Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

would the metadata for a wav file be the kind of thing stored in those shadow files that you always get on a Mac, the dsstore files? but otherwise, yeah, usually no tags in wavs

No, nothing stored in .dsstore files unfortunately. WAV metadata is indeed only stored in the internal iTunes/Music database, and orphaned when you move them to another library.

You can store metadata in WAV files (in INFO chunks) but there is no standard defined way of doing this, so presumably Apple just doesn't do it.

Pity but I figured as much. Can't have it all!

siegbran i’m going to give it another go.

i assume you need to invoke it again after a restart?

ideally you would convert the wavs to flac to save space and support metadata but unfortunately itunes doesn't support flac. the itunes metadata db might just be an sqlite file so if you know what you're doing you could probably go in and update the paths to point to the new drive

iTunes supports ALAC though, right? it's lossless and presumably iTunes could read the metadata

So it turns out...there is a solution to the WAV conundrum, easier than I thought. Basically the steps outlined here tell the tale:

https://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive

But in essence:

* already had the actual iTunes library database sitting on my computer separate from the hard drive with the music

* reset the Music Media folder location in Preferences to the new hard drive, went through the appropriate steps

* in iTunes did File - Library - Organize Library - Consolidate

* waited for about fourteen hours

And not only did everything copy over but all the tagged WAV files remain tagged. Simplicity!

Simplicity!

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Unsimplicity!

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-obsessive-world-of-digital-music-collectors/

and

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/everything-you-need-to-build-your-own-digital-music-collection/

being able to add metadata tags to audio or visual files, in addition to location data with gps and geotagging, strikes me as one of the most successful implementations of structured data, with digital cameras and iTunes and streaming media. has this been a common experience? has the structured format of the data been useful? are the tags right in terms of search, etc?

Seemingly no standard for reading the tags across players hurts, but it's all a lot better than it used to be. I used to keep my files untagged but wouldn't think to do that now.

Which players are there? How did any existing standards evolve from what you can tell? Are the tags useful to you in terms of how you want to find or to classify your music or other collections or questions that occur when you think about your collections?

I'm not terribly fastidious with this but i do enjoy a good "mp3tag" session. I like that the Genre tag in id3v2 (and whatever else these days?) is wide open. i tag a lot of different stuff as genre "wavy" so i can tell Logitech Media Server to hit me with a shuffle of that stuff. Probably most any player will do that for you.

Recently discovered I can tag multiple artists if I separate with a semicolon, the release will show up under all the artists if I'm browsing by artist! (practically never but ok :)

so maybe being able to see past uses of genre but being able to add to the list and knowing clearly when multiple entries are permitted and how to add them (to give proper credit and to find) would be useful?

I'm aah into it yeah. Are you writing a paper or making some software? Thinking of going from streaming to collecting files? I like it all.

The tag standards themselves are pretty good, however it all depends on the implementations:

- there are no music servers/players that read/utilize *all* metadata fields, of course they all do the basics like Artist/Song Title/Album/Track#/Year but support for metadata like Composer, Record Label, Language, BPM, Key, Producer, Remixer, Original Release Date, etc is extremely hit and miss (and makes users put that info in one of the other, supported, fields instead)

- even though the tag standards allow it, only a few servers/players support multi-valued fields (like a song with multiple artists, multiple genres). Result: people use non-standard workarounds (semicolon) or flatten everything to single value.

I'm interested in Linked Data and the Semantic Web.

The constructive criticism of enthusiasts is reallly useful.

nice nice

but I don't have any explicit or well thought out motives other than curiosity about what might be possible

(most devs of player apps don't like implementing multi-valued fields because then you have to create many-to-many relationships in your db structure, joins in your queries etc. Easier to do just assume it's all 1-to-many and dunk it all in one big table)

I need to come up with a custom tag (and mod the library display code in LMS) that better sorts albums under individual artist listings... I want to first see a list of studio albums by year, then compilations, then live albums, etc. If you have 30-40 releases by a band just doing it by year or alphabetically annoys me.

godspeed! Share that up to the community if you have a crack at it!

hahaha I would characterize this project as "in the planning stages"

Really does more than I need already. Does Roon and such already group like that? I dunno what the appeal is with the pricey server things. All that bio information and automatically downloading press photos of artists is bleccch

I like how Plex does that for movies on my media server, but it annoys me for music.

otm

i replaced my Plex with Jellyfin and it's surprisingly similar and good. But it has this bug where it can't turn off the music bio/photo fetching lol. Only got the music in there at all as a lark but it's not bad as a remote access thing (LMS being home only really).

still kinda lookin for a good way to listen to all my music out and about without it being on my phone

seems like people are enjoying apple's music match /cloud locker thing but i doubt it's long for this world

i gave it up around the time i left ilx. music was social for me; with nobody to talk to about my extreme niche and fringe interests, i couldn't muster the time or the energy to keep up that part of things. i used to go on these fairly extreme deep dives in my hypomanic phases. i'd listen to and evaluate ridiculous amounts of albums. wouldn't listen to them in their entirety. didn't have _time_ to listen to that much music. wasn't fomo per se, just...

a lot of it _was_ a coping mechanism. mckenzie wark calls me out pretty directly in her review of grace lavery's _please miss_ in liber:

"Still, even among those of us who, for reasons of class, race, or abandonment by family, didn’t get to deflect our desires into formal schooling, there’s the transsexual autodidact. Learning is a popular trans kink, as is turning that into art and pedagogy, formal or informal"

sure. it was a fetish. in particular, a fetish for _emotional connection_ (still my primary kink). i spent most of my time disconnected, dissociated, and music was one of the only ways i could allow myself to _feel_.

and now it's just a hobby, one of those things i keep _meaning_ to get to but never quite seem to.

it's not just transition, it's, i mean, the hard drive in my brain got full. there's more songs in my collection than i have room for. a lot of what drove my collecting was i'd hear a song and then i'd remember it, years later, and i'd go off on a dive, and the dives were never targeted, they were _wide_, i'd wander off into side corridors and eddies and wind up with stuff i had no idea existed. that was what motivated me more than the idea of a Collection, the process of discovery itself. which is fine and beautiful but it's also hard fucking work for something that, at the end of the day, goes in one ear and out the other.

when i started with napster i felt like this was a precious brief moment that could end at any time, and it did, and then audiogalaxy, and then slsk... and slsk is still there, right? there's no _urgency_ to it. do we lose things? yes, we do, always. everything is impermanent and i've started embracing that. it bothered me, streaming, a song is on spotify today and the next it is down the memory hole and what of it? what have we lost that nobody gives a shit about the dave clark five anymore?

i was drowned in sound, and i haven't reached a shore by a long shot but i'm floating in different waters now. music hasn't hit me like it used to in a long time. it's a dream of someone i used to be, someone i can barely remember, and every day that dream grows more distant.

i think today i'm gonna listen to the third soft machine album again.

I think music, and the importance we put on it, changes over time. So perhaps right now it isn't hitting but, some time in the future, you'll be open to the magic again. Or maybe you're not listening to the music that truly moves you - lord knows there's a seemingly infinite supply of music that's good but not great, enjoyable but not meaningful to you. Usually when I feel like that I go back to old favorites and that does the trick.

The third Soft Machine album is a good place to start, though I prefer the Peel session version of "Moon In June". ;-)

still kinda lookin for a good way to listen to all my music out and about without it being on my phone

seems like people are enjoying apple's music match /cloud locker thing but i doubt it's long for this world

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 1 June 2022 15:13 (one hour ago) link

refurbished & flashmooded ipods are like readily available on ebay & i don't understand why more people aren't bothering with them still. itunes/apple music still co-operates with them flawlessly

i just am not going to keep up with two devices :(

xps Yes slsk is still there. I feel no urgency or real importance in any of this

The fun of this kind of discussion is all of the variables and programs and quirks and reading about what someone is doing, thinking "wow they've really lost the plot on this"... with full knowledge many would think the same reading my blather

it's fun here particularly because the main point by far is music.

I think music, and the importance we put on it, changes over time. So perhaps right now it isn't hitting but, some time in the future, you'll be open to the magic again. Or maybe you're not listening to the music that truly moves you - lord knows there's a seemingly infinite supply of music that's good but not great, enjoyable but not meaningful to you. Usually when I feel like that I go back to old favorites and that does the trick.

The third Soft Machine album is a good place to start, though I prefer the Peel session version of "Moon In June". ;-)

― Gerald McBoing-Boing

I actually did a custom one-record edit of the third Soft Machine record, just to see if it'd hold up. Mind you I like it in its messy glory, but it was a fun thing to try.

I'm starting to understand why so many people stop listening to new music and just listen to the music they liked growing up. I don't think it's nostalgia; I think there's something to the way music accretes layers of meaning over time. "September the Ninth" means something very different to me today than it did in 1998. Are there songs today that convey the same general meaning? Yes, but I haven't been listening to them for a quarter century.

There is a certain amount of... choice paralysis as well. I'll be honest, the first time I heard _Trout Mask Replica_ I thought it was a bunch of awful noise, but white male nerds on the Internet told me it was brilliant and if I thought it was terrible I just hadn't listened to it enough, and I only had ten records and this was before Napster, so OK, I listened to it until I liked it. Is it Stockholm Syndrome? I don't think so, but other people say it is and laugh at me for putting that much time into liking a record. Having done it once, though, it doesn't _usually_ take as much time for me to come to terms with what a record is doing, to understand it. I mean sure half of my RYM reviews back in the day were shitposts that have since been rightfully removed, but I honestly learned a lot about listening critically to music from that experience.

I still put in that much effort learning to like music. I like the Grateful Dead because I decided I wanted to like them. For decades I hated them and then the Jesse Jarnow cartel started hyping them and I spent years trying to figure out what the hell people heard in them and now I'm listening to the Dark Star Orchestra do a 20 minute version of "Shakedown Street", and it RULES. Could I have spent that time listening to music I _didn't_ hate? Probably. I have no regrets.

I just don't know how much more I can change. I mean, obviously, I've changed a fuck of a lot, but, you know, I cannot will myself to infinite mutations. Music is still important to me, but being a _collector_...

I still have a directory of music I've downloaded to sort, file, and tag. I keep putting stuff in it. Right now, I'm putting this in it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEaKRqxriPI

At this point it's a black hole. It's not collecting, it's hoarding, and thanks to digital I don't have old newspapers piled to the ceiling, I have a black box that I call the Crap Mines. I'd be better off streaming. I'll probably never hear that song again anyway.

At this point it's a black hole. It's not collecting, it's hoarding, and thanks to digital I don't have old newspapers piled to the ceiling, I have a black box that I call the Crap Mines.

I wrote this today (part of a long piece about five classical albums I bought just because I trust the label):

Lately, I absorb music in bursts. I might buy 5 early-2000s albums by Dub Syndicate, or a clutch of brutal death metal releases, or the collected works of Argentine instrumental stoner doom act Black Sky Giant or noisy Russian drum ’n’ bass act Torn, or the entire output of the Colombian techno label Business Class. (To check out all of this music and much, much more, visit my Bandcamp collection.) The point is, I fixate on one thing for a day or two, and then I keep moving. To quote Mookie in Do the Right Thing, “I got it — I’m gone.”

I need to listen to given pieces of music enough times to feel that I've internalized it - or at least understand it, if I don't enjoy it that much. There's several factors going against me hearing all the music that I want to: that I've almost certainly got less time ahead than behind, that my memory is fading, that the whole "edifice of culture" has lost whatever aura it had for me as our world decays. But I'd rather limit my range of listening to try to go deep into the music that I do hear. It may seem strange but I feel I owe it to the artists (even if sometimes they don't expect anyone to listen more than once).

I used to think I was discovering an underlying order to the world, via music, or whatever. Eventually you realize you're imposing one, and the endeavor loses its appeal and you're fine with just gazing into chaos again. Music still sounds great though! Especially the new dark ambient stuff from Cryo Chamber, which is all both easily sampled on YouTube and then purchasable on CD should I feel like scratching that itch.

yeah you've captured there how it feels to read forums dedicated to most music playback software

I suppose as the alleged king of Bandcamp I should say something. The Pitchfork pieces ring reasonably true though I have no idea or not whether people would be terrified at the amount of music I have sitting around in my hard drive (and backed up at a separate drive at my parents', etc. etc.).

If anything, I am thinking about how these kinds of digital collections can in their own way become legacies. I interviewed Chris Jacques a couple of months before he died earlier this year and in his matter of fact way he was discussing about what he wanted to leave as a legacy. Part of it was insuring his label Dub Ditch Picnic just stayed up as a digital resource for people to discover:

I want the Bandcamp site to be as similar to the record store that I walked into, or I would spend my time at when I was 12 and 13 going, ‘What’s this, what’s this? Tell me what this is.’ Because I just don’t think kids have that experience anymore. It’s like an avalanche sometimes, where I was able to get things piecemeal, as I needed it. I’ve worked with people for 10 years. They’ve put their trust in me and let me caretake their sounds. I just don’t want to shut everything down and go, ‘No, that’s it, whatever.’ I did this and I’m super happy with it, and I treated people well and I got to meet, and work with so many really cool people and people that I respected for years. Lots of people don’t get that opportunity. So I wanted to honor that and just have it as… not a memorial, but as an archival site. Because I was, in my mind, helping folks that were working really hard in their bedroom, in their basement, with whatever they were doing. And I honored it by putting together a physical release, and I want to honor it even after that with some digital presence.

But part of it was also what he literally wanted to leave for his kids, something of his own taste and sense of self, thus in a separate comment:

I just had a friend go through all my Bandcamp stuff and download everything and catalog it: this is the dub folder, this is the experimental folder. This is the PSF, all the blown-out, in-the-red Japanese type stuff,” he says. “He put that on an external hard drive for me just so I have all that stuff collected properly, so that I can give it to my son and go, ‘Here you go, here’s lots of music, if you want to do that.’

That sense of passing something on does cross my mind. In that I have no kids, eventually some later form of the drive -- and I have continually migrated the collection along without a skip for many years now as it's grown -- will be left behind, but I'm not sure who, where or what for. I hope it'll be of bemused interest, whoever gets it.

haha i have honestly considered putting a note on my external drive saying ‘send to ned in the event of my death’ even though we’ve never actually met

i’m sure it wouldn’t be useful to him (or anyone, really) but i found it a comforting idea that he might at least understand why i wasted so much time collecting and tagging and making playlists of music files

I expect that my teenage daughter will inherit my collection of digital media as she's already picked up and started to dig into my physical copies of The Wire. It's nice to know that someone else might find value in my overly curated work. But I also accept that the hard drives could also just be wiped and used for other purposes. Fair enough, that's better than how the dozen bankers boxes filled with CDs in my basement might ultimately be addressed. Not so thrilled to acknowledge that a lot of them could end up in landfill.

my big disk and its backup are fully encrypted...hmm what should i do, put the password in my will?

this thread gives me NAS drive death anxiety.
my little 4TB WD My Cloud is nearly 10 years old now.
i back it up every tuesday onto an external drive and so have a degree of fallback.
i just know that when it does 'die', the replacement device will be a bugger to set up, and cause several days of techno woes.

I've wondered in the past about who'll wind up with my music collection when I'm gone, and it's a nice thought to imagine that someone else will go through these idiosyncratic records I've thrown together and find that it... opens them to the world I live in, I guess. Stuff I've been able to discover, to understand, that isn't really represented anywhere else. I can't imagine that actually happening. I can't imagine whoever winds up with this clunky old black box, or whatever format it takes when I'm gone, will have genuine interest in this assemblage of noises.

I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it helps keep me from putting things off, from Bucket Listing things. Having something on my NAS doesn't make it any more "real" or permanent than having it streaming on Spotify does. It's not even more _accessible_ to me - more and more I'll get songs stuck in my head but not be able to remember their name or who did them or find them in any way. I don't use Spotify or streaming services, but this is more a matter of obstinacy than the belief that my way of doing things is genuinely preferable, even to me, as well as maybe a little bit of sunk cost fallacy. God, I still use iTunes. iTunes is terrible software, but migrating the whole thing to less garbage music library software is more effort than I'm willing to undertake.

Basically my digital music collection is _obsolete_.

That reminds me that I need to replace my seven year old 4TB WD My Book which died last month. It’s been my primary/daily backup drive for all that time; I have a secondary/weekly backup drive that I normally keep in another location but doing daily backup duty at the moment.

This might be better off in the Apple Music thread, but has anyone merged your local files with your Apple Music streaming account recently? I remember all the horror stories of scrambled libraries when they first introduced it so I’ve kept mine separate, but I keep finding myself wanting to remotely stream stuff that isn’t available in Apple Music. I have 35K+ properly tagged tracks that I’d hate to have messed up (though I guess could always fix with my backup) so wondering if those issues are mostly settled now.

haha i have honestly considered putting a note on my external drive saying ‘send to ned in the event of my death’ even though we’ve never actually met

This is a vision. I'd have to think about this!

Slightly more seriously, a few of us Of An Age were having a discussion elsewhere about collection maintenance in general and what might happen to it, and I'm not sure -- wearing my library worker's hat here, though I will note I'm not a professional archivist -- where that level of interest in the field stands. Certainly awareness of the necessity of digital archives has grown, but the combination of awareness about how so much 'stuff,' in whatever form or however defined, essentially ends up in estate sales or the like rather than anything permanent or cared for by someone else in combination with the fact that personal collections aren't professional archives unless you've realllllly organized them as such in advance tends to be a factor -- and of course there's the fact that people have done amazing histories with preserved written archives that have hung around for hundreds of years versus hard drives that, well, won't, there ya go.

Kate's way of looking at it is pretty sharp, honestly; it's an interesting historical moment -- which has no guarantee of lasting -- where even if the heavenly jukebox doesn't of course have 'everything' and never did, if the pleasure is there, well then.

As for me, I was talking in said discussion about how when it comes to actual physical releases, I consciously look for and hold on to three specific kinds of releases:

* archival reissues, compilations, collections etc that preferably have extensive liner notes and information -- these are research tools and I treat them as such; in the cases of bands or scenes that haven't warranted particular study in books, anthologies etc., these may be the only collected information at all about them, making it more valuable.

* notably rare and interesting things I've found along the way -- all the old Digitalis CDRs for instance, and really a ton of the 2000s CDR boom in general, but there's plenty of CDs I have that were only ever issued in very short runs

* very specific releases with sentimental value -- so I'll never give up my copy of Loveless I got back in 1991, for instance, that really is a marker point for me, but also I've been lucky enough to be named in various liner notes over time so of course I'll keep those.

Everything else I'm buying, digital only and zero regrets. I will happily trawl used CD bins for many cheap things but that's just to rip them (Apple Lossless, as I've been doing for years now) and then send them on in turn. And per early rejecter's question, I've held off on doing anything with Apple Music services for that reason -- think there's something useful in not keeping all my eggs in one company's basket, speaking as an Apple/Mac guy since 1987.

That reminds me that I need to replace my seven year old 4TB WD My Book which died last month.

i'm going to regrest asking ... but how old was the device early rejector ?
i use mine for streaming my music via my old Sonos Connect.
i.e. it's in use for many hours a day as opposed to just sat there and being accessed from time to time for a photo/file.
i think i am definitely pushing my luck with my device now.

as for when i die, then i'll leave it to my lads to decide what to do with my collection, both digital and physical.
i have set aside my FAX cd collection and have already advised them to check before binning them if there's still a demand.