[Heavy]

I don't have a spare hard drive to load them on to, so I need to put them on a disc. I'd like to take the songs I've accumulated in my itunes library and back them up. Someone told me a DVD disc will hold a lot more data than a CD-R. I don't have a spare hard drive to load them on to, so I guess I'll need to put them on a disc.

On average, how many can fit on a dvd disc if I burn it as data? Is there a way to compress them to squeeze as many as possible on there?

[f1000]

Best way to back up mp3s?

Why do you need to back up MP3s? Just re-rip them from the original CDs.

Compressing MP3s is pointless because they're already highly compressed.

[SpaceMonkey]

How many mp3s you can fit on a DVD depends on if it is a single-layer or a dual-layer DVD (dual-layer DVD-Rs are more expensive than single-layer DVD-Rs, and you need a dual-layer burner), and how big your MP3s are. But as an example, let's just say that you have 10 GB of MP3s. You'd need 3 single-layer DVD-Rs or two dual-layer DVD-Rs to hold all of them.

You can burn the discs (data discs, as they are called in the iTunes burning preferences) directly in iTunes itself. When iTunes finishes burning one DVD, it will automatically tell you to insert another one. Or, if you want to preserve the folder hierarchy they are in (iTunes doesn't), you can burn them in Finder, but then burning the multiple DVDs becomes a manual process and you have to figure out which folders will fit on which DVDs.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by f1000

Why do you need to back up MP3s? Just re-rip them from the original CDs.

For some, the time spent ripping hundreds of CDs is not something that we want to have to repeat any time soon. Obviously, an external hard drive is much more beneficial than DVD-Rs in this sense, but even restoring a back-up from a dozen DVD-Rs is, IMO, much more convenient than re-ripping hundreds of CDs.

[TETENAL]

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