Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

original post :(3) I need a life in general.

fix'd

My media organizer software, J River Media Center, has slowly turned into a great media server, which requires almost no effort to set up. I'm ready to stream my library all over my house - what have other people used for receiving devices? I'd like to get a wifi DLNA-compliant device, which JRMC can recognize, and ideally it'd have a display to show the artist/track playing. Any suggestions?

logitech squeezebox is what I use. a little pricey but I really do love it.

Any links to good articles about this topic, from an organizational perspective or a practical usage view?

appletv was a completely realistic and cheap solution to this for me. yeah I know no flac but I just use apple lossless if I want lossless on something.

i'm thinking about getting an appletv pretty soon. can you describe how you use it as a media server. i am also contemplating a 3 piece sonos system. just wondering how you use the appletv aside from watching netflix etc.

So a big ol' thinkpiece from Pareles in the NYT today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/arts/music/new-online-services-offer-hope-to-music-fans.html

Does capture a certain state of things, though I do find it interesting he hasn't just simply let go of all that extra stuff yet; then again I think this is in large part a function of generations and time. Part of my recent move involved me making good on my long promised plan to donate the bulk of my CD collection to my old radio station; that was done a couple of weeks back. It was intriguing to feel no sense of loss in doing so as I packaged up the many boxes' worth of the collection, instead enjoying the empty sense of clarity that resulted and which has carried over to my new place. What rump of the collection I have consists of two medium sized racks tucked away in a closet and a spillover rack in my office area, and I couldn't be happier -- wouldn't be surprised if I chose to further winnow all that in the near future too.

damn, this thread is almost two years old!

unless a CD's hiding around the house, i ended up getting rid of literally every CD i own

2000 jpgs and many hours later I have tagged my collection of flac folders... around 750 from LP or tape, 1200 or so from CDR. Now it is really a pleasure to just be able to throw whatever I want onto the portable player for my workday listening. If I hear something that stumps me, I can just tap on the screen and immediately see the art & tags. Now I just need a 3 TB external stored elsewhere for one more layer of redundancy.

I'm about to buy a passport harddrive to store my music on, but I keep putting it off because of the extremely daunting task of tagging and organizing my MP3s. How do you guys organize? I have lots of single tracks so I'm thinking of doing it by genre, but yeah... going through every single mp3 on my computer is going to be a nightmare.

I have a big digital 'colection' but I still buy CDs and vinyl all the time, I like having the physical object for some reason... and I have a bunch of LPs that I need to rip to my computer. I'm just going to devote an entire day to re-organizing.

Tagging albums is pretty easy—several programs out there that do a really good, easy job. What I'd like to see is one that lets you right-click a loose mp3 and automatically download the tagging info/art for it. Anyone know of anything like that?

Without physical CDs, how will I go over to your house and judge you immediately based on your music collection?!

Sniff the stink cloud

OK, now we're getting somewhere... 6TB disk array with Thunderbolt connection. Expensive as hell now, but it'll drop in price.

I heartily approve.

I got my backup drives but I have been so damn busy I haven't even opened one of them yet. The other is done, I need to get it over to my friend's house for safekeeping. Now I can start ripping my CD collection (I am on "Bevis Frond" right now).

oh hi Ned xp

Also, do not make my mistake and buy a Seagate drive. It's slowly dying. I am a WD convert as of two weeks ago when I did a bunch of research on externals.

Hi there!

Sleeve, how long have you had your Seagate hd? And at what point did it start dying?

had it since January 2010, so a year and a half? It frequently makes this loud repetitive clicking/knocking sound that I read was a symptom of a slowly dying drive. It's the PCB controller board to the drive that's the problem, not anything mechanical.

lol redundant "board" in that sentence, sorry. PCB = printed circuit board fyi.

Also, do not make my mistake and buy a Seagate drive. It's slowly dying. I am a WD convert as of two weeks ago when I did a bunch of research on externals.

Conflict! I've been a Seagate convert ever since I had 2 WD models fail on me.

About the HDs that fail, do you keep them plugged in all the time, or do you only plug them in when you do a backup? I've had a Seagate for about a year and half now, and I haven't had any problems yet. I also don't keep it plugged in -- only when I do a backup.

I have one drive that's dedicated to TimeMachine (on OS X here) and I use that daily in the evening when I'm done for the night. The other drives I use for archiving (big drives for storing things - mostly mp3s, movies, Logic projects, etc.) I use maybe once a week.

my Seagate is on all the time. it puts itself to sleep if it's not being used though. we'll see which dies first, the Seagate or its WD backup.

learned some other interesting stuff from my local repair shop about how the Mac Stores use the cheapest possible drive in their LaCie models.

Really regretting all the stuff I didn't put in Apple Lossless before storing it. I don't really understand people who claim that it's hard to hear the difference -- the sound is so much richer.

I'm listening to a CD right now

i started this thread almost two years ago, and spotify basically made it so that i no longer give a shit about any of this kind of stuff

And you still wont pay the $10 a month?

Everything I ever got from emusic sounds shitty on good speakers, pandora even at higher quality sounds inconsistent on good speakers, doubt spotify will be different. I may just get all my CDs out of storage as soon as I have my place set up.

what is spotify?

And you still wont pay the $10 a month?

― fappin' duke (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, August 5, 2011 11:46 PM

nah i think i'm eventually going to go w/ the $5 or $10 a month thing but right now this is fine

it's totally worth $10 a month

i can't tell much of a difference between 128 AAC streaming over my apple router to 5 piece speakers, vs. CD

all the same to me

naturally i still own like 3,000 something cds

Naturally. You need the liner notes and the wall-collage CD spine effect!

well right now, the 25-boxes-in-a-storage-closet effect... someday i'll get the collage going again ;_;

i can't tell much of a difference between 128 AAC streaming over my apple router to 5 piece speakers, vs. CD

all the same to me

― i genuinely thought when i first joined that he was the admin (ilxor), Sunday, August 7, 2011 9:57 PM

imo this says more about the poor quality of surround sound than the quality of your source signal

i listen to most of my music via spotify, youtube, or my car's sound system

i have it set up to mostly come out of L/R front two speakers, not really a big surround imitation thing

xp

I'm not super familiar with Spotify.

I'm not super familiar with the Awl.

― buzza, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 4:43 AM

<3 buzza

― markers, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 7:05 AM

really enjoying spotify

― buzza, Sunday, July 17, 2011

128 kbps AAC is actually not bad. Way ahead of 128 kbps MP3

I highly doubt anyone could tell the difference between the CD and a good 224 kbps -aps rip

320 mp3s running through apple tv to my stereo sound mostly fine. the different is pretty slight, to me. still torn on whether it's worth selling off most of my cds though; they've been in storage for the past year while I was in a temporary living situation and I didn't miss 99% of them. but now I have a house, and maybe some room to keep them. selling them isn't going to net me very much money.

Do what I promised to do, and finally did -- donate to a place that can use them. In this case, my old campus radio station.

i finally chucked itunes for media monkey after i had to nuke my computer and it rules. so much faster. granted, my computer is lol old but i am not made of money. the hundreds of library cds we ripped to .wav are now converted to flac. i'm scared of compression formats especially when storage is relatively cheap these days--and hey, everything plays wav, it's high quality and it isn't going away any time soon--but one reason to never rip to wav is that wav does not store metadata. if your music library database goes, your artist/album info goes with it.

As sayeth the Lord, tear down the temple and in three days I will rebuild it.

As I'm going through a ripping pretty much my entire collection of CDs, I'm realizing I'm going to run out of space on my laptop sooner rather than later. I use iTunes for everything right now (yes, I realize its not the best option but I've been using it long enough now that I don't really wanna switch) and I'm tempted to go the route of an external hard-drive to manage my collection. Any drawbacks or things I should watch out for if I choose this route? I guess the biggest thing to get around will be not having music on my laptop when I travel, unless I bring the external drive everywhere.