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pescholl

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  1. I also tend to purchase Classical music by the label, with some exceptions. I recently picked up a copy of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" played by Anne Akiko Meyers based entirely on reviews. Her perfomance is different that what I am used to, but very enjoyable none-the-less.
  2. If you like big symphony orchestal pieces like Beethoven's 5th symphony, you might try some other symphonic "work horses". Rimsky-Korsakov "Scheherazade" Holst "The Planets" Grofe "Grand Canyon Suite" Respighi's Roman trilogy: "The Pines of Rome", "The Fountains of Rome", and "Roman Festivals" Debussy "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faune", "La Mer" and "Three Nocturns" Wagner "Orchestral Music from 'The Ring'" Mussorgsky "Pictures at an Exhibition" and "Night on Bald Mountain" Berlioz "Symphony Fantastique" Also, I'd like to add a symphony/choral mix: Orff "Carmina Burana" I'm not going to offer specific recordings because my taste in music may be different than other people's. Read the reviews at Amazon and other places and decide for yourselp.
  3. I have an Alienware laptop and the speakers on it sound quite good, like a quality tabletop radio. They are the best laptop speakers I have ever heard. Very listenable.
  4. Foobar can be configured to display anything you want, however you want it, but it does have a steep learning curve. Below is a pic of my Now Playing tab. As you can see, I also have 3 other tabs for filtering through my large music collection. I created a custom system of about a dozen tags for classical music and set up foobar to filter through them. This allows me to quickly find a specific recording out of thousands or I could bring up all of my baroque oboe concertos, for instance.
  5. JRiver and foobar2000 can play the iso files directly. With foobar you have to have the correct plugin and then under settings, you set whether you want foobar to play the stereo or multi-channel files and at what sample rate. Both will convert the DSD files to PCM on-the-fly unless you have a DSD DAC, which, right now, start at about $800.
  6. I did the same thing, had someone rip my 200 SACDs. He sent me back the iso files. I only have a stereo system so I am only extracting the stereo DSD files but am archiving the iso files to BD-R discs. Someday I may go multi-channel at which time I'll extract the multi-channel DSD files.
  7. I have many of the Kodama's set on Pentatone and highly recommend them. Beethoven Piano Sonatas, that is...
  8. I've always liked John Denver. In fact, the very first record I ever purchased was his Greatest Hits. I was 13 years old at the time and felt really guilty about spending $6 for it. In my experience, most JD albums have just OK sound quality, even the CDs. There is one noted exception if you can find it: The Best of John Denver Live on SACD. Its taken from his Wildlife Concert.
  9. True. I'm in my mid-50s and have a couple chronic medical problems, I hope to have another 20 years left in me. I just want my music collection to last longer than I do and then passed down to my kids. My oldest daughter will treat it like a family heirloom, knowing how much of my life I've poured into it. Concerning optical media, I am a firm believer in non-volatile backups of my data. Heck, I'm almost OCD about it! For the consumer, that means optical discs. When my brother was working on his masters thesis, a hard drive failure delayed him getting his degree by a year. I've lost personal data due to hard drive crashes, computer failures, and viruses. Corrupted data gets backed up as easily and good data. The only data truly "safe" from corruption is stored on non-volatile media. A good rule-of-thumb is: Have three copies of your data on two types of media. In my case, that's hard drive and optical.
  10. The main reason I'm planning on doing an optical backup of my music library is the threat of a virus. If a virus were to get past my home defenses and start messing up the headers in my music library, and I sync my drives without realizing what happened, I could loose all my music and nine years of work. With that in mind, a non-volatile optical archive of my music library (and other data libraries) becomes high-priority.
  11. I am planning to do an optical backup of my music collection on Blu-Ray in the near future. I figure 50 BDs per TB of data. So my entire music collection would fit on 150 BD-Rs. That is entirely manageable. Purchase one of those "DJ" cases with the hanging CD sleeves. Toss the sleeves and replace them with double slimline jewel cases. Store the BD-Rs in the slimline cases and the cases in the DJ box. Be sure to use archival grade BD-Rs such as TDK, Falcon or M-Disc. Put the DJ case in a lead-lined, underground vault that can withstand a direct nuclear explosion...
  12. I use FreeFileSync for Windows. Its easy to use, it is constantly being upgraded by its programmer, and, best of all, its free.
  13. I have a 3-TB external drive connected to my computer at home. It contains my entire music library, which is about 2.5-TB big. Almost every day I am adding new music or updating tags. Every evening before I turn off my computer, I sync my music library with a backup copy I keep on two 2-TB portable hard drives which I keep with me. I use the Windows program FreeFileSync for this purpose. I had to split my main music library into two smaller sub-libraries and keep each sub-library on a different portable drive. I also have a 3-TB external drive attached to my computer at work. Each morning I sync my portable drives with my work drive, making my work drive a mirror of my home drive. So I have three copies of my music library, which I started to work on back in 2004. My main copy at home, a mirror image copy at work, and a copy that I keep with me "just in case".
  14. One of my favorite HDTracks album is "Reveries" in high definition from Reference Recordings.
  15. I have all three versions mentioned above and they're all good. For more modern recordings I would suggest: Jarvi, Cincinnati Orchestra, Telarc, 2008 Dutoit, Montreal Symphony, Decca, 1987
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