Building media computer.

[David M]

I am going to build a media center computer that will be used to play music and to play movies. It will also need to be able to play some of my sons PC games. I plan on loading my music collection onto the hard drive(s) of the computer and use an internal IDE device like a Lite-on or a Plextor to play DVD's.

I have about 300 CD's and plan on purchasing more in the future so I need expansion. I realize that for the same drive space you can load on a lot more songs in an MP3 format than a .wav format. But I can hear the difference in quality between an MP3 and a regular CD. So I was wondering, what sampling rate for MP3 do you find absolutely no audible difference between the MP3 and the CD? I think I have seen 128 up to 196 or something like that. I have a really nice sound system and don't want to have to listen to music recorded at what the typical MP3 is recorded at because it does not sound as good as a .wav file.

So given that, how much hard drive space would I need to put my entire music collection of 300 albums onto the hard drive(s)..and figure another 300 albums for expansion over the years? I am willing to spend the money to buy a few very large hard drives if that is what it takes. Over a terrabyte?

Also, another big question is the software. I would like to categorize all my music into its various genres...jazz, classical, bluegrass, country, mellow rock, hard rock etc and be able to play the music according to my mood. It would be nice to play a shuffle of whatever genre I choose, randomly. Who makes software that gives me total control over my music collection? It would also be nice if it it can access the CDDB so that it shows the artist, album title and tracks.

The computer does not need to be a speed demon. It just needs to play music and DVD's. It does though need to be pretty quiet because I dont want fan or harddrive noise going during a movie.

So I have picked out the following build:
Case: Silverstone desktop case..not sure which one but a tower is too big for the entertainment center. It would not look right either. http://www.silverstonetek.com/products-lc14.htm

CPU: AMD 939, 3500 Winchester. I already have it.

PSU: No idea. It just needs to be quiet and reliable and be able to power the graphics card.

Graphics card: 6800 Ultra. I already have it.

Motherboard: Asus preferably. I needs only one graphics card slot.

RAM: One gig of economical RAM. Will not be overclocking anything.

Hardrive(s): I have no idea what size I will need. I tend to like WD drives but I am open to anything that is relaible and relatively quiet. I get the feeling they will be relatively large given the size of my CD collection.

IDE drive: It only needs to play CD's and DVD's, not burn them. I have another computer that can burn them if needed.

Mods: If this thread is more suited to Video, Audio and Multimedia, then please place it over there.

Thanks

[jmkeuning]

You know, that case looks pretty cool. Good luck with it.

To get your answer on the encoding question you need to go to an mp3 site, or other audio site. You could encode your files as PCM at 44.1KHz, 16 bit, stereo which will put you at around 600 megs per hour and give you a very high quality recording because it is completely uncompressed. You can do the math and figure out the HDD requirements.

As for organizing your collection, any software will depend on your tags. I do not know if you can tag PCM files the way you can tag mp3s. You will have to look in to this.

WD drives have recently earned a reputation for crashing, you may want to look at Seagate.

You are going to have a lot of ripping to do. You may want to get more than 1 52x CR reader. If you do, check the interface because (I think) that ATA will clog up if you try to run two drives off of one cable (master and slave). New mobos should have SATA which will help you avoid this problem.

Tuner card?