I tunes

[jjbomber]

I’m going to go with a USB stick in the back of the Marantz. Seems the cheapest and easiest option to me.

There's a few of us on here that use USB hard drives on the back of Oppo players. Great way to play music.

 

[insider9]

I’m going to go with a USB stick in the back of the Marantz. Seems the cheapest and easiest option to me. 

Good choice. Enjoy

 

[Gonepostal]

I’ve only just realised that I can use AirPlay from my Asus laptop when using iTunes. I thought you had to have an Apple laptop or iPad in order to use AirPlay.

 

[iMark]

I’ve only just realised that I can use AirPlay from my Asus laptop when using iTunes. I thought you had to have an Apple laptop or iPad in order to use AirPlay.

This has been a feature of iTunes for Windows for years. More information in case you need to do a bit of troubleshooting here: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH20382?locale=en_GB

 

[Gonepostal]

It’s the first time I’ve used I tunes so had no idea. No need to buy anything as my laptop has a load of memory available. Very happy man right here. Thanks for all help and advice, time to rip my cds.

 

[MajorFubar]

time to rip my cds and buy a backup device.

Just corrected that for you. Don't ever underestimate how important it is to keep at least one backup. You don't want to rip your CDs ever again.

 

[nick8858]

Crucial advice from Major there! I have my rips on laptop, USB drive attached to the Pioneer Streamer AND a further USB drive which is a duplicate copy. These things are not expensive these days and I, for one, would lose the will to live if I lost my rips.

 

[Gonepostal]

Good advice as always, just ordered a 128gb flash drive from the bay for £45. Small price to pay for peace of mind.

 

[MajorFubar]

Crucial advice from Major there! I have my rips on laptop, USB drive attached to the Pioneer Streamer AND a further USB drive which is a duplicate copy. These things are not expensive these days and I, for one, would lose the will to live if I lost my rips.

I decided on a HDD rather than a USB stick because I figured it might offer a more secure long-term backup, on the grounds that I have had a couple of old (10yr+) USB sticks that suddenly won't work. It's probably six of one and half a dozen of the other though, and the main message is just definitely keep a copy, no matter how you do it.

Cloud backup is another option, e.g. DropBox or OneDrive. You'll need to pay a subscription to get large enough storage, but typically it's only £6-7 a month for a 1TB, which is way plenty enough for most people who don't have thousands of CDs to rip and/or hundreds of films. Unless you choose some weird service provider who might go under, that debatably is the most secure option for backup. It will of course take an age to initially upload a very large library (unless you're some lucky ****** with SDSL).

 

[Dave_]

You're not backed up unless you have at least 3 copies, stored on two different mediums and 1 is kept offsite (i.e the 3-2-1 strategy) + you've actually tested/confirmed the integrity of the backups...

 

[MajorFubar]

You're not backed up unless you have at least 3 copies, stored on two different mediums and 1 is kept offsite (i.e the 3-2-1 strategy) + you've actually tested/confirmed the integrity of the backups...

yeah cloud backup blurs that a little though. Unless you consider it just part of the 3-2-1 strategy, offshoring your backup to a cloud service, whom you can hopefully assume do the data-resilience stuff for you*, is a bit fit-an-forget.

*No doubt they all have smallprint exonerating them from any and all data loss, but the likelyhood is slim in reality.