Organized backing up of many mp3s to DVD

August 17, 2007 10:55 PM

Help me burn my 100GB of Mp3s to DVD in some sort of organized fashion! (Mac)

I have a lot of mp3s in iTunes, and I'd like to back them up to DVD and DVD-DL disks. In the past, I've just copied folders from my iTunes music library to Toast, but it results in a pretty random set of albums on each DVD. I'd be nice if I could get my mp3s to DVD in a somewhat organized fashion such that I could find what I was looking for relatively easily (say, by genre or composer or something).

Burning an MP3 DVD through iTunes seems like it just makes a DVD with each individual mp3 file on the uppermost directory - even less organized than my copying of folders to Toast. (At least it seemed to do that when I tried it a year or two ago)

So! What's my best bet?

posted by anonymoose to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

For any significant quantity of data, a USB or Firewire hard drive is a better backup solution than a huge stack of DVDs.
posted by aubilenon at 11:12 PM on August 17, 2007

After you get the files to the dvds, you can use a program like Offline CD Browser that will let you search through all the DVDs without having to put each of them into the DVD drive every time. I know I've seen a better/different program that does this, but I've long since forgotten the name of it.
posted by philomathoholic at 11:24 PM on August 17, 2007

Dang, that's a lot of MP3's.
What I usually do is avoid iTunes altogether and create a new Burn Folder on my desktop and start clicking and dragging to that folder until I get up to my 8GB maximum.
After the burn I write on the disc the date and the artist range (for example, ABC through Heyward, Nick) and keep on going until I have all on DVD.
posted by willmize at 11:26 PM on August 17, 2007

When burning DVDs, I always include a few hundred megs of par2 data, just in case. Here is a little (well, a lot) more on data integrity of CD/DVD: Is recorded media such as CD-R completely permanent?

For any significant quantity of data, a USB or Firewire hard drive is a better backup solution than a huge stack of DVDs.

Certainly not. A failed DVD wipes out 5GB of data, a failed 500GB drive...

You could maybe say that RAID'd hard drives are better, but even then.. My suspicion is that firewire is a soon to be dead standard. USB will likely last, but IDE won't, and SATA may not either. On the other hand, CD/DVD will last.

If all you care about is convenience, a hard drive is fine, but remember that when the hard drive fails you will have to reconstruct the data from somewhere..
posted by Chuckles at 12:25 AM on August 18, 2007

why not use itunes backup function?

also - if you burn a disc in itunes, itunes will arrange the mp3s files in accordance with how the playlist is sorted. if it's sorted by album, you get a load of album folders, for example
posted by ascullion at 4:26 AM on August 18, 2007

Seconding what philomathoholic said. Back them up to DVD, number the DVDs and use a program like DiskTracker to keep track of them, remembering, of course, to put the DVD number in the DiskTracker comments box. Works for me.
posted by TheRaven at 4:51 AM on August 18, 2007

I haven't personally used it, but it got pretty good reviews and it has a "disc spanning" feature : Disco

After that, try DiskTracker like others have mentioned and you're all good.
posted by revmitcz at 3:37 PM on August 18, 2007

Choosing the correct DVD and storage conditons is important.
posted by lalochezia at 8:24 PM on August 19, 2007