I have 520 music files (a few more than that I suspect)(mp3) on computer which I would like to zip up and put on a CD for storage - sort of a back up in case my computer goes south.
Presently I have been making CD that are playable in my CD-Player (Music) needless to say the number of CDs are stacking up to make a tidy little tower. I use these (a lot actually) and they are subject to the wear and tear of use. I fear that I already had to remake three of them so far. Not a good way to insure that I have a back up library.
I have TDK 80 min 700mb CD-R disks 32X compatible CDs.
I know that these are one write only disks. That's fine, because this sort of data I will want to save permanently and read only in future, upload onto the machine, unzip, install in the correct folder, use a computer media player.
I know how to make Music CDs for the CD player - I want to compress (Zip) my music files for storage.
My Question(s):
Just how would I go about figuring how many mp3s to put in a file for zipping (Win Zip) so the zipped file would still fit on the CD-R.
Not an easy task, considering that my music is filed into subfiles (EXAMPLE: Music/Classical has subfiles of "Opera" "concerto" "Composer") Each kind of music ("Dance/Techno", "Classical" "Folk", "country" "Rap", etc) has its nice little folder.
I would like to maintain my folders on my back up Zipped CDs. Say have one CD for "Contemporary" one for "Classical" one for "Seasonal" etc.
I have to finish a disk for playing on the CD player which does something to close the CD so no more information can be written. I am in hopes that I can add more music in new zipped files on these stored CDs. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Next Question. I would also like to make a playable CD(s) which maintains the files in Mp3 format. I have Windows Media Player 10 (beta). This should be different than a Playable CD which goes into the antiquated CD player. I assume that one can get more data on a disk that way, if you use it for playing on the computer.
As far as I can tell there is no way to do the latter on Media Player 10 (beta).
If possible, great, if not, ok. It was just a thought. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Next Question, I would like to zip and save my Jpeg, Bitmaps, Gif, image files onto the same kind of disk. Again I need some idea of how to calculate a folder size (when zipped) to fit on my CD-R. Will want to update those CDs with new pictures.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would also like to do this for movie files, I have some clips from movies and South Park. I would like to zip and save. Similar questions, how many zipped can fit on my CDs.
If this is all the same information I need, Great. However its my experience that computer stuff is mostly complicated and requires knowing about 5 different skills to do the same thing with different files.
Cheers
David
Posts: 3895 | Location: Leaving land, heading for the ocean | Registered: 06-03-02
Hi David I've copied your question to this forum which is linked back to here.They deal with these questions more than this site Click this to see the latest answer
Posts: 13157 | Location: 6 miles west of Wigan UK | Registered: 06-05-02
Dvd, Have you thought about getting a separate hard drive and storing your music files there? It would be free from your main hard drive, and would make storing mp3s easier for the long haul. This is the method I use, as I have about 70 songs on my slave hard drive, (40GIG), and am using it for this purpose only.
chris
Posts: 819 | Location: Wytheville, va. USA | Registered: 09-03-02
Well, MP3s are already a compressed file format. They aren't going to compress much more than they already are. I would put maybe 750MB of MP3s into a ZIP file. You can probably get another 50MB or so of compression.
In short, I don't know the bitrate of all of your music so I don't know the number of songs that will fit on a CD. The best I can say is "700MB not zipped" and "around 750MB before zipped".
quote:Originally posted by vansrme: Dvd, Have you thought about getting a separate hard drive and storing your music files there? It would be free from your main hard drive, and would make storing mp3s easier for the long haul. This is the method I use, as I have about 70 songs on my slave hard drive, (40GIG), and am using it for this purpose only.
chris
No I didn't think of that. I was assuming that if I get a nasty illness (virus) that I could reformat and then have a backup. Music, videos, pictures I haven't backed up simply because they are so large.
David
Posts: 3895 | Location: Leaving land, heading for the ocean | Registered: 06-03-02
quote:Originally posted by Chris F: Well, MP3s are already a compressed file format. They aren't going to compress much more than they already are. I would put maybe 750MB of MP3s into a ZIP file. You can probably get another 50MB or so of compression.
In short, I don't know the bitrate of all of your music so I don't know the number of songs that will fit on a CD. The best I can say is "700MB not zipped" and "around 750MB before zipped".
Well that isn't that much compression.
I looked at my music file 2.53GB of music, thats about 3.62 CDs. Hm. I guess that's do-able. I had hoped to get it down further like one handy CD-rom.
Ah well.
thanks all.
Posts: 3895 | Location: Leaving land, heading for the ocean | Registered: 06-03-02
I looked at my music file 2.53GB of music, thats about 3.62 CDs. Hm. I guess that's do-able. I had hoped to get it down further like one handy CD-rom.
Think about smashing a can with your foot, like you're going to take it to recycle. Now, think about taking a vice and smashing it further. That's about how much more compression you'll get from an already compressed file.
