My First Full Album Purchase off iTunes

I'm going to admit that my first full album purchase (ie - not a single song) was Rick Ross's "Deeper Than Rap" album. And I got the deluxe version, lol.

It was about 6 months ago that I really started thinking about just how sweet it would be to have all of my music on my computer (well actually on an external drive connected to my computer) and the ultimate possibility of having an iPod with every song I have ever purchased or downloaded in my pocket whenever I feel like it. I've got about 90Gbs of music on my external drive and that could fit onto a classic iPod pretty easily. And the prospect of that makes me smile much more than it makes me nervous.

Some people I've spoken to seem to think that it's dangerous to have all your music in "one place". But what they're missing is that all the music isn't necessarily in a single location (in this case, the iPod). It's more of a distributed model with the iPod being one single device through which you can access the music. And with that said I'll give my plan for my musical archive...

The first thing I did was take all the CDs that I own and ripped them to my computer. That took me about a month to do (I had a crapload of CDs) on a when-I-had-the-time basis. From there I realized I was eventually going to run out of space on my hard drive (and relatively soon at that) so I invested some money in a portable 200Gb external hard drive. In hindsight this probably wasn't that smart of a move as I could have gotten a media server and not have to have the worry of carrying the external drive with me everywhere I take my labtop. Or I could have searched for a router with a USB port and turned the external hard drive into a psuedo-network attached drive (essentially achieving what a media server would but it's more of a hack than a proper media server implementation). The router I have doesn't have a USB port but it probably wouldn't be too difficult to find one with a USB port.

So next I'm going to buy a 1Tb media server (ie - 1000 or 1012 Gbs, depending on how nerdy you want to be), connect that to my network at home, and make my music library accessible from anywhere on the planet that I have my labtop. This will allow me to have access to my music at work, at home, or anywhere else with an internet connection. Not to mention I'll still have the option of saving everything on my iPod and I can take that instead of my labtop whenever it's more convenient to just have an iPod. The only issue that this "plan" presents is that it's subject to the speed of my internet connection and ultimately the reliability of my internet service provider. And that might just might turn out to be the downfall of this plan. But until then I've got hopes that I'll have a music archive set up that is optimized for my lifestyle and for accessibility.