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How much disc space is required on average for a CD using Apple Lossless compression?

post #1 of 3
5/1/11 at 10:11am
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I have approximately 600 CD's that I want to store in Lossless (assuming Lossless will give me the best sounding audio). Wondering how large my hard drive will need to be. Also, are there hardware features I should be aware of when buying a hard drive for music storage and playback? Any specific hard drives that will work best? The one caveat is that I would prefer something that I can take to the office, though I might just buy one drive for home and one for the office.

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post #2 of 3
5/1/11 at 10:20am

The average 3-5minute apple lossless song will take up around 40-50mb of space.  Let's say there's an average of 12songs per cd, then you're looking at 540mb of space per cd, and a little over 300gigs of space for 600cds.

 

 

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post #3 of 3
5/1/11 at 10:24am

Depends on length of CD and how it's ripped. By the way, if you're using a Mac I recommend XLD to do the ripping instead of iTunes. I keep hearing the quality of the rip is superior. Never tested it myself as I never rip CDs.

 

Here's a good comparison I have around 302 ALAC EPs and albums averaging out to 16 songs per album. That comes to a little under 108 GB so assuming by 600 CDs you mean individual CDs and not albums that might be multi-disc you should expect <250 GB of space required.

 

Oh, and the average size comes to 278 MB per album.

 

If you haven't bought a hard drive yet, you could spend $50 on a 1 TB and have MORE than enough space so that you could never fill it.


Edited by DougofTheAbaci - 5/1/11 at 10:26am
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