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WARNING _ ILLEGAL ACTIVITY DESCRIBED BELOW - click read more if you want to see the rest.

I have recently completed re-ripping my entire CD collection at the maximum MP3 bitrate. It came to 15GB of music. This includes all the kids cds that they like to play in their beatbox and the car cd player. There are several reasons I do this.

• Protects the original CDs from damage by their not being used, I create copies for the kids tro use
• Allow central storage and streaming of music across our network. Windows Vista and Media Centre work really nicely with Media Plaer now. I have all the music stored on one hard drive and shared to all users on our network. The Media Centre in the Media room can stream movies and music wirelessly onto our main Amp and speaker system for listening without having to change CDs on the CD player
• Allows for the protection against loss. I have another 1 GB of music files ripped previously from CDs that I know I used to have, but appear to have lost.

I have also started ripping our DVD collection for the same reasons. Some were already done, but I have actively started doing the rest. Now that hard drive space* is cheap I am ripping them at the maximum compression as ISO files that can be copied for the kids to play or launched in a virtual CD drive on a PC to play.

Of course this is all illegal - technically. Ridiculously the copyright laws do not allow me to do this with DVD's though they have relaxed the copyright law with CDs in Australia now. However I prefer to believe that my DVD and CD collection is an asset I want to maintain and if a DVD or CD is lost or damaged I want to still be able to enjoy the music or film I purchased. The rules regarding recording TV shows are also archaic. You can only record if you want to watch it at a more convenient time, and you can allow others you live with to watch it but you can't give it to them or keep it indefinately.

*Adding up the hard drive space roughly I think we have 4.3TB of space across our network with about 1.7TB free.