Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

there is a reflexive leverage of the idea of loss whenever preservation comes up, digital or otherwise, that i have an ambivalent relationship with. nonetheless i can't help but wonder exactly how and in what form researchers 50 years from now will understand culture and the internet when so much documentation and context is disappearing and will disappear. on the one hand, tech enables so much more of it. on the other, the amount that can just disappear after an acquisition or w/e is just staggering. the numbers on both ends are hard to get a handle on ime.

xxp yes gratefully there are countless ways to be an asshole

and i hardly think that justifies ripping digital copies to keep forever if you haven't paid for them. i mean, we've all done it, but it's still not right if there's any avenue for getting a legit permanent copy.

xpost

compared to previous eras in history we must be producing, even just non-digitally, a tremendous amount of record, right? like just all the published books alone. it's hard to imagine losing all that information in some kind of modern library of alexandria fire.

yeah i don't think singular event loss is the most accurate way of thinking about how the fragility of digital information manifests itself, it's more scattered / in smaller increments / at the edges / more streamlined as part of other processes imo.

and i hardly think that justifies ripping digital copies to keep forever if you haven't paid for them. i mean, we've all done it, but it's still not right if there's any avenue for getting a legit permanent copy.

tracer, i was clearly referring to cases where there is no way to get a "legit permanent copy." read again.

fair enough!

sorry to be grouchy. i just thought i had made myself pretty clear.

i feel like having as we do the theoretical capability to save everything makes us very loss-averse. was reading about a vector of this with the internet archive guy talking about video games, which have a bigger problem than music, because music, when you record it, it's there, it's done. video games now on steam, the code is constantly changing. and even more than that the community. look at something like tinymud. we're trying to figure out what it means to "archive" that, but you can't. you can't archive community. loss is part of life; you can't save everything. and none of us can know what's going to be "valuable" a hundred years from now, what experiences people will be able to learn from. i can imagine someone going, in 2115, "why did they put so much effort into those fucking grateful dead bootlegs instead of telling us what we actually want to know?". (not pickin' on the dead, just a random example.)

don't know where to put this so I'm putting it here since streaming paywalls and the perishability of online services were discussed above http://www.stereogum.com/1806026/leaked-contract-confirms-soundcloud-is-plotting-a-subscription-service/news/

the other day maura mentioned on twitter that one of Robyn's mid-2000s remixes is completely unfindable now

ok, off-thread i know, but i'll bite.

which remix ?

back in the mid-00s i got sent a lot of robyn cd-eps with remixes on them.

you never know.

If this is the tweet... https://twitter.com/maura/status/605575281345183744 then that track is easily available for purchase as a digital file or on discogs.

ahh .. and of course, i don't have this one.

well, just wanted to see if i could help.

"why did they put so much effort into those fucking grateful dead bootlegs instead of telling us what we actually want to know?"...

― rushomancy, Wednesday, June 3, 2015 7:31 PM

You make some very good points but i have a small issue with the perspective. One of the major issues that might alter the precepts of your discussion is the nature of being "connected" or not. Many people use social apps to coral their real friends, others for their fake friends, layers and levels for those in-between, and even more for those unknown future connections. But what of those un-connected? Sure, their are those who only converse via direct face-to-face, hand-written letters or telephone; maybe a few of these people can be cajoled into texts or emails, but they tend to be migrants from their traditional mode(s) of communication.

The "opinions" of these non-connected people is just as lost to history as is the whimsy of any given online community. Example: I have this friend that i have known forever and have shared many experiences (and music) with, yet, nowhere does their exist any tangible evidence of the "why". The historic confabs are lost to the ether and the exchanged mixtapes are of no directly defined origin -- but we both "know" who the other is and our friendship is of a definably important nature.

My point is that unless i someday write a book that defines the nature of the relationship i have with this friend, that archive will be just as lost as any given droplet down a river. So, one could argue what's going to be "valuable" a hundred years from know is the same as what is valuable today -- it depends more on the individuals and the "editors" who sift out the chaff for the more salient and relevant details. Also noting that people many times need to let old things go before they let new things in.

A hundred years from now historians will likely point out how the general populace was so distracted by their "connectivity" that they lost the forest for the trees. Even more than that, answering "what we actually want to know" 100-years-hence assumes that the question doesn't change over the same duration [end of tangent].

I treat my digital music the same as my material music -- i don't keep it unless i like it but i still keep some titles simply for their "importance". I'm not quite as picky with the expanse of my digital stax because the space is so affordable; still, i keep everything tagged, properly annotated, and always with cover art -- and, in general, just as organized as i can reasonably manage (given the inherent difficulties of the format). I have 2 hard drive back-ups and zero intention of ever saving it to the cloud -- so, i still await tech to catch up with my desires to make a truly archival copy of my 0.7 TB digital collection.

Another new one at NPR

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411795140/looking-for-a-connection-in-an-infinite-jukebox

"why did they put so much effort into those fucking grateful dead bootlegs instead of telling us what we actually want to know?"...
because what you need to know, man, is how sweet garcia's tone is on this "franklin's tower" from '75! the answers are all there!

if there's one thing archival science has taught us pretty conclusively over the past century it's that the informational value of something kept is unknowable, albeit in some knowable ways.

paper is actually a very "sticky" way of representing memory and a book doesn't have to be written to save the possibility of discovery of someone or some relationship, in many cases a decision just has to be made to not throw away a filing cabinet or box or receipt and/or keep it somewhere dry and/or entrust it to someone else. in many cases what these archives / personal accumulations document never becomes "opened" as a subject but until someone makes the active decision to get rid of them the potential is there. they have the potential to be human readable for hundreds of years. (depending on the composition of the paper; newspaper is notoriously short-lived for example.)

thinking more about this, maybe the threat of digital "loss" today is overstated since what we're talking about in many ways is an increasingly complicated form of archaeology that is abstracted from but still inescapably rooted in the physical, and digital forensics is a very new burgeoning field iirc.

in some ways what digital information is doing is modifying our concept of memory, changing its utility from something that used to be more or less practical to something that has an increasingly ideological air about it imo, something that is feel-y, marketable and maybe only indicative of a certain end-of-the-world neurosis about loss. xps

don't know what i was thinking when i typed "albeit in some knowable ways" above as it's unknowable, full-stop!

i think what i meant is that you can guess around it but yeah, no one can actually predict the future, shocker

Due to Spotify's desktop downgrade (still can't even search through local files), I've canceled and been enjoying my archive. I really hope iTunes/Beats seamlessly integrates everything.

it seems to me like a much bigger challenge for future archeologists than finding missing archival information is going to be digging through the massive amounts of available information looking for things of value. or maybe the two are linked - the things you want to find are gone, the things you don't want to find are everywhere

yes

the things you want to find are gone, the things you don't want to find are everywhere

see also: every thrift store vinyl bin nowadays

i've written a lot on this to try and understand but i'm not going to post most of it. i'm not sure "connection" on the internet is everything it's cracked up to be. i don't feel as "connected" to anyone i talk to on the net, even people i've known for decades, as people i interact with on a daily basis. i feel like all this social mania, curating, sharing, "connecting", is a desperate and mostly unsuccessful attempt to get computers to simulate the emotions and growth we get from talking to other human beings face to face. maybe one day the "connectedness" you get from sharing a spotify playlist with someone will surpass the social utility of meeting them for lunch, but that day hasn't come yet. people who don't exist as online "presences" have as much ability to affect the future, as much ability to be remembered or forgotten, as anybody alive prior to 1993. they're not a problem which needs solving. the internet is.

xp mordy: finding value in excessive quantities of data is what i do for a living. it's far from trivial, but like they used to say in the '80s, too much is always better than not enough.

maybe one day the "connectedness" you get from sharing a spotify playlist with someone will surpass the social utility of meeting them for lunch, but that day hasn't come yet

speak for yourself!

lol

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/19/music-groups-win-court-battle-private-copying-cds

Good thing I ripped all my CDs whilst it was legal...

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/all-power-to-the-pack-rats/

xp applies to uk only thankfully

ty sarahell

there's probably a way around this but for awhile i've been annoyed at how the mobile Music app on iOS shows you songs that aren't actually on your phone, so if you're out of range you can see them but not listen to them. if you have no connection those should just vanish surely.

Settings > Music > Show All Music [slide to off]

My computer crossed into the void a few days ago. Just got a new laptop. Luckily a few days before that happened I updated my external hard drive with the latest downloads. But I think I just lost my itunes playlists permanently, some of which I've worked on for over a decade.

Has anyone tried those third party apps that will transfer all the songs/playlists from an ipod/phone to a new computer?

thank you Favorite Album!

thing is, when i DO have internet, i'd like to see the stuff in the cloud, so i can stream/DL/listen..... guess that means toggling that setting on and off each time?

Has anyone tried those third party apps that will transfer all the songs/playlists from an ipod/phone to a new computer?

ephpod rescued my years worth of metatagging from an old iPod two years ago

itunes match is going up to 100,000 songs: http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/29/apple-itunes-match-100k-songs/

Finally.

Nice but Amazon still has them beat at 250,000 songs.

I have a question about streaming music from my computer, and I thought you some of you might know the answer...

I have ripped a lot of my albums on my computer as flac files. I also have a bluray player that's capable of playing flacs. However, what I haven't managed to do is stream those flacs as flacs from the computer to the bluray player, so I could listen to them in my living room. I've tried a few media server programs, such as Plex and Subsonic, and while they can stream flac files, they always transcode them into mp3, so the bluray player is playing a lossy transcoded version of the file instead of the original flac.

Are there some technical limitations that makes it impossible to stream flacs as such, without transcoding them? If not, are there any media server programs that would be able to stream flacs without turning them into mp3s?

My dilemma is about tagging classical music albums. I bought this CD of the Berlin Philharmonic playing Schoenberg, Berg and Webern and when I ripped it obviously Berlin Philharmonic comes up as the artist and the tracks are all "Schoenberg String Quartet 1" etc. etc. I'm wondering if I should change the artist tag to the composer's name b/c if I want to listen to some Schoenberg I should be looking for Schoenberg's name not that of the Berlin Phil.

When you tag an album or a song, you can multiple artists with a separator between them. So, for example, if I'll add a Schönberg album played by the Berlin Philharmonic, I can tag the artist as "Arnold Schönberg\\The Berlin Philharmonic", and after that, when I browse through artists in my music collection, the album appears under both Schönberg and the Berlin Philharmonic.

Apparently different music players might recognize different separators, while looking for info online, I've also read that a ";" or a "/" could be used to separate multiple artists in the ID3v2 tagging, but my MP3 player doesn't recognize those (tagging the album as "Arnold Schönberg/The Berlin Philharmonic" means it'll only be listed "Arnold Schönberg/The Berlin Philharmonic", not under two different artists), while it does recognize the "\\" separator.

I have a question about streaming music from my computer, and I thought you some of you might know the answer...

I have ripped a lot of my albums on my computer as flac files. I also have a bluray player that's capable of playing flacs. However, what I haven't managed to do is stream those flacs as flacs from the computer to the bluray player, so I could listen to them in my living room. I've tried a few media server programs, such as Plex and Subsonic, and while they can stream flac files, they always transcode them into mp3, so the bluray player is playing a lossy transcoded version of the file instead of the original flac.

Are there some technical limitations that makes it impossible to stream flacs as such, without transcoding them? If not, are there any media server programs that would be able to stream flacs without turning them into mp3s?

― Tuomas, Wednesday, July 22, 2015 3:19 AM (3 hours ago)

You can absolutely stream flac as flac from Subsonic as long as the player supports it. You should be able to just go to the Transcoding tab and remove flac from the Convert From field, or, if you want it to transcode for all players except the bluray, find the bluray on the Players tab (after you've played to it once so it's a defined player) and disable the audio transcode option for it.

you'll also want to make sure there's no max bitrate defined for the user or player

Thanks Tuomas, I'll try that out.

The tagging convention for classical music where Artist = Performer has always made me crazy, I get why it started (you wouldn't want the artist field for coltrane my favorite things to be Rodgers and Hammerstein) but when I browse CM, like anagram it's bc I want to hear some schoenberg or Schumann or saariaho and that's the list I want to see.

I've always tagged the composer in the Artist field by themselves and identified the performer/ensemble/conductor in the album title right after the work name.

Artist: Schoenberg
Album artist: fuck you I never use this field and always blank it out
Album: Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16 - Dohnanyi/Cleveland SO

Or

Schumann
Humoreske - Richter (bmg melodiya remaster)

Or

Bartok
Piano Concertos 1-3 - Kocsis/Fischer/Budapest Festival O

an album like yr Schoenberg berg Webern one I would basically rip as three separate short albums by those composers. Only when it's a super mixed recital with like 12 short pieces by 12 different composers will I give in and put the performer in the Artist field.

I only have one version of a given classical piece, so I just go composer-as-artist, and separate individual pieces (like if there are two string quartets on a single disc of Beethoven) into their own albums.

Yeah, the artist = performer thing is mostly useless when it comes to classical music, though I do sometimes use it with solo perfomers that a have distinctive style, like Jacqueline du Pré. But just like you, mostly it's the composer I want to listen to, so I can't be arsed to add the performer to the artist tag, not even with a "\\" separator.

Where the separator comes really handy in classical is the cases (which I think are fairly common in classical music) where you have music by several different composers on one album. So, for example, if I have an album with compositions by Edward Elgar and Hubert Parry, I put "Hubert Parry\\Edward Elgar" in the album artist tag, then put "Edward Elgar" into the artist tag for all of his tracks, and "Hubert Parry" for all of his tracks.

This way I can browse through artists, and my mp3 player shows the album in question under both Parry and Elgar. And if play the album that way, for example, browsing it via Parry, the player will only play those individual tracks on the album where I've tagged the artist as Parry, while it doesn't play the tunes tagged for Elgar. So there's no need to rip the album into separate folders by composer. And if I want to play the whole album with both composers' tracks, I can browse it via albums, and then it'll play all the tracks. Tagging albums like this takes a bit of extra work, but I think it works nicely with classical music.

(xpost)

You can absolutely stream flac as flac from Subsonic as long as the player supports it. You should be able to just go to the Transcoding tab and remove flac from the Convert From field, or, if you want it to transcode for all players except the bluray, find the bluray on the Players tab (after you've played to it once so it's a defined player) and disable the audio transcode option for it.

― felldownawell, 22. heinäkuuta 2015 14:47 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you'll also want to make sure there's no max bitrate defined for the user or player

― felldownawell, 22. heinäkuuta 2015 14:50 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I did try streaming flacs with Subsonic, but I'm not sure if I did all the steps you mention here, so I'll try it again once I get home. Thanks for the help!

Album artist: fuck you I never use this field and always blank it out

Why is that, out of curiosity? I was about to suggest that as a good place for the composer's name. I have very little classical in my iTunes so there may likely be issues with that solution, but it works well for me.

I also find that field very useful with pop/rock stuff -- like for compilations that are tributes to a particular artist and I want them sorted under that artist's name, not with the rest of the compilations; or anthologies of an artists who recorded with different bands.

Well there is a Composer tag, why not use that?