Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

Spotify is great, and I use it every workday, but some time in the future the service will shut down and/or music that's available on it now won't be. Geiger might be right that the future is not about owning files but owning files is the only effective insurance policy against losing access to music you care about.

"Geiger’s “files are over” isn’t necessarily wrong but a problem lies, like always, with music that’s pulled out of circulation."

And with music that, in its streaming incarnation, is defaced by hideous sonic watermarking (hello UMG labels). I'm always going to need onboard storage until UMG resupplies Spotify et al with untucked up files which is going to be a hell of a batch process. And it's intensely annoying to make a spotify playlist for friends but have to leave off steely dan, decca orchestral recordings, sonic youth, Motown etc bc of this.

Hey, do we have a 100% free and open internet available to all geographic coordinates yet?

20 years ago I worked in the William Morris music department when Geiger was there. Back then I thought he was one of the few (well, only) welterweight music execs who had a handle on what the internet meant. Intelligent guy - galls me to see this. Then again, in an interview a couple years back he was going on about how great and exciting Karmin were. In the end, you have to just shut up, drink the kool aide, and make your numbers.

I'm down in the subway for 90 minutes a day, I like to listen to music down there, and there is no internet. Considering the current state NY subway system technology and the amount of money available to improve it, I don't see this changing in the next 15 years or so.

Obviously it's my own fault for not backing up my drives, but I recently lost all my digital music for the second time and it's really making me appreciate my CDs and even Spotify.

Jon where were you doing that awesome rant about UMG watermarking from a while ago - did it have its own thread?

xxp: 3+ hours a day on a bus for me. I could stream music on my phone, but I already kill my battery just browsing ilx on the trip to work and back. Also, presumably it would eat into my minutes? Sticking with my separate ipod and purchasing tracks for now.

xpost that was on the RIAA apocalypse thread I think?

for those 90 mins a day on the subway or three hours a day on the bus, that's why you pay the small monthly fee to spotify or rhapsody or now beats that allows you to listen offline.

interesting.

how does that work, exactly? do you have to cue stuff up in advance?

Yes, you can select any of your playlists to be listenable offline and when you do so they download into a cache. The DL is extremely fast, maybe a couple of minutes for an average length album?

(xp) you can download anything you want anytime -- albums, playlists, tracks, etc. obviously you have to be online when doing the actual downloading. the downloads are basically tethered to a cookie that lives on your device as long as you are an active subscriber. if you stop subscribing, the files won't play. but as long as your account is active, you're good to go, anytime, anywhere.

Guess I hadn't mentioned it before on the thread but I decided to give Amazon Cloud Player Premium a whirl about a month ago, after idly pondering further offsite backups (not flat out replacements, obv.) to my drives. I vaguely remember some mention of the changed service they provided but I hadn't realized they essentially were providing a steal in comparison to their general cloud data rates -- $25 a year for up to 250,000 songs. Hell, I'll take that (and since I have very little tied into things via Amazon unlike Google or Apple, I like the idea of it being separate from them, with full awareness that we're talking one Big Huge Data Loving Company vs. others). MP3 Store matched tunes are imported to the player at 256K, which I can live with, and it accepts all mp3 and m4a uploads flatout if not matched, which has been great when it comes to out of print/unreleased/rarities/mixes/etc. AIFF files etc are only worked with if matched, presumably to keep lossless bros from overwhelming the system with one Phish soundboard versus another. You can also edit track info, album info, etc. as needed. Not perfect -- it'll accept your image files but the matched songs sometimes get incorrect art, and that can't be edited yet, while sometimes it doesn't include it at all. And if you have a LOT of songs (hi dere) then better to do the manual import options group by group or however you've got your music folders organized. But for the crazy low rate and for the ease of accessibility -- web player, standalone program and phone app all work for me as needed -- then no complaints. The fact that I have my entire Jandek collection immediately to hand now alone is so wonderfully strange.

Oh and you can download from the player to your phone, computer, etc. once your songs are in place, so for long travel/avoiding battery drain as needed, cue up and download before you start and you're good.

Streaming is great if you're not really into music and are okay with it disappearing at any time or being replaced with an overcompressed remastered version at somebody's whim.

Ned what if, for instance, I want to be able to stream my MP3s of Katy Lied and not Amazon's UMG-supplied unlistenable ones, do you reckon it would let me upload and stream my own rip of something already "available" from their cloud like that?

Good question! Here's the basic file type breakdown:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201114020

In terms of 'forcing' a match, you may well be out of luck, and I don't discount that as an issue. (Not being a Steely Dan fan I can't speak to that specific example.)

This is long-overdue. Can't wait to try it when I get home

Hm I wonder if I could tag them as "The Dan" or some shit and trick it that way

You could try! Anyway, yeah, it's definitely not a holy grail, but it does seem to exist in a perfect sweet spot for the moment.

I'm sitting here at work, scrolling through my ipod, and thinking I really need to purge half the crap on here I don't listen to anymore. I got songs albums from 2005 on here that I haven't listened to since 2005. /Random

I hear you, by all means get rid of stuff you don't like, but sometimes crate digging in your own collection can reveal lost gems and forgotten favorites.

shuffle that thing for a week or so, you'll find something to save (and a lot to delete)

Do you need space? Otherwise keep it all

My normal iPod browse mode is by Artist, but when that starts to feel exhausted and uninspiring I find it refreshing to switch to all Albums A to Z, as if it were one big record crate with no author distinctions...

I put stuff into my iPod when I have to review it, and if I then forget to delete it I sometimes come across it weeks or months later and think, "Ugh, what the hell is this crap doing in here?"

Actually my second favorite thing about rockbox on iPod, after the parametric EQ and crossfeed, is ONBOARD DELETION. I can actually erase a song as soon as it displeases me.

My normal iPod browse mode is by Artist, but when that starts to feel exhausted and uninspiring I find it refreshing to switch to all Albums A to Z, as if it were one big record crate with no author distinctions...

― grape is the flavor of my true love's hair (Jon Lewis), Saturday, February 22, 2014 2:52 PM

I think that's my problem. It's the act of passing the same artists every day for years that makes me think I should purge. I'll try the view-by-album function. I'm not actually going to purge, cause space isn't an issue yet (and at this point, it'll probably never be).

This streaming stuff has never appealed to me and I don't know if I'm wrong for getting worried about it. Surely downloading will always be an option? Why would anyone stop that option? Too many people have bad internet connections for streaming to be a great idea.
Cant take your streaming music on holiday to somewhere with no internet? What if I just wanted to stop using the internet for a couple of months or suddenly couldn't afford the streaming subscription anymore? Just go back to my old cds and not be able to get new cds and downloads?

It just eerily reminds me of videogame companies wanting to give consumers as little power as possible by keeping the game online, ready to change it or end it whenever they please. I bet some pricks would like to make some music region coded.

I'm scared and paranoid, please someone convince me there isn't a conspiracy to make music less enjoyable.

no it's good

downloading isn't going anywhere. i don't like streaming either, but that's because i have old-school notions about why owning (rather than renting) desired music is important.

I've embraced the cloud but I just got the newly released 128gb microsd card for my phone so I have all my bases covered, cloud or no cloud.

Smart music execs certainly have a conspiracy to make all music streaming and then raise prices once you are locked in, but that will be easier said than done.

There's a 128GB micro ss card? Jesus!

Sd that is

Yes, this is the micro ss:

http://www.writeonnewjersey.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Mel-Brooks-The-Producers.jpg

there is a conspiracy to make music less enjoyable, it's the MP3

just kidding, i love spotify

Without reading the whole thread, what do people now recommend for storing/organising music on their computers (and burning compilation CD-Rs)?

iTunes for me

J River Media Center. It just keeps getting better.

going to borrow a Rasberry Pi this week and try RASP-FI

I used to have a Xbox set up to as an audio player but it was not very good and took up lots of space, hopefully this can slip down the back of the hifi and work just as well. I know there used to be issues with USB soundcards, but these seem to have fixed.

if it works, its going to put the price of a stable Audio server at £50.

Can J River sync with iPods/iPhones, allowing me to banish the abomination that is iTunes?

if I hadn't been using iTunes forever, I'd use Swinsian. A really good, fast iTunes replacement with some sadly lost iTunes features (opening multiple playlist windows at once!)

my library is too big for Itunes and I use FLAC, so I use a very well-organized hard drive and play things off it through VLC

listening to Charlie Parker right now

(on a Mac btw)

J River can sync with my iPod Classic, not sure what the situation is with iPhones, I suspect it can. It also acts as a music server and you can stream your library anywhere you've got a data connection.

I use foobar2000 for the playback. Lossless FLAC files organized by folder, with plug-ins to get bitperfect data to my DAC. I haven't made a compilation CDR in a while, but I guess I would still use Imgburn or Burrrn if I needed to.

I used to use foobar plug-in to load my ipod, but I don't use one currently.

At what stage is a music library too big for iTunes? I use iTunes for the front end and an 8 hard-drive NAS (network attached storage) server for holding the files. Laptop, or whatever, points the iTunes library to the server which holds the files. System works fine for 100,000+ lossless files. Plus you can set the NAS to have one or two hard drive failure tolerance without losing all your files. And if one hard drive fails, you hot swap in a new one and it rebuilds itself.