How tidy are you?

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I'm more toward's Jack Klugman's interpretation of Oscar Madison, although I'm not a total slob. I could stand to run the vacuum in my room. My biggest problem is clutter, with music and CD's scattered all over the place.

mee too! [the CDs/DVDs all over the place]

Would it help to convert all the music into mp3s and store the lot on a big hard drive? That's what I'm trying to do. It's a huge task because of the number of CDs, cassettes, vinyls and minidiscs, but I'm getting there.

problem with hard drives and SSDs is they have a finite service life.

My method is to have at least two drives of different brand, with everything on both, and I very rarely use one of them. The most important music is on three drives. It's not 100% safe, but then the house could burn down anyway.

is it a grab and go system?

I should clarify, I have sheet music and cd's cluttering my room. I have my MP4 (audio and video) on my Mac mini hard drive, which gets backed up automatically when my mini is turned on. I also have my iTunes music and video library backed up across several DVD-rw's as one large zip file (although it's been a while since I refreshed that backup. As for the sheet music, see my thread elsewhere with sheet music and OCR software and my lack of success with it.

Grab and go? Technically it ought to be when I've finished the project. At least I stand a better chance of running from the burning house with a USB hard drive than I do of running from the house with the originals in my arms. That would take several journeys. I've even wondered about storing one drive at my son's house.

Main problem is promptly updating the archive drives with my new music as I acquire it. And for video, it's the sheer size of the files.

the closest I've come to archiving/grab-and-going my stuff is two 8GB MP3 players stuffed full.

Ah, sheet music. I've never owned a scanner. But it must be possible. Have you a link to your thread?

As for the CDs, can you rip them to mp3 and add them to the music library?

auntblabby, my HDs are typically 2TB. I'm not bragging, my video collection is embarrassingly large and I'm running out of drive space.

how big is each typical video file on your storage device?

All kinds of sizes, but the biggest are DVD rips at about 4 or 5gb. I should probably compress them but I hate to lose any quality. God forbid I ever get into Blu-ray.

I might get another 8gb MP3 device to store the remainder of my most important musics. all my most important vinyls have already been restored and archived.

I never found a decent de-crackler, though I've got de-hissing of cassettes pretty good. So many albums are on YouTube these days, often (but not always) fairly good quality, so I bypass the hard work where possible and download or capture them that way. But restoring analogue recordings used to be a labour of love. Sometimes I've even bought the CD (second hand of course).

I've had the best luck using a variety of different ones, the one that comes with wavelab elements 8 is among the best, you can hear right away when you're driving it too hard- if you never drive it more than about 2/3 strength, it works better than any other software declicker. close behind is the sound forge NR declicker module. however, none of them deals with sharp musical transients well, all of them dull them somewhat at anything above a mild declick setting. the only declicker I've heard that leaves the transients alone, is the CEDAR DCX rack module [very expensive even used]. however, that one works as intended only when paired with the CEDAR CRX decrackler. a very expensive combo.

I can admit to being a bit of a slob.