There are so many ways to store and play back your digital music. For archiving you can use CD or DVD as the cheapest storage solution. Your average song will eat up 5Mb (good bitrate and 4 minute song) so your average CD can store 100 songs and the average DVD will store 940 songs.But disk are easy to damage and if you have experienced scratches in the past you may want to store your music on a disk. If you have a 80 gig hard drive and used 70 gig for music that would leave you with enough space for roughly 14,000 songs. But you should add your music to an External Hard Drive, this way you can easily move the MP3’s between any computer you own!
Your Top Three Options
- Based on your needs you have three options. Option #1, store the music on a device that can play the music back as well. AKA a MP3 player.
- If you don’t need to play the music back and just want a place to store the music then you just need cheap disk space.
- You can go even cheaper and store the music on CD or DVD.
Best MP3 Player Storage Options
Thanks to compression algorithms you can store even more MP3’s on a MP3 player. Here are some of the top rated items from Amazon.
Best Hard Disk Storage Options
With hard drive space being so cheap that makes this decision easy. Here are my top picks from Amazon. All have plenty of space to hold 1,000’s of songs! Just plug the drive into your computer and start moving the music to your USB attached storage device.
Best CD and DVD Options
Here are some quality CD and DVD options. You’ll need to look at the front of your CD/DVD drive on your computer. If it says “DVD RW” you know you can burn DVD’s. If that’s the case I’d purchase the DVD’s since they can store many more songs than CD.
What to Look for in a Computer for Music
If you’re only using the computer to store music and basic stuff like surfing the internet I recommend you focus more on a quality CD burner in your computer. Look for fast read speed no less than 52x since you’re ripping those CD’s to MP3 to store them. So now that you have your fast burner and sizable hard drive you need to pick your PC. Laptop hard drives cost way more than a PC. If you are only using this to store music then I say you purchase a used PC off ebay. If you want a new PC or laptop roll with a Dell. You can customize the CD reader/burner and hard drive size during your order and Dell offers quality at a good price. Here’s a list of my top buys on Amazon.