I would still have to keep my library on my PC to be able to listen to it, right?
 
mspot for about 5 bucks a month will store 40 GB of your music (2 GB for free) and stream it to anywhere with an internet connection. There is even a Android app to stream it to your phone.
 
You should also be worried about what happens if your computer goes missing or its HD dies. Buy 2 external HDs, the things are cheap enough now. Keep a copy of your music library on each one. So if one dies or goes missing, you've not lost anything.

Having only one copy of anything important and irreplaceable like music, photos, movies, is not a backup at all. You really should have two copies of anything important, preferably three. I suggest 2 HDs, and have cloud storage as well. Also keep one of those backup HDs in a separate place well away from the home PC, like at the office or something. In case of theft, fire, flood or earthquake.

medwa said:
I Aldo considered cloud storage, but I would still have to keep my library on my PC to be able to listen to it, right?
Click to expand...

Cloud storage is good, however you really should have local storage as well on an external HDs or USB sticks. What happens if the cloud storage company ceases trading? Things like Mspot are OK, however they do re-compress the music, and you will lose quality.
 
I would say hard copies are probably best. CDs being the best because with an external hard drive those things crash very easily and you could lose everything. If you do decide to go with external hard drives get good ones. Stay away from Western Digital drives; they are crap.

The online storage sites also seems like a good way to go, but I have no experience with them.
 
EvoJunky said:
I would say hard copies are probably best. CDs being the best because with an external hard drive those things crash very easily and you could lose everything. If you do decide to go with external hard drives get good ones. Stay away from Western Digital drives; they are crap.

The online storage sites also seems like a good way to go, but I have no experience with them.
Click to expand...

Um, I use WD almost exclusively for externals. I've had many more scratched CDs than crashed HDs. Not to mention the pain in the ass backing everything up to CD is, keeping track of 100s of CDs, and then FINDING what you want when you need to back it up.. I can't believe someone would even suggest this. And if an external hard drive crashes, its pretty unlikely its gonna be on the same day your internal crashed, so its not like you lost really anything.

(typed from a computer using a 6 year old maxtor internal, backed up onto an 8 year old WD external)
 
Tempusfugit said:
Um, I use WD almost exclusively for externals. I've had many more scratched CDs than crashed HDs. Not to mention the pain in the ass backing everything up to CD is, keeping track of 100s of CDs, and then FINDING what you want when you need to back it up.. I can't believe someone would even suggest this. And if an external hard drive crashes, its pretty unlikely its gonna be on the same day your internal crashed, so its not like you lost really anything.
Click to expand...

I have over 100GB of music in various lossy and lossless formats, for me to try and keep it on CDs would be completely preposterous. Also CDs don't even have to get scratched to become unreadable, it can happen just by storing the things. I wouldn't even consider recordable Blu-ray discs to be a viable method of storing my music either.

I have 2 external HDs, I keep one at home and one at my office. So even if there is a complete disaster, I've not lost anything. If one HD crashes, I can just replace it and restore it from the other one. I also keep my music on my laptop as well, as it's got a 500GB internal drive.

I also use cloud storage as well for my irreplaceable photos....see my sig.
 
cipher6 said:
mspot for about 5 bucks a month will store 40 GB of your music (2 GB for free) and stream it to anywhere with an internet connection. There is even a Android app to stream it to your phone.
Click to expand...

This is interesting to me. Can I store .m4p files (itunes) and listen to them from my pc with itunes? Or would I have to convert all of my music files to .mp3 and use a Mspot hosted service for streaming?

I'm seriously leaning towards buying 2 external HDs. That way I can keep both itunes and my music files on them, which would free up an enormous amount of space on my HD. If I store itunes on the external HD with my music library, can I still use it to listen to my music without having it actually installed on my pc?

Thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it.
 
iTunes .M4P songs are DRM copy protected. I'm quite sure that Mspot wont work with that. You'd have to convert them a non DRM'd format, like M4A or MP3.

You can certainly use iTunes with an external drive. You'll have to direct iTunes to the drive and folder where your music now resides.
 
I'm a msft certified pc tech, Online storage or external hdd in my opinion isn't the answer. I have a separate Internal hdd for music and films and both are backed up to separate externals. The external is there as a backup only, as to read from the external would be slugish, so internal is the answer. This is the best way to do it, solid state hdds are the future but still expensive, but large internal satas aren't bad now, this is my opinion to speed yours up.
 
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