Thinking of swapping discman for iphone

Hi

I am back on public transport with a daily commute of 150 / 160 minutes in total.

At the moment I am using my trusty Sony discman and usually bring three or four CDs with me.

I am also still using a Nokia phone from 2005. That's not going to last much longer.

Nearly everybody who knows me has suggested that I get a smart phone and put my some (!) of my music onto that.

At the moment, the discman is an easy option. I just pick the CDs the night before and there's loads of variety.

Transferring loads of CDs onto a phone seems like a tedious and time-consuming option. Is there any way around it? Any advice appreciated.

 

Don't think about it, just do it!

It will take about 5-10 minutes per disc, to rip them into iTunes. Could be a bit more effort (using a different ripping software than iTunes) if you're after the ultimate fidelity.

Simple option: get iTunes and an iPhone. Start popping your CDs into your computer drive, and you'll be jamming away in less than an hour.

 

Presume tagging will be done automatically if I rip via iTunes?

 

Yes, but depending on your requirements the automatically added tags might need to be revised.

 

Do you get free wifi on the public transportation? Get a tablet. If no free wifi get a phone with a 4.5 inch screen or bigger. I got a Volt for $20. Good deals on sweet phones pop up monthly. Best by has a $25 points rebate for a few more days. Dump that discman and rip your cds to flac or/and stream music and video. Your friends will stop laughing at you behind your back
Don't get an iphone, get a phone with android.

 

It will get tagged automatically as long as it can search for the info online as you load it, but there will be changes you will want to make to song titles, combining multiple discs or whatever; you will learn how to edit in itunes. Are you Mac or PC, that would help to know. There will be many on here who use say XLD that confirm error free loads, but if you use itunes error correction, when loading you should generally be fine. I have had to reload a few songs here and there sure after hearing a click/pop during listenting (just make a note on you new iphone to fix later!), it is not the biggest pain. I would start off ripping using itunes until you had problems assuming you want to keep it simple at first.

I would definitely do it. Load CDs as you go when you are in the mood, in the background when doing something else—don’t make a chore out of it and next thing you know you will have a sweet collection at your finger tips.

Decide whether you are going for lossy or lossless (ALAC) itunes does not do FLAC although you can get FLAC players for the phone; if lossy then what kbps? Frankly I run out of the phone as well as via dac/amp sometimes into various etymotic headphones and despite being picky looking for differences I did not find a big difference between 192 and 256 so I go 192 for the space. Could I tell 192 vs. ALAC, sure, but I am usually on a plane or train when doing this so I preferred the access to any whim vs. better quality—the differences of availability vs. quality were not equal tradeoffs. YMMV of course. You can always load them up both ways and test how they sound on your commute. I am using 49 gigs now, 627 albums, 7,419 songs, and believe it or not I have to control some that don’t fit, but that is easy to do within itunes using smart playlists and checking on/off what gets loaded.

Finally I would recommend getting IEM such as the Etymotics to cut out 25-30 db of outside bus/train noise. I think you will save your hearing in the long run. The etymotic hf5 works real nice right out of the phone, although they have a very flat response so that may not be your taste.

 

For the most part yes, except the random WTF moment when apple assigns the tags, but super simple to edit them. I have the I phone 6 - sounds pretty good.

Just upgrade the earbuds to something more comfy....the stock ones are hard on the ears

 

Hi - yes have free WiFi on the bus.

 

Hi, thanks for comprehensive response.
I use a laptop (Windows 8).
Cheers for Etymotics recommendation - need to upgrade the ear/headphones in any case.
Preferred kbps is 320 - will go for a phone with at least 64GB memory.

I can see myself wanting to chop and change albums - presume it is easy to delete album files from phone and replace with new stuff?

 

My main reservation has been the sheer vastness of my collection - I own about 12,000 albums [7,000 CD, the rest LPs] - so being able to pull any of the CDs off the shelf is great. I know that I'll only get a small percentage of these onto the phone so I need to be careful in what I rip.

Cheers for all the replies so far.

 

You are good to go with plenty of room then at 320 which I think you will be happy with in your situation.

Yes editing album names, artwork etc. in your desktop iTunes is easy, just highlight all the songs in the album, right click get info and you can adjust everything you need.

As far as controlling what is on the phone, think about it more it is always on your computer, just when you sync the phone to iTunes you are controlling what will be on the phone and what will not. Some people drop and drag what they want on or off the the phone but I find it much cleaner to have my phone sync settings set up to "load" a single smart playlist say "my phone music", that smart playlist with some research and using certain fields like comments can for me anyway split what goes on my phone vs my wife's; in your case, you could have the smart playlist = all music media, but if you use the "match only checked items", then only checked albums will show up on the list that is syncing to it. So say you loaded 20 albums, all checked, then next week wanted only 18, highlight albums, right click, uncheck, they will not be on the smart playlist when you sync. That may be well down the road for you since you have plenty of room but it is what I do to control what cannot fit on the phone six or seven years down the line of adding things.

 

Have you thought about using Spotify/Deezer? The offline function is very handy.

You'll notice a dropoff in sound quality by switching from the discman to lossy (I know i did) but it will save you a lot of time and effort time ripping cds. Also a good way to discover new music.

 

Would consider

Thanks; I didn't think of it like that. Makes sense to consider it as what's on the laptop.

 

Might try Spotify although I tend to divide my listening 50/50 between albums and specific dance / pop compilations [which are never available in their original incarnation]/

 

If I were the OP, I'd rip the CDs to lossless ALAC. There's a setting in iTunes that lets you convert to lossy 256 on the fly when you load music to the iPhone.

That way, you save space on the phone, but won't have to rip your collection again in the future if you decide you want lossless files down the road. You'll have them on your computer.

 

Rip your CDs to MP3 format, then use MP3gain to normalize the files so that they all have the same perceived loudness. Not all CDs are mastered to the same loudness. You'll find that when you rip MP3s from different albums, you'll find yourself adjust the volume repeatedly. Once the MP3s are normalized then you load them onto your MP3 player of choice.

 

I use both an iPod Touch 64Gb 5th Gen model and a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact. Both are excellent music sources.

 

It probably does not apply for a daily commute, but I did the cd>headphone for trips and so I would take what 20 cds or however many fit in a small carrying case, and invariably 1/4 of the way through the first leg of the trip I would find out I really should have brought so and so. This setup really helps with that.

If you have the space on the laptop or an external drive ripping to ALAC is smart if you ever expect to use the laptop output to a dac and home stereo someday; as was said, you may down the road really wish you had done everything that way. The 256 loading on the fly seems the best option for sure; but if you still wanted 320 for whatever reason, I would point out you only have to rip the CD to ALAC once, as you have the option to then create an AAC 320 from what you already ripped. So you would have a copy of both and you could control your smart playlist to only read kbps < 400 or whatever and so the list you sync to your phone won't have ALAC files on it. It may well be dumb to have two versions on your laptop, but I bring it up as an options if you wanted ALAC for the future but did not want to go under 320 for the phone. Back up everything of course, maybe twice, two locations possibly; once you do it, you are not too psyched to do it again.

 

I was a relatively late comer to the world of portable digital players (2008 or so), but once you start shuffling through playlists or your favorite albums or complete works of an artist, it is hard to go back! Sort of like having your own custom radio station.

Enjoy!

 

Got the same problem,(sans commute!) and was looking at something like a Philips-GoGEAR Ariaz MP3 Player..do not need a phone application, just a simple low cost player. Fidelity is not all that important.

 

I would also consider the FiiO X1 in the same price range. In the portable world you can get a lot of opinions over at head-fi.org and the X1 is pretty well loved for what it is. I don’t have one mind you but am in the market for one of these DAPs to play FLACs, maybe a few hi res, a better DAC and headphone amp, swappable micro sd cards, all in one package to use instead of the phone.

 

You might want to consider ripping and keeping the files you ripped on a small external drive with Itunes pointing to that drive. That way as you rip you can transfer to your phone and off your phone without worrying about re-ripping the cd if you want to hear it again.

When I got my first Ipod (60gb) I didn't have a music server set up like I do now. So I used an extra HD I had to create a 320kb archive of the cds I was ripping. Of course I later realised that I should've just started ripping in lossless as that would save me time when I did build a proper music server but I wasn't thinking of that back then.

Anyway, just a suggestion.

 

OP, consider iTunes Match if you go iPhone since you have so much music. I use it and love it.

 

You will likely rediscover entire CDs or deep tracks on those you rarely pull off the shelf - that happened to me when I made switch,

 

The way I see it you should tackle one thing at a time before diving in head-first into the 21st century. You'll overwhelm yourself!

Let's break it down.



1. You want to start ripping your CDs

• for this, you can go the easy route or the food route. Lossless quality and verified rips will create perfect digital clones of your discs on your computer, for use on all devices. That's the hard route. iTunes simplifies things quite a bit but does not provide the same level of quality even at it's best configuration.

2. You need a new phone

• you use your phone for many many years, this would be an important area to invest in. Get an iPhone. Top notch build quality, intuitive to use for experts and beginners, and it's basically the gold standard amongst smartphones.
While there are "free" or low cost options in the iPhone line, again, I highly recommend investing here if you are one to keep it for a long time. Not only to get the highest quality device, but also the biggest capacity - if you use it to take pictures and videos or download applications, you will start to feel the squeeze for space eventually. A 128gb iPhone 6 will give you room to breathe for the next 15 years. One less thing to worry about. I certainly consider myself a power user and this is what I currently use.
Keep in mind the iPhone 6 comes in a "plus size" as well, if you prefer a bigger screen.
But more importantly, it's basically guaranteed that Apple will come out with something new within the next 3 months - likely to be an improved revision of the 6/6+. So my recommendation would be to hold out for that at this point.



3. You want to sync your music to your new phone.


• again, this depends on the method you used to rip, but if you went through iTunes, it is very intuitive and easy to get the hang of. Even if ripping and playing back lossless via alternative applications, you can have new music at your fingertips each morning within seconds. And it all fits in your pocket! Isn't the future great