Hefting all of my CDs around when I DJ is a foolish idea. One, a fair number are now irreplaceable. Two, I own over 800 CDs at this point. I think. Last I counted was a few years back, around 750. It's grotesque.

So I got to thinking, "Well, I could simply burn high quality rips to CD and, in a club, where it's all bass anyway, nobody's going to notice." Which would work for most of my stuff, to be honest.

Looking into that avenue, however, I see that I'd pay out my ass along with my best friend's ass to have my CDs converted by somebody else.

"Why, for that price, I could build a machine to do it myself!" I thought. And you know, that's not a bad idea. For about $800, I could simply do it myself.

I'm thinking a dual Athlon 64 box with a pair of slot-loading DVD drives to pull two discs at a time, tray loading DVD burner to sort things out later and for ripping those few mini and oddly shaped discs I have, RAID 1 to secure what work I'm putting into this, and a soundcard to run this vast audio library into my receiver, which may have optical in, I forget.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Input?

don't need that big of a system, one 64 with 4 optical drives.  Nice sound card and a 2 big ass harddrives using built in SATA raid.  One of the opticals can be a dvd burner.

I like the redundancy of RAID 1 and the idea of portability which a massive external hard drive would grant. I don't need 24/7 performance, but I also don't care to use a few dozen-hundred hours of my life ripping with proper tags to a decent quality to see it all flushed away on a rogue HD failure. I'm being paranoid and looking at worst case scenarios, I know.

Primarily ripping, though, as I said, after that, I'd likely use it for playback and, perhaps at some point, picking up FinalScratch Pro and toying around with that. Nothing video related -- the S-video on my laptop takes care of all of that well enough.

Supposition I'm ripping three albums at a time. What's the minimum processor you'd want?

Don't you have any teenage nephews/nieces/friends of family who you could pay a pittance to do that for you?

No, seriously, I was actually asking, if you're ripping 3 CDs at a time, what's the minimal processor/RAM you'd want?

Also, for the HDs, I'm thinking something more along the lines of 10K RPMs to handle all of the file creation occuring at once. Anyone find fault with such logic? P.S. Excepting the insanity of pricing on 10K SATA drives. Holy mother of Hell.

Well, I think I'm crossing into bold, new territory here, unless somebody else on this board has endeavored to rip 800+ CDs, three at a time.

This may be a fine motherboard, the Asus I've and used before having never let me down, featuring the SATA RAID, on-board audio, and some manner of instant music.

So, $150 for a 64 3200,
$90 for a lesser board, $150 for a pair of HDs, around the 160 gig mark, $100 for a gig of RAM, $50 for a pair of these slot-loading CD drives for the primary ripping (unless somebody can find something better, slot-loading to save me the hassle of trays), and another $75 or so for case and dual layer burner.

And yes, I've a shitty video card I can pull out of my old Athlon 700. It's old and shitty, but displays video. Oooh, though... do I want to get a small LCD I could hang near the box? Nothing big; if I could find a 10" or 15" widescreen cheaply, I'd probably do well enough.

So, further opinions on bits and specs? Because this is something I seriously need to do, if only to catalogue all of the shit I have strewn about.

I'll vouch for ASUS as well on the mobo and that one in particular looks good. CPU sounds right too. To be honest I'm not all that familiar with AMD so I could be wrong.

But you're going to spend $180 on a single 10k RPM hard drive, and that's only 74GB. If a RAID setup is optional you could use the fast HD as a primary and just stick  a bigger, slower IDE drive in the box and back it all up in one long, hideous transfer (I'm thinking, set it before you go to bed). So you'd have backup but still operate from a speedy drive, and swap files as necessary. Frankly, 74GB of music should be more than enough but then again I may not have a full grasp of the scope of your music collection.

Cannibalizing an old video card will save you a bundle though. As for a small LCD monitor you'd have to look into a specialty LCD sort of thing to get something small enough to be really portable. Samsung has a number of higher-end monitors which fold up nice and small, though. Bit on the pricey side I'd imagine, though a quick perusal of Newegg doesn't turn up any.

Since you will be tagging them as they are ripped this utility might not be so helpful, but for everyone else it is a godsend

http://users.otenet.gr/~jtcliper/tgf/

Godfather MP3 utility.

While you're ripping all the CDs, open the case and point a box fan at it. When you're done with all 800, take the extra CD drives out of the computer--you don't need them anymore. I don't think you need to worry about overheating.