Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

There's been some talk about digital music collections in the past on threads like The Data Migration Thread , but I wanted to start a new thread! dedicated solely to those of us who are actively building up (legally acquired) digital music collections. I'm not talking about buying a CD or LP and then digitizing it, but buying music natively in mp3, FLAC, or some other format. The majority of posters on ILM seem to prefer their music on LPs and CDs, and I definitely see the appeal in doing that--up until very recently, I had to have everything in CD-- but I think there might be a few others who, like me, are starting to purchase most of their music digitally.

Recently, I've decided to go (mostly) digital. The first step in this process has been culling my CD collection. I sold off a chunk of the collection in two batches, and I'm getting ready to sell off a third. My goal is to eventually have as few physical CDs as possible, and I want all of my digital music to sit on two hard drives. Most of the new music I buy is from Amazon mp3, although I'm currently searching for some good online stores that sell everything in FLAC.

I'm doing this for several reasons:

(1) I'm 22, so I'm of the generation that sees CDs as nothing more than a storage medium. I buy a CD, rip it into iTunes, and place it on my CD shelves, where it sits forever.
(2) I have a lot of books, and I'm not a fan of eBook readers, so I plan on acquiring many more books than I already own, and I don't want to maintain two physical media collections.
(3) I need less shit in my life in general.
(4) There's a lot of stuff that's difficult for me to easily acquire where I live, and I've been able to find some stuff that I've had a lot of difficulty tracking down in brick-and-mortar stores on Amazon mp3 and iTunes.
(5) A lot of artists are starting to do the whole LP + mp3/FLAC thing, and I have no desire to start collecting LPs. I think that soon enough more and more artists will start going this route as CDs sales continue to tank.

Is anyone else actively maintaining a digital record collection or planning on doing so? Where are you buying from? How are you storing and organizing everything?

As I said, I'm sure that the audience for this thread on this board is relatively small, but I'm hoping there might be at least a few others out there who are going this route, and perhaps we can get a discussion going.

i can't even fathom doing what you're doing. seems no stretch of my imagination no matter how great will alow me to even consider the possibility paying for an mp3. sorry!

Keep all your favorite/best CDs, or yer gonna feel like a chump when that hard drive explodes

Much more convenient for housebreakers too, like being able to carry away a whole collection in a binder.

I'm more interested in how people are organizing large digital collections. Do you just chuck it all in one folder or do you take the time to set things up in an artist/album way? Do you keep multiple CDs as multiple folders or just combine it all? Do you get rid of duplicates or is that too much work? Etc.

I trust that when you say "two hard drives" you mean one to back up the other. Wouldn't be the dumbest thing to, from time to time, dump everything to a third that you send offsite--back to your parents' house, for example. I'd also make sure you were getting everything at the highest quality possible. What seems good now, won't. And storage will someday be irrelevant.

I just use iTunes, so that takes care of the folders and files. Two external drives (one good quality for constant use, the other, cheaper, to backup the first once a week). I do try to eliminate duplicates, but that can be a lot of work. And also to maintain consistency of names and genres. There are certainly times I feel more like a database manager than a music listener.

But I still can't see getting rid of the originals. Risky. Maybe putting them in deeper storage?

I'm more interested in how people are organizing large digital collections.

I don't have an enormous digital collection, only about 4000 songs. I organize it in a pretty standard way, I think. A folder for each artist, and then within that, folders for each album, using the format of:

year - album name

Adding the year onto the front can be a hassle if you didn't do it from the start, but once everything uses that format it's convenient because it arranges everything chronologically under each artist.

I also make sure that I have album art for each album, which has come in handy recently with my new iPhone acquisition, since you can flip through your collection by scrolling through album covers.

My concern with acquiring material digitally is bad rips - I'm paranoid about downloading something from Amazon and hearing digital noise. I've heard reports of this a number of times; I'd rather make my own rips and have the quality under my own control.

Z S, do you still buy many physical releases?

I'm more interested in how people are organizing large digital collections. Do you just chuck it all in one folder or do you take the time to set things up in an artist/album way? Do you keep multiple CDs as multiple folders or just combine it all? Do you get rid of duplicates or is that too much work? Etc.

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Saturday, August 22, 2009 7:03 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

For right now my shit's all over the place, but I'm starting to work out in my head how I'm going to manage this . . .

I'm considering starting off by organizing by the SOURCE of the mp3. So, if I download something from Amazon, it will go into an Amazon/[artist name] folder. Then I'll copy everything into iTunes and have it copy everything into its own directory structure and sort everything for me.

Keep all your favorite/best CDs, or yer gonna feel like a chump when that hard drive explodes

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Saturday, August 22, 2009 6:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^ This is the plan, Whiney.

Honestly, though, I usually listen to records I love 30-40 times and then I can barely, if ever, listen to them again. Wilco's a ghost is born is my favorite record of the decade, and I've barely listened to it since 2005. By then, my brain's had enough of the record for a lifetime.

I buy records with pretty much all of my spare money, which isn't much, admittedly. I download everything else.

I have about 45 DVDs on a spindle, each of which holds about 4.5 GB of MP3s (AACs, actually). I have a desktop iMac with a 250GB hard drive which has about 50GB or so of music on it, and I'm planning to burn all that to DVD pretty soon. I've also got a laptop (on which I'm typing this post) with a similar-sized hard drive, and that one's got about 25GB of music on it at present (because that's the one I import all my promo CDs to, and download digital promos to). I'm gonna burn that stuff to DVD soon as well. How many individual albums does all this add up to? Several thousand, easy.

my brain's had enough of the record for a lifetime.

Yeah, I feel the same about that Wilco album. Mind you, I've never heard it.

stop ripping. bind your cds its totally hot

unperson: Do you still buy/collect any physical albums or are you mostly digital?

Album art is always nice to have, in any form. To me, just collecting mp3s seems really sterile and doesn't have any connection to the process of collecting music. A lot of my best memories of music are of buying it at my favorite local store, or studying the lyrics. My thought process when I think about an album immediately begins with the album cover.

I guess there's nothing wrong with collecting music the way you are, and god knows, just about everyone your age was raised under the same circumstances. I personally never want to stop "collecting" music outside of the mp3 format, although I do realize there will come a day (in the not too distant future) that cars won't even come with CD players.

and all your meals will come in tablet form.

Do you still buy/collect any physical albums or are you mostly digital?

I don't keep many individual album CDs around anymore - one tower's worth, which is about 400 or so, plus another couple of hundred slimcase promos and things in weirdly shaped digipaks which I keep in a cabinet. Mostly what I keep is boxed sets, especially archival ones like the Anthony Braxton Mosaic box from last year, or the Miles Davis Complete Plugged Nickel Sessions set.

stop ripping. bind your cds its totally hot

Yes, great idea. This works best if you put similar genres adjacent to each other (e.g., all your M0unt41n G04ts CDs next to your Bright Eyes, Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday). That way once J0hn D. gets you feeling all emo and sad, it's only a single binder page-flip to your Chris Carrabba stuff! Woo!

god the saddoes eager to show they've heard of me are out in force tonite eh

lool

:'(

eager to show they've heard of me

Seriously though -- considering I've been on ILM three years, that was hardly the point.

dude it's all love I was just rezingin please unsad that face

How good a sound quality/how great a breadth would an on-demand music service have to be in order to consider doing away with having a digital collection at all?

I can't really hear the difference between a well encoded mp3 and a FLAC, even though I've had the opportunity to use some pretty heavy audiophile equipment in the past...tin ears, I guess. so as long as it's 200+ kbps I'm fine, which both Amazon and iTunes do now.

what are you gonna do when iTunes moves to this rumored 'Cocktail' format?

my biggest problem with a digital collection is all the metadata. do you add the lyrics? when do you feel the need to add a composer? what if you can't find a decent scan of the album art bigger than 150x150 pixels? etc.

We've got about 80gb of music on this iMac, which runs three iPods - an 80gb classic that sits on the Zeppelin, my 1gb shuffle, and Em's iPhone. It's not backed up anywhere at the moment, because we've only just migrated to this machine in the last week. We've got an external HD that'll take it all. The vast majority of it is backed up next door on a couple of thousand CDs though, and most of our listening is probably still off CDs. I've bought a few dozen songs from iTunes, mainly b-sides, odd old singles, and things that I'd not want a whole album or compilation of. I guess those are the only ones that really NEED backing up. Everything's just organised via iTunes; I'm pretty anal about covers & tags & things. I don't think we'd ever go totally digital; just yesterday I bought The XX album on CD. I love CDs too much. But then I'm 30.

for all you guys backing up to CD/DVD, be careful: Up To 10% of CD-Rs Fail Within a Few Years

I've got pretty much my entire music collection in digital form on a 500gb hard drive (with another one as backup) for iPod purposes - however I only really buy singles digitally rather than whole albums. This is partly because I like the physical object and partly 'cos the CDs I do still buy are mostly very cheap secondhand/bargain bin ones so it's cheaper just to rip from the disc. That said, I've got rid of/have boxed up to get rid of 350+ CDs this year, basically things I've gone off. I moved earlier this year and I've got slightly less room in the new house which certainly spurred me on and I'll be honest, it feels really good paring things down (I still have loads left though!).
The main reason for me buying CDs over vinyl was portability - I've always done a large portion of my listening on the move and I had a CD walkman up until a few years back. However I've started replacing some CDs with vinyl for home listening and I intend to buy more nof my new music in vinyl form (really grateful to those labels who include a download coupon with the record). I could never see myself only having a digital collection and nothing else - I'm sure I'll hang on to lots of my remaining CDs for as long as they can be played.

(really grateful to those labels who include a download coupon with the record)

Seconding this.

I think I'm at 8 or 9TB of digital files now split evenly between audio and video and I'm probably going to go to some sort of desktop RAID 5 set up once the next generation of 2+TB drives become common. I'm more concerned with having a decent file system that can handle all that and a metafile indexer/cataloger that won't collapse when I hit it with that size of data.

Even if i was goin digital, I think I would throw all my CDs in storage or somethin

I mean, amassing a bunch of files isn't really "collecting" anything anymore is it? It;s like saying you collect pokemon

For those who are on PC, Mediamonkey is the only place to go.

"I mean, amassing a bunch of files isn't really "collecting" anything anymore is it? It;s like saying you collect pokemon"

If you have a file that isn't readily replaceable/accessible (like say something dubbed off a rare public access TV performance that only you have a VHS copy of), then it takes on more of the properties of something tangible/loseable like pokemon cards, but my thinking is that music services will increasingly make obsolete any need to keep a file or file backup at all.

For example, netflix users wouldn't bother to "collect" movies they've seen on netflix, at least not with any great frequency. (though there's supposedly some pirate group that prides itself on having backed up the entire netflix catalog)

i don't really consider my digital music a "collection" per se, it's just me tunes

i could (and will) quite happily be all-digital in the future. i'll probably hang on to most of my cds, boxed up and stored away, more than anything else because it's not worth the time or effort trying to sell them.

my digital vs hard copy purchase ratio is about 9 to 1 at the moment. i think i've bought less than 50 cds this year.

well but this is what begs the really interesting generational divide question. what is your collection? a series of hard-evidence signifiers about experiences you've had & can have again at will, tangible evidence of those experiences - or is your real collection the experiences themselves, and the physical collection something of an old-fashioned proof that will no longer be necessary in the future/present? nb I am from the previous gen so for me I gotta have some physical token to feel like I "own" something. but I don't think that's the only way to conceive of "ownership," and I suspect that different conceptions - no less valid - will replace/have replaced "our" conception. it's like: I don't save ticket stubs or collect/trade shows, but I do have a collection of live music experiences - that collection is the experiences themselves. digital collections are considerably more tangible than those, right?

xpost w/philip btw

"Honestly, though, I usually listen to records I love 30-40 times and then I can barely, if ever, listen to them again."

I cannot for the life of me fathom feeling this way about "records I love".

At age 45, my big paradigm shift was when the artwork and liner notes shrank from 12" to 5", so I find myself strangely blasé (perfectly happy, actually) about the shift from 5" disc to digital file.

Pardon my grammar. I'm 45, not my paradigm shift.

w/r/t generational divide, I don't believe the next generation will be so alien as to maintain a digital collection against an endless buffet that makes that collection obsolete when making personal top-ten lists does all the signifying one needs (and is an activity well-enjoyed cross-generationally)

so maybe this kind of digital album collecting as if they were physical albums will be a weird hiccup peculiar to just this moment in time.

i can appreciate good artwork as much as the next dude but i've pretty much always listened to music the same way - compiled the best songs into whatever format i was working with at the time (tape, cdr, playlist) and listen to that, completely separate from the original artifacts. so artwork is really something i only ever looked at if i wanted to know who the producer was or something. frankly some records i appreciate more for not having the shitty artwork.

i have a car and that is mostly why i buy cds

Honestly, though, I usually listen to records I love 30-40 times and then I can barely, if ever, listen to them again. Wilco's a ghost is born is my favorite record of the decade, and I've barely listened to it since 2005. By then, my brain's had enough of the record for a lifetime.

How old are you? I found that after about 10 years, I bought a lot of albums I previously weeded out by favorite groups. Now that I'm digitizing my collection, it's not as big a deal. I'm still keeping 60% of my CDs. I'm ripping in FLAC with dbpoweramp, correct some tagging and make playlists with Mediamonkey, and listen in three rooms with Squeezebox. I will be able to fit everything on my 6TB NAS server with room to spare, and have everything backed up twice, one on extra drives at home, another at work. It's nice to be able to have access to everything at work.

I think it's crucial to use lossless files. You can easily convert them to another format with a batch converter without losing anything. Buying CDs is still the cheapest option, because you can get deals on them new and used for under $10 each. $1 to $2 a song for FLAC is just not an option. The CDs you don't want to keep, you can sell, and end up spending only $2 to $5 on the music.

I'm listening to more of my music more often now that I can play it simultaneously in multiple rooms. Living with someone else the past couple years, I had stopped listening later at night because she goes to sleep earlier. Now I can put on some closed headphones and have access to the whole collection from bed on the Duet remote.

i mean, one of the biggest obstacles for me re: digital is that iTunes keeps changing how it organizes things.

Like for a while it was just artist/song/album and then with a recent update you can put files in one pile while labeling it another with "sort by." Also my iphone used to recognize "sort by" so I'd sort all my compilations by "#" so the errant comp tracks just show up at the end. The new iPhone update no longer recognizes "sort by" and my iphone tracks are now a shitty jumble again.

Who knows what iTunes will change to? Or even if we'll be using itunes in 10 years?

where we're going, we don't need iTunes

iTunes is just a ID3 tag editor isn't it (at least for mp3 files) and it's such an 800 pound gorilla that I'm sure whatever player we'll be using in the future, Mp3-O-Matic 5000 or whatever, will definitely be "iTunes compatible"

the Album Artist field is such a life saver w/r/t rap albums...and Sort By is great for those who catalog by last name, among others

but completely useless for people that use iphones

Co-sign on Squeezeboxes. I set some up recently and love being able to listen anywhere in the house.

The ease of maintaining off-site back-ups is one of the biggest advantages of going digital.

Wow, a lot of good stuff here!

Fastnbulbous, I'm 22.

I'm actually reconsidering going all-digital after reading through some of the stuff you all have said here. The comments where people said stuff like "Someone can just steal your hard drive or your hard drive could die, and then you'll lose all your music!" struck me as all too true.

I will also admit that I feel affectively different towards .mp3s than I do CDs. My relationship with the music does change. And probably not for the better.

met a guy who owns this company today, seems like an interesting idea in terms of having your collection on hand whereever you are.

http://www.psonar.com/

-i'm at the point storage-wise where i hate having cds, just more shit i don't have room for.

-i mostly listen to music on my ipod, but that's all almost full and it's also old and acting like it might conk out. my digital music is all over the place storage-wise and organization-wise, it's a mess.

-love listening to vinyl, but i don't spend that much time listening to music at home.

so basically no media choices are super appealing at the moment. if i was really serious i would get a new ipod and another hard drive and back up/organize all my stuff, but spending the time and money on that is lower than a lot of other things on my list.

Who knows what iTunes will change to? Or even if we'll be using itunes in 10 years?

gonna go out on a limb here & say we still will be. while one of the governing tropes of thinking about the digital age is "everything moves at a very accelerated pace," I don't think the speed is nearly as dizzying as it was until about five years ago. things have slowed down; most of the "new" developments in digital communication aren't so much new developments as they are tweaks on already extant concepts. the iTunes we're using in 10 years may have gone through a bunch of reconfiguring, but it'll still be what we're using, I'd guess. I could be wrong! but I believe pretty strongly that the speed-of-technology's-growth paradigm is itself one we've outgrown; that a settling-in has taken place.

I think that's a pretty big limb considering how hard to imagine iPods it was ten years ago (the fact that Apple "came back" at all is kind of amazing in its own right.) These kind of leaps can happen totally unexpectedly and can leave everything else in the dust pretty quickly.

ha, I think you're both right, which is why I now use iTunes exclusively and why I buy as much as I can on CD and then rip it to MP3 when adding it to my library

do digital people keep upgrading the albums they like from mp3 to flac to whatever comes next? seems tiresome. or maybe most people don't care that much about how things sound. i mean, a lot of people listen to horrible internet mp3 sound and don't seem to care.

That said even if we aren't using iTunes, I think that something will exist to allow you to transfer your mp3s to whatever is replacing them. One of the main reasons people are so unattached to CDs is it's easy to convert them to mp3s. Don't think people would be quite as keen to give up mp3s if they couldn't be similarly carried over to whatever new format will exist.

xp I don't think so. But most of the people I know who maintain huge digital collections have ripped their collections @ 320s + where the differences are subtle to non-existent.

this seems like a waste of time tbh, everything will be streaming in less than 10 years, probably more like 5. i heard someone in the movie industry saying that blu-ray is already archaic.

I'll hang to my archaic CDs thankyouverymuch. I somehow doubt everything that has ever been or ever will be recorded will be available streaming, but I could be wrong.

yeah you can't stream OOP stuff on blogs now rite...

No to mention I suspect that this limitless streaming is going to somehow involve a lot of commercial advertisements somewhere.

Yes, the next paradigm shift is clearly streaming from centralised cloud-based storage, eliminating the need for personal collections of anything bar metadata. I'm already heading in that direction [insert Eurocentric Spotify Premium gloat here - £10 per month for ad-free high-bitrate is money well spent IMO], and I unreservedly welcome it.

I fucking hate paradigms

yeah you can't stream OOP stuff on blogs now rite..

eh, I've spent a fair chunk of this afternoon looking for old Dolly Parton and Buck Owens MP3s and let me tell you there is a LOT of out of print stuff that is just not on the internet

basically whenever one medium replaces another, a bunch of stuff gets lost and I don't find that particularly exciting or awesome

being someone who still buys CDs, can someone tell me how they handle 'liner notes'?

I've been doing this narrative podcast thing recently, introducing tracks, and people are asking me 'wow you are so well researched' and... I'm just... 50% of that stuff is straight from the booklet that comes with the CD and a surprising number of my friends respond to that by saying 'that's exactly what I mean'

Roughly two-thirds of my digital music collection is on Lala.com, which I know because once you register for the site, you can sync your iTunes library with your Lala account and then listen to anything in Lala's database that you already own at any computer.

"old Dolly Parton and Buck Owens MP3s"
these were on CDs at some point? that is kind of surprising that they're not somewhere out there...

Can someone explain Media Monkey to me?

Though most of my music collection is on CD/vinyl, I have loads of promos on my computer that just feel ... disorganised. Would Media Monkey make my life neater?

I have no idea if they were ever on CD (but I kind of doubt it) - I'm talking about stuff like Joshua, Hello My Name is Dolly, Just Because I'm a Woman, etc. Same goes for Buck's 60s LPs.

there is a LOAD of stuff that is just plain not out there

which in a way is both gratifying & frustrating

xp milton: seriously ... I have a good number of free jazz large ensemble recordings I've downloaded, and I have no clue how the current I-tunes/mp3 system would even manage listing all the musicians.

to really have access to everything ever recorded you would def have to have 1) a computer 2) a turntable 3) a CD player 4) a cassette deck and...shit a record player that plays 78s maybe proably? A wax cylinder? 8 track player?

there is a LOAD of stuff that is just plain not out there

which in a way is both gratifying & frustrating

I dunno what's gratifying about it but it annoys me that this fact is always glossed over by hyped-up digital acolytes

I mean its not like this stuff I'm looking for is obscure - these were hits! By major artists! With huge distribution networks! But a few decades later *poof* gone.

xp Was anything really released exclusively on 8-track?

The loss of cassettes is kind sad though.

shakey, you should learn about google blog search, i think everything is out there, it's just a matter of how you look for it:

http://boxofmuzik.blogspot.com/2009/04/dolly-parton-rare-album.html

those files are all gone shasta nice try

Due to a violation of our terms of use, the file has been removed from the server.

don't get me wrong I'm so glad the record company that owns those albums is being so diligent to make sure Dolly fans can only hear that music on albums purchased from used record dealers. which doesn't make them any money anyway.

fucking people. I hate them.

Hey they aren't going to undercut the 17-disc Dolly Parton Boxed Set that's coming out next year!

I dunno what's gratifying about it

perhaps I haven't gone into my big ol crush on oblivion & things that get lost to history here but I think I take as much pleasure in things I can't find as others do in like finding things

well then if there's no blogs, there are torrentz:
http://www.torrentz.com/9d3f1bd617739c27a411978313ce445e7fa1dc76

You aren't exactly proving your point, Steve.

I ain't installing now torrent client software on my machine at work, that is asking for trouble

I mean this stuff is currently scattered hither and yon in various formats and variable quality. What exactly is going to unite everything together again? Spotify?

er I AIN'T BE INSTALLIN NO TORRENT dadgummit

is what I meant to say

MediaMonkey is simply a media library jukebox like MP or iTunes that happens to be lower-bloat (loads quickly and uses fewer resources), with integral folder browser and tag macros. Ideal for those who have their own preferred file organization scheme (eg slsk sharers), or in iPod mp3 players.

@ Milton: I've taken to just keeping hi-res scans of album liners. Since I never had a turntable (ie 12" media) this was fairly easy.

@ others: burning DVD-R backup is pretty silly. After 2 annual rounds of this (losing 2 days of free-time each time), I discovered that I could back up for < $80 total investment with a discount HDD and USB enclosure. If you have an spare old drive a USB enclosure is maybe $15-20.

above should read non iPod mp3 players. Ie, a lot of more audiophile players didn't support tags well until the last 2 years, so users ended up needing hierarchical folder organization that iTunes evidently no longer uses by default.

All this talk of organizing digital files, triple back up of hard drives weekly seems a lot more complicated than having a few shelves full of CDs or LPs (even if they're more of a pain to move and take up more space). I'm not totally addicted to physical media exactly, I just think we're still in an awkward middle phase. Perhaps some type of subscription based cloud style streaming could be the possible future, where you didn't have to worry about organizing or backing up or collecting anything?

Part of having a large digital collection means accepting some responsibility for the database management if you don't want tags like "Presley, Elvis" and "Elvis Presley" as separate artists. There are easy-to-use tools built into iTunes and other apps that make it a snap to handle these tasks. The trick is understanding the benefit of making the effort - like a big one upfront and then pretty small going forward. Kinda like if you want a reasonably filed set of CD shelves you need to decide on an organizing approach.

Meanwhile, the idea that a digital collection reduces the connection with music is crazy to me. Having all this music at my fingertips lets me easily do things like compare versions, or make connections between artists I hadn't before, or simply allow me to dig deeper in my collection as I scroll my artist list and hit on someone I hadn't listened to in ages.

Also - sharing albums is a snap: zip it up, put it on a site like Divshare, email the link. Much faster than making a tape or a CDR.

And what about making mixes for yourself or a friend? Back in the cassette days I really had to think it was going to be worth it to go to the effort it took to create one: pulling out all the source CDs, playing them in real-time, listening to the results, creating the in-lay card. Now with MP3s I'm inspired to pull things from hither and yon and put them together for like-minded folks.

being someone who still buys CDs, can someone tell me how they handle 'liner notes'?

case in point re: the 'awkward middle phase', i tag my music w/ album covers, reviews, label and assorted other stuff that can be procured through mediamonkey or whatever and i figure an easy way to add more indepth info is just around the corner (in case i want to be that completist, i'm not at the moment, i haven't even looked at what comes with cds regularly for years and years) so i don't even sweat that at the moment. i like the idea of ripping everything so i can search tracks, recombine them, backup etc. but it's soooo slow i'm probably 20% done and i feel like at the end i'm not gonna wanna part w/ a sizable portion but we'll see how it goes

say, how accurate are those softwares that claim to automatically tag mp3s by listening to a small sample of it?

"don't get me wrong I'm so glad the record company that owns those albums is being so diligent to make sure Dolly fans can only hear that music on albums purchased from used record dealers. which doesn't make them any money anyway."

i'm all for it. i made five bucks selling a dolly parton album this week. that paid for my lunch from the hot dog vendor.

I think streaming music is gonna be a bunch of bullshit; it's the one way the content providers have of giving us less control over media, and locking us in

half-serious question: will the difficult (impossible?) challenge of figuring out a system to correctly tag classical music that would integrate it with other styles of music in your collection hasten the demise of classical music?

I have no idea if they were ever on CD (but I kind of doubt it) - I'm talking about stuff like Joshua, Hello My Name is Dolly, Just Because I'm a Woman, etc. Same goes for Buck's 60s LPs.

FWIW, I found two of those albums (and ten other early Dolly albums) on USENET.

> I'll hang to my archaic CDs thankyouverymuch.

i'd rip them (losslessly) all the same - i've just done all mine and there are about a dozen that have gone to coppery bit-rot heaven.

> triple back up of hard drives weekly seems a lot more complicated than having a few shelves full of CDs

well, weekly backups should be incremental - only the changed things. which shouldn't take long.

i need to get into the habit of burning new purchases as flacs to dvdr as i buy them. i have about 600G of flacs that i only have one copy of... i have the original cds but it'd take me another 6 months to re-rip them.

"half-serious question: will the difficult (impossible?) challenge of figuring out a system to correctly tag classical music that would integrate it with other styles of music in your collection hasten the demise of classical music?"

?? wouldn't software that auto-tags classical music correctly tag the genre as 'classical' (along with conductor,album name, and other metadata)? Is there something about classical music that makes it harder for software to figure out what album it came from?

It seems that for classical music the auto filled in results are often (currently) messed up, and inconsistent. For example, you put in one CD and in the artist field you get the composer, put in the next CD and you get the conductor, or the orchestra, or the star performer, or all the results are in Japanese (this seems to happen to me a lot actually). And of course, with many classical CDs you'll get works by multiple composers and sometimes by different conductors or orchestras. It's just much less normalized than trying to classify rock music (for instance).

i'm all for it. i made five bucks selling a dolly parton album this week. that paid for my lunch from the hot dog vendor.

hey fair enough, I buy used records too!

the only thing i hate about going digital is not having performance & production credits for an album. i used to love poring over that shit, and while it's not like i'm buying many jazz albums digitally now, it was really important for figuring out who i liked and making connections between different records.

and i meant to add that even when i buy something legally and it has some kind of digital liner notes, half of the time the credits aren't even included ;_;

do digital people keep upgrading the albums they like from mp3 to flac to whatever comes next? seems tiresome. or maybe most people don't care that much about how things sound. i mean, a lot of people listen to horrible internet mp3 sound and don't seem to care.

This is one reason I hang onto CDs after ripping them. If someday I decide my 256kbps AAC files don't sound very good, I can go back and make FLACs. I doubt that will ever happen, I'm too lazy. I like keeping the CD liner notes and artwork too.

I think the poor sound quality of MP3s is less of an issue than it used to be, mainly because people rip at higher bit rates now. With my non-audiophile ears and gear, I rarely notice differences between computer files and tracks played off CDs.

For me, a much bigger difference than the recording format is the combination of room acoustics, speaker positions, and my location in the room. It was a big "Duh" moment, but a valuable one, when I realized I could drastically improve what I was hearing by moving my speakers closer to ear level, getting furniture out of the way, etc.

i didn't read all the thread but there is one little thing i'd like to add. i have downloaded and ripped quite a lot of stuff in the last years (around 160 gb). but i didn't listen to most of it. i still listened to my old cds. i had an archos 20 gb jukebox with some of the digitized music. in may i bought an ipod classic, the biggest one available at 120 gb. first i was a little disappointed as there used to be a 160 gb ipod which apple does not produce anymore and which would have been more or less to store all my mp3s. as i could not transfer all mp3s from the computer to the ipod i started alphabetically. i copied everything from a to q. or synchronized if you want the right tech term. the great thing about this 120 meg limitation is that i am now forced to listen to the music. what i do is i rate it. crap to be deleted from the pc hard disk gets one star, stuff which isn't good enough for the ipod but which can stay on the pc gets two and all the rest which will be kept on the ipod gets three and more stars. i have listened to about 3000 songs (often just for a couple of secs) and rated them. right now most of my smiths mp3s are on the ipod. soon there will be sonic youth, swell, talk talk and yo la tengo. maybe around xmas the ipod will contain only music i like (there are still lots of cds to be ripped). i love my little ipod. and the bose earplugs and the sounddock music system. very handy.

which would have been more or less to store all my mp3s =
which would have been more or less big enough to store all my mp3s

I'm curious how big people's digital collections are. Not in a dick-wagging contest, just how much music do you have at your fingertips at home? And do you struggle with choosing what goes on your portable device?

I have about 225gb and am still ripping my CDs. I've got a 160gb iPod for the main library and an 8gb Sansa for new stuff (past year) with a 16gb microsd card for compilations. I constantly have to shift stuff around, which is a pain, and occasionally swap stuff out of my main library with recently ripped older stuff. I was disappointed Apple didn't release a 240gb model - that's the sweet spot where I'll have space for everything I feel is critical. For me, it's not about listening to EVERYTHING, it's about having the choice to listen to ANYTHING. My play stats indicate I listen to about 20-25% of my collection per year so it's not like there's a ton of stuff I never play.

Backed up my mp3 music collection to ten DVD's recently.

i've cut way down on the cds I purchase; I've bought maybe eight all year, plus the beatles box sets. which was a lot of money, really. but I've also found myself downloading less across the board. I think this is just age and time; I have a kid, a family, work two jobs where it's hard for me to listen to music, so the binging years of a few years ago where I acquired untold hundreds of albums in a one week period are just over. I've also grown less attached to physical cds lately (except, like I said, for fetish objects like the Beatles remasters); I just realized the other day that although I purchased the last AMC album when it came out (and love it), I never even played the CD from it because all I've listened to have been mp3s that I got before it came out for the past two years.

also, very nicely done collections like the recycled new order collection make the existing cds kind of superfluous.

C:\MUSIC
209 GB
32,602 files, 3142 folders

I think one thing the mp3 revolution has taught me is that I'll never really enjoy music I don't have an emotional connection to, and I'll never have an emotional connection to music I rarely hear. So a good portion of my listening time is spent considering lesser albums tagged with a 'purgatory' rating, with the expectation that either I'll feel an emotional spark of recognition, or I'll tire of them and delete them.

I'd be happy to have half of my collection, if only to have a stronger emotional response. But figuring out which half is a bastard of a problem.

Anyone else on the cusp of not maintaining a digital music collection at all? I'm at the stage of not backing up or organizing anything, but still being loathe to delete any mp3s I have already.

Anyone else on the cusp of not maintaining a digital music collection at all? I'm at the stage of not backing up or organizing anything, but still being loathe to delete any mp3s I have already.

That's where I've gotten to. I had been backing everything up to dvd-rs and then to external hard drives, but gave up about a year ago (about the time my first kid was born). I think I realized that this stuff would always be available and that it wasn't any major coup to find and download something, legally or otherwise.

So a good portion of my listening time is spent considering lesser albums tagged with a 'purgatory' rating, with the expectation that either I'll feel an emotional spark of recognition, or I'll tire of them and delete them.

me too, as my last.fm stats often indicate. it only just hit me how much of my listening it analytical and evaluative, not so much 'trying to like things more' but trying to develop proper arguments for/against and so its a process that perversely rewards mediocre artists and albums over stuff i've heard just a few times, classified as great and not thought about as much. weird sure but i still feel like i listen to awesome stuff often enough.

I deleted 8,000 MP3s today, as it happens.

i've also listened to new albums a lot more this year than previous years due to spotify making it so easy to do so, so on that basis the volume of music i don't actually like much if at all has probably risen (you have to hear it to hate it). downloading stuff to hear tended to result in a lot of songs just taking up space and remaining unheard.

I'd be happy to have half of my collection, if only to have a stronger emotional response. But figuring out which half is a bastard of a problem.

Hells yeah, especially when you're dealing with the volume of stuff we have. I'll be damned if I'm going to rate 40,000 individual tracks. Properly tagging each was enough of an effort!

it only just hit me how much of my listening is analytical and evaluative

I go through periods like that, too, where I'm CONSUMING music as opposed to ENGAGING music. That's ok - when I get a ton of stuff from the library or download a bunch of albums, I'm looking for something new that will float my boat. I gave up evaluating mediocre stuff long ago and just sell stuff eventually.

I deleted 8,000 MP3s today, as it happens.

Based on any particular criteria?

@blueski:

In a sense, I think we've all become private curators.

At one time, when I was younger and collecting physical formats and watching "Day After" and "Threads" I think I had a vision that I was making a time capsule of a time, place and mindset, and that centuries after the apocalypse archeologists might dig up my collection and have some insight into this life.

After a few decades, I've seen too many collections dispersed in estate sales. I'd probably weep watching vinyl melted down during recycling. Collections are temporary accretions, all is burning, burning.

I think the real value of collecting now has become the way it allows me to construct a metanarrative, broad historical swoops and impregnations and dilutions of style - to think about these ephemeral things as a moving cloud.

The 8,000 was all the music I had on my work computer. If I want to listen to something at work now I use my iPhone so I thought I'd clear space.

There's only about 8,000 mp3s on our home computer anyway; we keep most things on CD still.

i don't so much do the evaluative/analytical thing at all anymore (and i've never gone so far as rating tracks anyway), and several 'pleasant surprise' shuffle sessions of my ripped folder have scared me off just deleting stuff cause it didn't hit me right once or twice. i probably have > 150 gb of material and about a tb total of free space to work with so i don't think i'll have to be too selective anytime soon. i think i actually sell cds more readily than delete mp3s and even i can't make sense of that.

well, it is money duh, but i get tired of glancing at the covers of stuff that gives me a meh impression more than anything

i get tired of glancing at the covers of stuff that gives me a meh impression more than anything

I can totally relate! And I just feel *cleaner* when that stuff is gone from my house!

There's only about 8,000 mp3s on our home computer anyway; we keep most things on CD still.

So you don't feel the need to have all your music available while you're out and about? Just whatever you can stream or have on the iPhone?

"So you don't feel the need to have all your music available while you're out and about? Just whatever you can stream or have on the iPhone?"

Good god no. WTF is wrong with you people?

Why is that so wrong?

Okay maybe for you whipper-snappers the idea of having your complete music collection at your fingertips at all times is something you "need" but for most folks born before oh let's say 1990 it just sounds like overkill.

I don't carry all of my books around with me, so why all of my music?

Once I surmounted that (in hindsight) strange idea, I could buy a tiny little 8 GB flash-memory based device that lasts 30 hours on a charge. The library is still there at home, and someday the devices will converge again. Till then, I pack all the music I'll need for my mental vacations, about once a month.

> I don't carry all of my books around with me, so why all of my music?

because you can?

I "can" poison my girlfriend and throw my cats out of the window to a certain death, but I don't.

I also like the rigmarole of making and syncing new playlists to my iPhone, so I only have certain stuff on me at any time. Like, big Beatles tip right now, so I've just taken off some 90s indie and put on a load of Zombies / Stones / Hendrix / Curtis Mayfield etc. It makes me think, and structures my listening in a way I appreciate.

I don't carry all of my books around with me, so why all of my music?

Music can be enjoyed while doing a bunch activities (working out, grocery shopping, working, etc). It's pretty hard to read a book while exercising, working, blah blah blah.

Saying that, I don't carry all of my music with me. My ipod has about 35GB of music out of 80 (I probably own about 300GB of music on CDs on the whole).

i used to think that was important....I had an 80GB ipod for exactly this reason. when I switched to an iphone was all, "what the hell, how am I going to scale all this down by over half?" then I did and didn't even notice. I got that simplifymedia app so I can stream stuff from home if need be but have used it maybe ten times.

Maybe for you whipper-snappers the idea of having your complete music collection at your fingertips at all times is something you "need" but for most folks born before oh let's say 1990 it just sounds like overkill.

Uh, I was born a helluva long time before 1990. I don't understand people who dismiss the desire to have all one's music at any given time. Just because you aren't interested in the idea doesn't mean no one else should be.

I also like the rigmarole of making and syncing new playlists

I can understand that, but I'm geared towards albums and have no desire to muck about with playlists. I used to hate the morning ritual of staring at my CD racks trying to figure out what 8 CDs I was going to bring to work with me. Now I don't have to make that decision anymore.

I have about 10,000 songs, 60 GB but I haven't uploaded all of my CDs. I am also digitizing two to three LPs or cassettes every day.

I am kinda embarrassed to even answer this, but here ya go.

around 170 gigs of MP3s from various sources on DVDR and some CDRs (from longer ago).

around 400 gigs of lossless bootlegs from D1M3 etc.

around 100 gigs on DVDR that are FLAC rips of stuff I've sold.

iTunes library hovers around 150 gigs as new stuff gets added and old stuff deleted. Maybe 20 gigs of that is stuff I've ripped from CDs I still ahve.

iPod goes back and forth between 10% and 60% of the iTunes depending on my mood and what I'm into at the time.

Don't feel embarrassed, sleeve.

Trust me.

also I still have at least 1000 CDs to rip, but I want to keep most of them so I have no real incentive to do so unless I need it on the iPod for some reason.

lol xpost

i ripped more than half my cd collection and sold it a week or so ago. got a decent return too which is funny because cds are worthless to me other than the booklet or packaging having something interesting

I was born quite a bit before 1990 and the idea of having all my music with me at all times is still really appealing to me. I've got a 120gb ipod but my music collection is around 250gb so too often I end up thinking about listening to something I haven't heard in ages but not having it with me.

I was also thinking the other day about how much I don't miss the time I spent every day picking the 12 CDs that I would have with me at work all day; it's so much easier to carry this tiny little box with 100x more albums on it. I also don't miss walking around with a bulky discman that ran for two hours before losing battery power.

But on the other hand, records from that era when I was in college, delivering pizzas, listening the the same CDs in my car over and over just stick with me and mean so much more. Listening to things that I couldn't find for years and stumbled upon in some record store somewhere, or put off buying for years because something else was always a bit more urgent, when I can just google particular phrases and listen to pretty much anything within 10 minutes. I don't get that attachment and involvement any more, I just do it because I can so why not?

"I don't understand people who dismiss the desire to have all one's music at any given time. Just because you aren't interested in the idea doesn't mean no one else should be."

Well I don't understand the desire at all (or more accurately I don't understand someone being incredulous about someone else not caring about not having access to ALL one's music at any given time.)

"I was also thinking the other day about how much I don't miss the time I spent every day picking the 12 CDs that I would have with me at work all day"

Would totally miss this btw. iPods are listening to singles and mixes I've downloaded and misappropriated albums. Stuff I really care about I listen to on CD.

I'm geared towards albums and have no desire to muck about with playlists

You know you can set up playlists that sync full albums.

(iTunes - Controls - Shuffle - By Albums)

Annoyingly, yes, you have to change this setting if you want to shuffle songs in iTunes itself.

We should talk about who has the most over-engineered set of smart playlists to fill their iPod. Mine give me 60/40 new/old stuff, about 70% albums, 15% singles (tracks with a blank album field) and 15% single-track mixes (with Mix in the Grouping field.) Plus playlists that reference those to give me top rated, top rated and added recently, top rated but rarely listened to ("Unpopular favorites"), added in the last day, week ... etc. Oh, and a regular old playlist where I can add audiobooks and old albums that I absolutely have to have.

I don't really get archiving mp3s on DVD-R. The one thing I've noticed is that DVD-Rs with even a few scratches in them are hard for computers to read. If I cared about losing mp3s, I'd hate to rely on those.

yeah DVD-Rs will probably last 3-5 years tops

OK so here we go...

I just burned my 412th DVD-R of audio. Adding that in with the video collection (most of which is out-of-print television or movies that aren't on Netflix) I'm looking at a minimum of 5-6 TB of storage. Everything is cataloged via CD FInder and a custom FileMaker database so it's easy to do lookups on criteria like "everything released in 1971" or "anytime Pink Floyd played 'Obscured By Clouds' live in 1972", etc. Getting everything into that catalog system took some work, but it's pretty easy now. On top of all that, there's band recordings, video projects, etc.. - all of which need to be archived.

Now that 10.6 is out with a speedy enough Finder, I'm looking at moving the whole works to some sort of desktop RAID 5 system.

>>> I don't carry all of my books around with me, so why all of my music?

>> because you can?

> I "can" poison my girlfriend and throw my cats out of the window to a certain death, but I don't.

but there's no benefit in doing so. (i'm guessing 8) )

you don't carry books around with you because they are bulky and there's no easy way of getting digital copies of them, you certainly can't do it yourself. (plus the reading thing that musicfanatic points out - you can't read whilst walking down the street. not that people don't try)

whereas an ipod that'll carry everything you own is about the size of a fag packet. and costs only about double a 8G mp3 player.

that said, i have only an 8G player with about 2000 oggs on it. i tend to keep the most recent purchases on it (which is everything from this year and half of last year) rather than personal favourites. i'm tempted to buy another that'll be nothing but all-time personal favourites.

(there are a lack of large capacity personal players out there, ipods and those archos things (which are marketed as video players) being about your only options. and neither of those appeal to me for various reasons)

main collection, digitised from cds over a 6 month period, is 17,000 / 750G of flac files on a 1T disk somewhere. and mostly not backed up (what to, another £100 HD?), which i must do something about. but most of my listening is on the walk to work and back.

We should talk about who has the most over-engineered set of smart playlists to fill their iPod.

I don't use iTunes (too slow and a resource hog) but I use J. River Media Center, which has similar functionality but is much faster, watches folders and has an interface I prefer. I set up a Primary and an Offline folder for syncing, that way I know exactly what is on and off the iPod and it's easy to move things between the two. I've got two playlists - one for Recent Acquisitions (which is unplayed stuff I've ripped and added during my big rips over the last couple of years) and Sharp, Short Bursts which is 2 hours of random tracks not listened to in the last six months which are less than 3:30 and have a BPM>150 (mostly punk).

not backed up (what to, another £100 HD?)

Yes, exactly. Space is cheap, get two. Even better, get a drive for your mother, bring your drive when you visit and make an off-site backup while you're there.

J. River is great. since i finally lost it with itunes i try pretty much anything that comes out and media center is still my favorite by some way.

To clarify my point about books, it seems most of us collectors have accumulated hundreds of gigs of music files. Hence, with 2009-era technology (bulky hard disk players with short battery life that max out at 160 GB, or svelte flash players with long battery life that max out at 32 GB), any current portable will force us at some point to make a choice about what portion of our collection to carry. A larger fraction of the library that has to be recharged nightly, a smaller fraction of the library that has to be recharged weekly. But we're already consigned to having a mothership and our pod.

Some day memory costs and collection sizes will converge again. Maybe a smart manufacturer will provide a thoughtful base for a FLAC friendly player (with wifi (network & remote), high-quality s/pdif audio output, and hdmi output for TV file browsing), so that a portable can truly displace other media storage at the home too. But I suspect 160 GB is already well beyond the needs of all but a tiny fraction of users (ILMers, I presume, are atypical), so the market is small.

> Yes, exactly. Space is cheap, get two.

that's not cheap. plus i'd rather be spending the money on more cds.

price of numerous shelves/wallets/racks over the years vs price of a couple of hard disks

500 GB HDs in an external enclosure are running $60 these days. For $140, you can find external enclosures for your TB 3.5 drives that will play all your mp3s and HD video through the home system.

But the major advantage is simple: Backing up a large collection requires days of time swapping/labelling disks. An external drive requires about 2 minutes (and a few hours of overwriting while I sleep). My days are worth more than $60.

i'm probably gonna bite the bullet and stop bothering with archiving tracks/albums on external hard disks altogether other than back-ups of what's on the desktop pc itself. i hardly ever need to turn the external drives on for anything so fuck it. i've got between 17-20,000 or so tracks (+ mixes) just on the desktop hd and that's quite enough alongside streaming apps.

god i don't even know. i stopped counting at the 4TB mark. i have 5 1TB HDs and 1 shiny new 1.5TB drive that have, respectively, <50s-60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and Various. most are at the 80% or greater fill rate, also have two internal drives at 600MB that i use for formatting, sorting, renaming, downloading, etc

and i've been dumping all my backedup DVDrs back onto my drives, because i was finding they were not lasting very long and i was getting lots of CRC errors on them.

i also have given up on trying to systematcially rip my collection of cds and vinyl - but was doing so to archival quality (flac and big cover scans). too much effort.

the only thing i'm making "second" copies of now is flac and wavs i've bought off beatport and juno, etc - as i figure if i've paid money for them it would be a shame to lose them altogether. kinda dumb argument i know, but it is what it is.

i have more than i could possibly listen to in a lifetime, but it's amazingly manageable. and i continue to accumulate.

serious OCD fetishization too, all my directories/files are tagged and named correctly, through some handy apps - and my directory naming structure is "ARTIST - TITLE (YEAR) [FORMAT] {other info}" like :

Eddie Kendricks - Eddie Kendricks (1973) [FLAC] {2007 Remaster}

Probably more than any of y'all cared to know, but, again.... OCD

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Drobo:

http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/richmedia/images/blank.png

Perfect for an irreplaceable and unwieldy music collection.

Hot expandable up to 16TB
Redundant data protection
Mix n match drive capacities

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Drobo

I don't like that Drobo's storage format is proprietary, but' it's something to consider. From all the reviews of it, it's good as near-line storage but not something that you want to use as a home server.

i need to get into the habit of burning new purchases as flacs to dvdr as i buy them. i have about 600G of flacs that i only have one copy of... i have the original cds but it'd take me another 6 months to re-rip them.

When I rip new music, I just ftp it from my NAS to my backup at work. I have 3 1.5 TB drives in a RAID config with 3TB available, with the option to add another 1.5TB. I'm about 90% done ripping my collection. I'm halfway through my Jamaican music, and just have Brazilian, world/global and jazz left. Woo hoo!

I find myself listening to music so much more at home now that it's mostly on flac-Squeezebox and can play simultaneously in every room in the house. I have a few playlists mainly for new music, that I create in MediaMonkey and export to Squeezecenter. The last few days I just put it on random on my Jamaican and soul folders, and hear stuff for the first time in years.

Just ripped my CD of Celtic Frost's Into The Pandemonium to iTunes, which means I now have exactly 33500 songs in my library (128.46GB). Still trying to get rid of more CDs...

so i'm thinking about redigitizing my cds next year and putting them on some networked storage. couple reasons, incl. it'd be nice to have all my shit in itunes at the same time, easier to add stuff to ipod/iphone, i'll be moving in with my gf and then we can both access music on the network, and most importantly a lot of my rips are like 9 years old and were done at 128 on musicmatch or something. even now i only rip at 192 to save space. so i think i have two basic questions--

anyone have experience with network storage--good/bad products, etc.

should i use apple lossless when i re-rip everything? is that overkill? would 320 be ok? ideally i'd like to do everything in itunes just because it's easier but i'm open to ideas. i really need to do some test rips at different bitrates soon.

if you are keeping the discs i personally would consider lossless overkill. i keep my vinyl transfers as flacs but everything else at 320

you should be fine w/192; i can't for the life of me distinguish 320 from 192.

this could be of interest:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/mp3/review/2009/11/18/Sounds-Good-To-Me/p1

I do everything to lossless so I never have to do it again.

mark thanks dude that was a cool article

if you rip with iTunes make sure you turn error correction on - if you're on a PC you should use EAC + lame, it's better. on Mac I like to use Max because it supports mp3 and FLAC.

I agree about the bitrate tho - you should worry more about upgrading your listening equipment before bitrate (then again upgrading bitrate is just a matter of hard drive space whereas it can cost $$$ to get good equipment). I do everything using VBR which is the best compromise between 320 and 192 imo

what popture said. do it lossless. then you only ever have to do the ripping once and can transcode everything into any current or future format as the need arises.

My music collection is sadly digital now, I couldn't afford to buy all the music I get.
While I agree in most part that a mp3 can't quite be as fetishised as much as cd/vinyl, there's still a pride in my music collection - making sure everything is i V0,except electronic releases i 320. I've got 341gb of mp3, split chronologically.

my folder structure is as such:
2008-09
2008-09\artist
2008-09\artist\album

then everything played through itunes.

I'd never buy a CD anymore, the only CDs I've received in the past year are promos. If I was to buy something it'd be o vinyl - but as I'm curretly sellling alot to make rent, I can't see myself doing that often in the future.

when you rip FLACs, what level of compression do you use? I'm confused about what the difference is. isn't any FLAC lossless, anyway?

i rip to VBR now after years of suspicion caved in, setting an average rate of 256. haven't actually ripped a CD in many months and in that time somehow my copy of CDex doesn't seem to work anymore. itunes ripping and .m4a can fuck off - since i updated itunes i can't import .m4a's directly into Acid Pro anymore (this was always kinda random tho)

> when you rip FLACs, what level of compression do you use?

the default (-5 i think). the others say they are faster (although -5 is fast enough) or smaller (but that's dependant on what you're compressing) so i don't bother. as you say, it's all lossless.

i've seen results from 11% of original size (very quiet track) to 70%+. it's usually 50-60% though. i have 17000+ flacs ripped from cds (and about as many ogg / mp3 copies of the same files) on a 1TB disk which is 75% full.

I rip to 192kbps MP3 to save space on my player. However, I use the LAME encoder and I always set the quality on the highest (slowest) setting. I find that using that setting makes a very noticeable difference in quality vs. a 192kbps MP3 encoded with other encoders. Since I do most of my listening in the car, where there's a ton of extraneous noise, I think that the quality is good enough.

the others say they are faster (although -5 is fast enough) or smaller (but that's dependant on what you're compressing) so i don't bother.

by "faster" do you just mean how long it takes to do the rip?

thanks, koogs.

(the ripping and compressing are usually two different stages, ripping is done to an intermediate wav file and the wav is then compressed and deleted).

but, yes, i meant how long it takes to compress the wav.

(how long it takes to do the rip seems to depend on how thorough it's being, the state of the disk and software - the windows box at work is way faster than my linux laptop but the laptop will successfully rip without errors things that the windows box can't)

i am intrigued by this "max" program mentioned above--could rip high-bitrate LAME-encoded mp3s which might be perfect.

unscientific test using the biggest wav i had lying around (822727292 byte mix cd)

compression level 0
josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 613424186 bytes, ratio=0.746
real 1m59.235s

compression level 5
josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 554256133 bytes, ratio=0.674
real 1m52.021s

compression level 8
josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 547994685 bytes, ratio=0.666
real 2m11.511s

so 5 (default) is actually faster than 0 (fast) and has only slightly worse compression than 8 (best)

I always rip at level 8, why not take time and save space.

lately I've really been enjoying the fact that VLC can play flac audio, makes it so much easier to check out sound quality of various files.

Much love for this thread, it makes me feel slightly less of an OCD lunatic.

I was inspired by some comments here to make the effort to add album art to the 3500 or so singles/non-lp tracks that lacked it. Took me a couple of months but I wound up with only 25 tracks that I couldn't find covers for. Quite amazing that between Discogs.com, Rateyourmusic.com and Google Image search there's art for almost everything.

If something doesn't have art, I make it myself. Like some mixes and comps.

One of my greatest victories was finally finding scans of each disc of the merzbox.

Yeah, for radio sessions and bootlegs that have no official art I mainly used interesting band shots - it's nice to have an image of the actual artists.

I forgot to mention I've also been ripping a lot more of my collection and have revised my must-carry-everything viewpoint. I've got a full 160gb iPod and as I was listening to my recent rips it dawned on me how much was second tier in the first place - nice to have, not needed to walk around with. So I've got about 2/3s of my stuff at any given time and feel satisfied.

this is seriously the biggest waste of time in the universe

what the fuck is wrong with us

What, maintaining it or organizing it?

i mean, both really

Yeah, man, CDs don't take 25% as much organising and backing-up as MP3s do.

i mean fucking honestly what an enormous waste of my life

i am still rating and deleting. i think i have almost rated 20,000 songs. less than 9,000 to go. i'll be finished in april, i guess.

cool snarky comeback bro, but i have like 80 gigs of music i've collected over the year clogging my itunes and now i have to waste a day figuring out what goes over to a hard drive and what gets deleted, and then move it all over folder by folder? get fucked, mp3s

and it's not like you can drag straight from itunes, you have to drag the FOLDER into your hard drive or the trash and then go BACK to itunes and delete it. So much easier than CDs thanks for breaking it down for me man

I'm not joking or being snarky; organising CDs, even if you're fastidious as hell, is far less time-consuming than organising MP3s. Digital music makes database nerds out of everyone. It's dull as fuck.

Don't get the dragging a folder into the trash thing? Just highlight in iTunes, delete, and select to delete the source file too?

Yesterday Elvis Telecom posted this useful hint:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20091231160510142

ha, sorry for snappin, glad yr on my team. fuck an mp3. i'm TOTALLY gonna listen to this Akron/Family album again

i almost envy some 12 year old kid now who may not ever have to worry about this shit haha

i almost envy some 30 year old man who has more fulfilling things in his life than this shit

oh i definitely envy them

Don't get the dragging a folder into the trash thing? Just highlight in iTunes, delete, and select to delete the source file too?
--exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy)

this is what I do and it works great?

I don't mind the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with MP3 farming. It gives my hands something to do while I'm listening to music. Makes a nice change from doing the ironing.

no, what i'm saying

1. I go through iTunes to decide what to keep and what to lose
2. I go into the iTunes folders to drag and drop into my harddrive
3. I have to go BACK to iTumes to delete the folders I just moved

I don't get point #2.

not using itunes to manage your music may actually help you a lot

i'm cleaning my itunes and moving the things i want to "keep" to my external hard drive, anagram. it's mind-numbing and pointless

I don't mind the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with MP3 farming. It gives my hands something to do while I'm listening to music. Makes a nice change from doing the ironing.

― mike t-diva, Friday, 8 January 2010 15:07 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You need Pro Evolution Soccer and masturbation in yr life, Mike,

Also, "fantasy air-conducting".

Like "air guitar" but REALLY wacko.

oh, an external hard drive. gotcha. can't you do it all in one go, though? just make sure the iTunes folders only contain what you want to keep. then when you're done with that drag the whole lot to your external drive in one go.

Whiney, surely trimming your iTunes so it['s JUST what you want to keep and then copying EVERYTHING OVER AT ONCE to the HDD while you go and do something less boring instead would make more sense?

xpost!

xpost Nah, who needs soccer and wanking when you've got Doodle Jump?

hah!

Whiney, surely trimming your iTunes so it['s JUST what you want to keep and then copying EVERYTHING OVER AT ONCE to the HDD while you go and do something less boring instead would make more sense?

― exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy), Friday, January 8, 2010 9:21 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

but i'm also freeing up itunes to get another 80 gigs of 2010 music! so "Want to keep" and "want to keep on my hard drive" are two different animals

After a long talk with my roomate, i think i'm giving up on having a tidy "digital music collection". Its a complete waste of time considering how easily you can just steal shit when you need it.

I'm just gonna transfer EVERYTHING over, keep my external harddrive sloppy and patchworky, and then just go on wild deleting sprees when i eventually run out of space.

The librarian / IT guy in me just died.

is the external HD something you use to play music or is it basically a closet?

closet, yo

I just keep my external HD permanently plugged in, with my iTunes library switched over to it. I uncheck stuff that I don't want synching to the iPod, and that's about it.

Yeah, my laptop moves around too much for that to be really possible.

i need to get an external hd that'll hook up to my router. then things will be cool.

Yeah, my laptop moves around too much for that to be really possible.

― steady mmmobyn (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, January 8, 2010 9:51 AM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah exactly

yeah the existence of my external HDs as essentially "put them here so I don't feel like they're gone forever" things has given me occasional pause over the past year, because I have used them exactly once to retrieve stuff - they're graveyards. once the stuff is off the devices I use (pretty much only the computer now - my iPod hardly ever gets any use these days), it's not in play. this makes me think a lot about how I relate to music & storage & all that stuff

btw f this thread for forcing me to spend 1/2 hour and counting putting tags on my "unknown artist" files

I'm just gonna transfer EVERYTHING over, keep my external harddrive sloppy and patchworky, and then just go on wild deleting sprees when i eventually run out of space.

― steady mmmobyn (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, January 8, 2010 6:41 AM (18 minutes ago)

The librarian / IT guy in me just died.

― exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy), Friday, January 8, 2010 6:42 AM (17 minutes ago)

The future, summed up.

Just a quick heads up, and clearly in this area ymmv, but for those external HDD users or would-be purchasers I'd strongly recommend against using anything made or badged by LaCie, assuming you want to keep the data thereon for any length of time. A friend has just had two separate LaCie devices fail beyond any repair within a month (both less than two years old) and my workplace colleagues who deal with such matters see LaCie HDDs fail more often than any other brand.

(sorry for turning this into oh noes boring computer questions)

+1, my LaCie is on the verge of dying as well after less than a year. do you have any recommendations for other brands?

Where did kshighway go btw?

heard this too. i'm still on lacie, but with backup on another hd.
btw is there a way how to do a fast search on external usb drives? a simple search hangs up my expicula/explorer...

Seagates are great

Yeah, where is kshighway? I just made the sod a website.

I have two western digital "mybook" hds that I've used heavily and have never had any problems

Also MIA:

Kate

it makes me sad to even think about how much time I've spent tagging mp3s

> do you have any recommendations for other brands?

I've heard good reports on the WD Mybooks too; my network storage colleague has been trialling Buffalo TeraStations as a "personal" storage solution with good results.

Agreed on WD Mybooks, been working for me just fine.

hard drives are cheap. Spend 100 dollars and don't sweat it.

My music library is well over 300 gigs. I've moved it from 1 drive to another several times with no problems. I've also restored it when an old hard drive crashed with no problem.

I avoid LaCie as I've had multiple external drives of theirs fail. The drives are Samsung or Hitachi or WD or Seagate anyway, so you're paying for the box and controller card and power supply. I had a LaCie 1tb(2 500gig drives in 1 box) die on my, then a year later I cracked it open, pulled out one of the drives, stuck it in my computer, and it works great.

Gtech drives from Hitachi are good. I'm all internal and everything is Western Digital. I also have an old Maxtor external that's held up really well. If you research all the major brands you'll hear complaints. Hard drives fail. But researching on Newegg led me to the Western Digital Caviar Black internal drives and I now have 3 of them. I had 4 but that's the one that died after several years and two computers.

I'm waiting for SSDs to be cheap, or eventually I'll just by a Drobo.

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Robotics-FireWire-Storage-DR04DD10/dp/B001CZ9ZEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262965209&sr=8-1

330 dollars and just fill it with the internal drives I already have! Automatic raid mirroring. If 1 drive dies, you replace it with another and your computer never notices the difference.

knowing that there are 1TB SSDs out there is just mindblowing to me.

whiney otm x1000000000000000000

all my songs are on a NAS which makes syncing verrrryy slooooww

i once had a dream that my ID3 tags were actually organized and that every song had the lyrics field filled in corrently - that was fucked up

i swear i think half my motivation to make money is so that some day i can pay someone to spend three days putting the record label into the genre field

Yeah, where is kshighway? I just made the sod a website.

― exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy), Friday, January 8, 2010 3:17 PM (45 minutes ago)

I am reading Powell's essay now!

So, taking a month or two off was good. Glad to see Whiney's bringing further attention to my thread. Thanks dude.

>Automatic raid mirroring. If 1 drive dies, you replace it with another and your computer never notices the difference.

On a final LaCie=Junk note, and for those who might not be au fait with RAID etc, I'd only add: Avoid any RAID device which only uses RAID 0 - if that fails then any data on it will be irretrievably fucked (unless yr prepared to drop the £££ to get it professionally looked at).

>i once had a dream that my ID3 tags were actually organized and that every song had the lyrics field filled in corrently - that was fucked up

proper lols.

fwiw i have completely given up trying to organize the actual music files i own - if i have to actually copy or export actual files anywhere i use one of doug's applescripts for itunes. it was a good moment when i realized i could do that with no negative consequences to myself or those i hold dear

My dream is simple. MP3 tagging should allow for multiple albums. For instance, let's say I have a song by a band on their own LP. I also have it on some seminal compilation. Sometimes I want to be able to view by artist and album, but other times I want to click on the compilation. For this reason alone, I have multiple copies of the same song. It's not that simple though, because it would really screw with iTunes folder hierarchy.

My (admittedly partial) solution to that problem is to make a playlist with the same track listing as the compilation.

i'm keeping my cds and vinyl yall, fwiw

like in the next 10 years there's gonna be some way you can stream records superfast and in super high quality and those thousands of hours spent making sure that Alvo Noto was filed under Classical is gonna make us feel like total chumps

I actually managed to get rid of all of my CDs by the end of the year. I don't really "manage" my mp3s. They just sit there and I listen to them.

That being said, I think it makes more sense to keep your CDs than to do what I'm doing. For all of the reasons everyone's already said. But I buy a lot of books and didn't want to deal with two physical media collections in my life. Also, I just prefer the digital format for music now. So, just personal preference.

Your mp3s are all backed up though, right?

I recently (finally) completed ripping most of my collection -- I'm down to a small amount of vinyl and a slew of traded CDRs -- and spent some time packing down what I was going to keep into binders and the like. Basically I just wanted to make it all easier to move.

xpost

Apple Time Capsule backs everything up automatically.

yeah, I kept my 300 most crucial, most listened to CDs in a binder and sold the rest, and made a KILLING.

But vinyl? Yeah I have thousands and while it needs a big purge, they're not going anywhere.

I'm still doing my planned donation of things to KUCI here soon, I really want to get some paintings up on the wall instead of CD racks.

You're taking down all of the racks and switching to binders?

i will say a silent prayer for all of you. good luck and godspeed with all of your sorting and saving!

http://api.ning.com/files/SKpnRD7cBshuv9Vuz7vRwzVih24jVn6p9DWsLk-FHn0*ZB7YimhZuL3PyvGKdx6moc6k0cTmU9vngc47u7QBeW2u3A4bXGUt/babyprayinghands.jpg

Hahaha.

Seems like a good moment to mention these supercool space-saving CD sleeves which I praised on another thread recently:

http://www.jazzloft.com/p-34281-space-saving-cd-sleeves.aspx

anagram do u find that u can't really see the spines with those?

No I can see them just fine and dandy

although it does depend on how tightly packed they are

How are they on the actual discs? We had a discussion a few months ago about . . . binders . . . and me and someone else who's name I can't recall right now were talking about how the old binders--at least of the type we owned--used to scratch the CDs. (Not as awesome as the *CD player* I had once that carved deep-ish circular grooves into all of my CDs. Thankfully I didn't own many records back then, although it basically fucked up most of the Metallica discography at the time.)

they're fine on the discs. the playable surface rests next to the tray card.

Sweet.

For car listening, do you folks hook up your mp3 player, or just stick with CDs?

I pretty much listen exclusively to the radio when I'm in my car nowadays, but my car has a tape deck, so I used to just use one of the type of things

http://www.newertech.com/products/images/cassette_adapter_400x250.jpg

and my iPod.

i actually kind of like the sorting/tagging of mp3s. it satisfies my ocd

i use cds--my car doesnt have a tape deck and fm transmitters blow.

I have heard nothing but negative reviews of FM transmitters. Interference. Bad sound quality. Bleh.

tried FM transmitter but it didn't work. Tried above tape doo-hicky but that didn't work. And now the CD player is having trouble so I'm hoping to one day replace the car stereo with something fancy.

^ks, Yes the iTrip, I remember those well.

I personally get too distracted by music, especially busier music, while I'm driving, so I tend to stick with Radio 4 or 5 these days. Or stuff that works just as well in the background. This makes me sound much older than I am..

Yeah! I've never actually used an iTrip, but my best friend did back in the day and it seemed like he was always having problems with it cutting out. I've used a bunch of tape adapters, and sometimes you heard some additional noise in the music you're listening to, but if you turn it up loud enough it's fine. Which isn't ideal, but if all you have is a cassette deck like me, it's the cheapest way to listen to music in the car. But now I just mostly listen to NPR and the local pop, hip-hop, and "alternative" radio stations.

Which is good, because that's how I find out about a lot of music I wouldn't hear otherwise. When I was in college and just read indie rock blogs and shit, a lot of the time I didn't even know what the big pop songs were, which was stupid because I love pop music.

I think I'd have a better sense of what is truly happening in 'pop' music if I listened to commerical radio more, rather than snooped around forums like these or the Singles Jukebox.

But now I just mostly listen to NPR and the local pop, hip-hop, and "alternative" radio stations. Which is good, because that's how I find out about a lot of music I wouldn't hear otherwise.

There's your complete inversion of the college radio role model.

But often I will have been exposed to these songs by osmosis almost, so when you actually make time to listen to 'I Gotta Feeling', it's like 'oh that's what it is'.

Also, when I did tune into the radio, the overplay/heavy rotation robbed even the best songs of their gloss and freshness. You remember how sick we all were of Hey Ya! by the end of 2003, not that everyone like it in the first place.

*liked.

iTrip/etc is ok if you can get some dead air. Not so good in urban areas, or all of spain apparently, where every .05mhz has some guy shouting from the back of his garage.

Ned, as you said in your Stylus Decade piece: "pop is the biggest musical subculture among all the rest." As many people before me have said, in some ways you actually have to go out and seek out this shit in a way you wouldn't have to before. If I stop listening to the radio for a few weeks, I don't even know what's going on in pop music, except for the tidbits I read here and there online, which isn't much because I don't seek new pop out much online.

it is true about pop music though...when I get tired of the few CDs at hand I just listen to the radio, and since I started driving more I've become much more familiar with the likes of Pitbull.

Poker Face sucks though, am I right?

I just over xmas succumbed to iTunes and got all my mp3s on an external drive --- this article was real helpful

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

I've been maintaining a digital music collection for 8 years and all the effort has been TOTALLY worth it for me. But then, I like having a neat, organized house - things go where they're supposed to go. Same with music - when I acquire new music either physically or digitally, it's easy to drop it into the appropriate folder in the appropriate section in my library. It took a few iterations to come up with the structure that I use but now there's not much 'maintenance', just regular use and enjoyment.

I can understand the angst involved if you've never had things organized and you've got a mountain of music to comb through, but you can chip away at it over time, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing chore. And maybe, just maybe, you'll find it enjoyable to pull out everything you've got by your favorite artists and listen to it while you fix tags and add album art.

Do you do spring cleaning in your home? Do you go through all the stuff in your closet and desk, chucking things, filing others, etc? Not everyone does and I suspect that behavior will correlate with how you handle your digital media.

i should seriously start a business offering to organize peoples' mp3s

more like gerald mcboring boring

i was given a gift certificate to an electronics store for xmas, so i went to see what they have.
they had a usb drive with the "twilight" soundtrack pre-loaded.
they had a toothbrush that played one song on it so you could tell how long to brush your teeth.
they had some mp3 players, and one of them had a feature where you could buy miniSD cards by genre, that had a proprietary playlist on them, but you couldn't access the songs individually, or change the play order, or rewind, but you could skip a song.
they had another mp3 player with NO FOLDER SYSTEM.
i didn't buy anything.

question that i'm almost embarrassed asking:

if i have a compilation on cd, how do i convert it to a single mp3 file?

on iTunes on my Mac you select all the tracks on the CD and then from the Advanced menu pick Join CD Tracks. Then import as usual.

thanks.

how about without itunes?

on linux i use abcde with the -1 (one) option

Why would you want to do that?

To upload a mix compilation to the net.

it's getting to where if i need to hear a PJ Harvey album or something i just type "PJ Harvey+rar" into google and i have it in like 2 minutes. I don't know if yall digital tag-and-organize hoarder types are expecting that to go away any time soon, but it don't look likely.

I'm not but knowing how badly compilations usually get tagged and organized by others I'm content to do some trawling just to get that under control more. (Was doing that yesterday with the American Pop: An Audio History files -- when everything has as its artist 'Various Artists,' I was happily cursing whoever entered THAT into the CDDB...)

I'm not either but (a) I like owning the music, rather than just streaming it (although this is becoming a little less significant to me (n.1)) and (b) I don't mean to sound like a tool, but is the "artist + rar" formula legal? I'm not judging anyone else, but I'm sticking with legal downloads and/or streaming.

________________________________________
(n.1) Between my old discs and MP3s I acquire from eMusic and Lala and Juno, I have so much that sometimes I feel like it's akin to having nothing (if an unheralded, unheard album cut is lost amid 13K songs (which is what I estimate I have now on my iPod, spread over 1448 albums), it's like not having that song at all).

Are there people out there spending hours organizing their mp3s? If you're importing a CD into iTunes, it will pull in the artist name, track names, and album art for you. If you're buying mp3s, all of the metadata's already there. And even if it weren't, it wouldn't take too long to just look it up on Wikipedia or allmusic and enter it manually. As far as keeping the files themselves organized, iTunes can do that automatically for you, or you can just put them in folders by artist or something, so you never have to think about where any of it goes. If you actually have to think about this too much, you're making things way too complicated for yourself.

As an aside, I also think it's hilariously odd that we've reached the point where a bunch of CDs are cheaper *new* on Amazon or my local record store than they are as digital files on Amazon Mp3 or iTunes. The big chain of indie record stores around here, Newbury Comics, have started selling a bunch of records brand new starting at $6.99. So, as people have noted before, this is a really good time for all of you who still buy CDs.

Daniel: Typing the artist name and ".rar" into Google and downloading whatever comes up isn't legal.

i dunno ksh, your simple theory doesn't really work with the way i DL music since

a) i download SO MUCH for work AND pleasure that i'm not gonna take the time to fix all the fucked up metadata. Like I get tons of promos that are just Track 01, Track 02; or weird things ppl put in "sort by artist"; and god forbid if you download a rap album. I'd have to really take the time to fix the metadata in EVERY album i download and sometimes, for work, I'm downloading 10-12 albums a day. People are so careless with metadata, and i used to take the time to fix it, but then just stopped because it felt like a retarded waste of my time to be fixing these albums.

b) then I have to move that shit to a hard drive, which becomes sorting and agony once i have to move the one High On Fire album into the High On Fire folder individually.

its all just a fucking pain in the ass since

c) If I want to hear PJ Harvey's White Chalk, it's easier for me to just DL White Chalk via rapidshare and have it in two minutes than
-plug in my hard drive to the wall
-plug the wire into my laptop
-find the PJ Harvey folder
-drag it into my iTunes

People are so careless with metadata, and i used to take the time to fix it, but then just stopped because it felt like a retarded waste of my time to be fixing these albums.

If (if) my proposal for EMP this year makes the cut, this is going to be one of the many points that comes up for discussion. (The title is "The Listener as Electronic Librarian.")

yeah, listeners are usually fucking dipshits in my experience

i mean even since the days of Napster, "OH FUCK ITS A FUNNY SONG, I GUESS IT'S WEIRD AL!"

i mean even since the days of Napster, "OH FUCK ITS A FUNNY SONG, I GUESS IT'S WEIRD AL!"

1) otm 2) lol 3) big eye-opening process for me in the napster days w/this: "oh, wow, I try not to be a big ol' cynic but there sure are a lotta dumbasses out there"

A sort-of sneak peak here but a big area of discussion in the librarian profession right now is the question of user-generated indexes -- think of tags like this, but also on YouTube and throughout the web. It can and does have a relevant impact on everyone participating in the digital world, and not just in terms of music. Since libraries/librarians/indexers/cataloguers are in the business of agreed-upon standards, when that goes out the window things get...involved.

J0hn,

i went to the New Museum in New York and this Scottish artist Ruth Ewan made a whole jukebox of lefty protest songs, which was a pretty cool concept. And fun to flick around. Great piece.

http://artobserved.com/artimages/2009/04/ruth-ewan-a-jukebox-of-people-trying-to-change-the-world-2009-via-ny-art-beat.jpg

But one of the songs is some wacky "Let's Bomb Iraq" song and she credited it to Weird Al, Napster-style. I was like, "Fuck, you're 30 years old and did how much research for this and you still don't know what Weird Al is like?"

That's why you can't trust metadata

Whiney, if that system works for you, that's cool! But many non-rock crit types, myself included, aren't downloading 10-12 albums a day. And if importing via CD or downloading via Amazon mp3 are the primary ways music ends up in your mp3 player, it only takes two seconds to double-check the metadata with Wikipedia or allmusic to make sure it's accurate, because most of the time it's going to already be fine.

gotta say that kshighway is otm there tho - people who want to hear as much music as they can fit into their day will always, always be a pretty small percentage of the listening public, who aren't dumb sheep: they're just not obsessed/permanently engaged/still reeling from their early experiences with the power of the form. I mean I first encountered this when I was in the 6th grade geeking out on liner notes: everybody else in class liked music just fine, but there were exactly two of who gave 1/10 of a shit about producers' names and whether they also played on the record and where stuff was recorded, and both of us turned out kinda whacked

everybody else mainly just cares about some cool tunes now and then

like, by "weird al," they mean something different from what you and I might mean by "weird al" i.e. the name of an artist

that post just blew my mind

xxpost -- Extremely true. There is an element of any kind of indexing or cataloguing that is essentially...I don't know if Sisyphean is the correct word, because it's not a case where you approach a clear end point only to have it all slip out of your fingers time and again; rather it's a case where there is never an end point even in sight. But it is nonetheless addressed as a task anyway, information catalogued, search terms judged and assigned, catalog headers created, etc. etc. It's absolutely true that for the vast majority of people the specific distinctions and paths to information created will never be of active or immediate use -- nonetheless, they are there, because one never knows who will need them or use them.

xpost

the universal weird al

from each according to his ability, to each according to what he means by "weird al"

if you see weird al on the road kill him

I always need to change the tags when it comes to double CDs. The title tags always say "disc 1" and "disc 2" but that's not how I want it to appear on my iPod, I just want the whole album as one item. So I have to change those titles and then renumber the tracks as well, from 1 of 12 to 7 of 12 or whatever.

not to mention i have to retitle all my comps because the iphone is a stupid jagoff that sprays my compilation artists all over place like a firehose.

and then when they fix it i'm gonna have to change them all back? sounds like a waste of time.

hi folks, I just finished ripping 250 DVDRs back into the new external HD and I'm sitting here sorting folders and fixing metadata on my day off.

for some reason the computer decided it hates around 20 DVDs full of mp3s, it keeps spitting the discs back out so I can't even see what's on them. not sure yet if this is a hardware issue or a problem with the discs. but like whiney sez, most of them are probably still out there (at least ten were from Mutantsounds).

and kshighway, ever tried to run iTunes with more than 175-200 gigs in it? not pretty, at least not on my old G4. for me iTunes is where I keep stuff I'm actively attempting to listen to, it doesn't have the capacity for my storage.

(The title is "The Listener as Electronic Librarian.")

lol you should interview me for this

"Furthermore, my son, be admonished: of organizing your music collection there is no end;"

lol you should interview me for this

Kept in mind!

On the topic of bad metadata, there seems to be a general misunderstanding of the "compilation" checkbox in iTunes... its for multiple artists people, not greatest hits packages.

Oh god the 'compilations' tag annoyed me for ages - all sorts of stuff came up as having that box checked when I ripped my CDs to iTunes. Like Physical Grafitti, but only disc 2.

I run across that with lots of rap album. I was trying to listen to The Game on my iPod a few months ago and couldn't find any of the three albums despite knowing I had put them on it. Of course, they were under "compilations". WTF?

The only thing I really care about w/r/t metadata is making sure artist/song/album tags are correct. I'd love to go through and make sure all the years are correct, although with 18,000 mp3s, this isn't something I'm really excited about doing (plus, there's the question: for re-releases and compilations, do you go with the year first released or the year it appeared on that particular album?). I'd also love to fix all the "featuring" credits so they appear next to the song instead of next to the artist, but again, I can't imagine that it will ever seem like a high priority.

(A quick further note -- my EMP topic proposal has been accepted so yes, definitely expect to hear more about this now!)

I have fixed all the featuring credits on albums where they were tagged in the artist field. I have also gone though and properly categorized my compilations. I have spent hundreds of hours fixing metadata in my library but my ability to sort/filter/enjoy has gone up exponentially.

I heart keith sweat!

I love tagging music. I too have spent hundreds of hours doing this, and I found it all strangely calming. I basically took several swipes through my collection.

Pass 1: Make sure the basic information is correct. Album, artist, track name, year, genre. Use very broad genres and don't fret too much about it. Also, I tend to keep the genre same for the same artist. I know that this is flawed, but it's one of the rules I laid out at the beginning of this project and I've stuck to it. Also made sure that compilations were tagged properly and the album artist field was correct.

Pass 2: Album art. Every single album, single, compilation, anything must have album art. I used an applescript to just create a playlist to find all tracks that didn't have album art, then went through each of them. Also, I changed some other album art that I thought was too small. I even found scans of each disc of the Merzbox. In the rare case that something didn't have album art, I created it myself. This is the case for some mixes that I've recieved or something like ILX Top tracks of the 1970s.

Pass 3: Proper capitalization for album, artist, and title. For this one used another applescript, and wouldn't have done it other wise. Essential that the artist case match, otherwise the iPhone displays them twice. This one didn't take as long as I thought it would

All along the way I've been doing ratings as well. I don't rate every single song and I don't rate on perceived quality. I rate on replayability. Basically, if I give a song 3 stars, then I like it and I would like to hear it again sometime. I have a 3 star playlist that I know I can put on and hear songs that I will enjoy and there not be a bad one in the bunch. Currently this playlist is at 1434 songs.

I haven't experienced iTunes problems now that I've headed well north of 300gb. Sometimes you get a bit of a hang-up while the external drive does its thing (perhaps a function of the Firewire 400 that would disappear with an 800 or eSATA connection).

congratulations ned. if, as a small part of your presentation, you can persuade the entire world to agree on a format for crediting songwriters ...

"Madonna/Patrick Leonard"?
"Madonna / Leonard, Patrick"?
"Madonna, Patrick Leonard"?
"Madonna, P. Leonard"?
"Madonna and Patrick Leonard"?
"Madonna"?
"Weird Al"?

...then my computer will be your computer's best friend.

p.s. i have unilaterally decided the first way above is correct.

also please, while you are wielding the power of the EMP podium, please order all record companies, publishers, etc., to include songwriter credits on any and all metadata they produce.

yeah, I think it's a function of the USB2 connection to the LaCie HD or the hardwired bus speed of the old G4 that slows it down, not the actual library size. I should try the Firewire connection.

the new drive is a Seagate and has really been put through the paces in its first week, performing admirably.

xp hahaha fcc otm, #1 would be my choice as well.

Weird Al, surely.

The only thing I really care about w/r/t metadata is making sure artist/song/album tags are correct. I'd love to go through and make sure all the years are correct, although with 18,000 mp3s, this isn't something I'm really excited about doing (plus, there's the question: for re-releases and compilations, do you go with the year first released or the year it appeared on that particular album?). I'd also love to fix all the "featuring" credits so they appear next to the song instead of next to the artist, but again, I can't imagine that it will ever seem like a high priority.

― Hoisin Murphy (jaymc), Tuesday, January 19, 2010 5:15 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

this is my approach, to a tee. I sometimes dream of how nice it would be to have *all* the metadata sorted out properly, with lyrics to each song even (but only if there were lyrics in the original liners, obviously.)

I also make sure all my albums have cover art - but get really annoyed when the biggest image I can find for an album is say, 150x150, and it happens to be a really shitty/pixelated scan. or when I can't find a jpg of the cover art at all, and have to use some random picture of the artist.

oh man, i don't know if i want to get started on this. i have almost 40,000 MP3s and i spend too much time trying to make sure they are tagged correctly. i've always been a bit of a closet librarian.

one of these days i plan to get the years right.

they should have separate entries for "year released" and "year recorded" or something like that. anyone else ahree?

when itunes introduced the "album artist" tag it was a good day.

i think i spend time on this b/c it's something i (in theory) have total control over and can actually be "accomplished" to a reasonable degree unlike all the other work that piles up.

I've been "yelled at" on last.fm for incorrect tagging several times because I tag my featuring artists with the song "incorrectly".

Hahah part of my proposal mentioned the possibility of being contacted online by someone with that very complaint...

What I wonder is: Why the hell is there not a computer program that can do this? You should be able to set a few parameters and let it do its thing. Another couple of clicks, and two hard drives are merged and sync'd, just like two contact lists. I much prefer to let machines do the machine work.

Software coders: I would pay $50 for a program to do this well.

what is last.fm?

always wondered this ^^^^ too, btw

music listening/streaming service, yeah? I don't do it myself.

UPDATE***

Well, my roommate's PC recognizes all the discs my drive spits out, so now it's just a question of dumping them on HIS external, then over to mine. No idea why they won't read, whether it's a weird format glitch, a hardware thing, or a bad batch of discs (they are all from the same spindle). Or some combo thereof.

Now I am going to venture into the "various/compilations" folder and try to get some consistent formatting going on. I swear I think I might end up using iTunes for the compilations and nothing else, then another manager for all the regular album folders and flac files.

i sort of like "featured" stuff to be in the artist tags, but usually i don't take the time to change it.

the biggest mindfuck for me is the GENRE tag.

what the hell?

the very nature of GENRE precludes a systematic way of deciding what goes in what category, but i can't help wishing for one.

does anyone have some system for dealing with genre?

i HATE a lot of the default GENRE tags in itunes, like Indie/Alternative or whatever.

but there are so many artists i have NO IDEA how to categorize. like townes van zandt? country? not really. folk? i hate that label. singer-songwriter? ugh.

The one iTunes feature I've always longed for is an ability to click on a song and see which playlists, if any, it appears on. I have a bunch of duplicates, but I don't always know which of the two versions of a song I should delete, because one might be the version I've put on a mix.

I decided to use the genre tag to hold, well tags - so: "Country, Folk, singer-songwriter".

If you want to sync files over two hardrives and you're on windows give 'Synctoy' a try. It's free:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&displaylang=en

I decided to use the genre tag to hold, well tags - so: "Country, Folk, singer-songwriter".

the problem is that if you want to actually browse your collection BY genre, you end up with some as

country, folk, singer-songwriter

and others as

folk, singer-songwriter, experimental

or whatever.

In other words, they come up as different genres. So you have to construct "smart playlists" that take all this into account. And frankly I don't use playlists very much, since they clutter up the interface. I'd rather be able to search for something quickly, or just use iTunes' native filing structure.

the ability to tag with multiple genres would be the greatest leap forward in itunes functionality since ctrl+i function

What are people here doing as they reach the upper limits of their MP3 player's memory capacity?

I have an external drive with lots of room, and I use iTunes and a "Classic iPod." I've used 90GB of memory, and have about 50GB left. Whenever I open iTunes on my PC, all the music I've loaded appears in the window, even if my external drive isn't plugged in. At my current rate, I think I'll use the remaining 50GB by the end of 2010. What then? Will it be necessary for me to get a new iPod and a new external drive (to clear the old library off my iTunes program)?

at some point you have to stop automatically sync'ing your entire collection. How big is your external drive? Why would you want to clear off the old library? You just have 1 big library with all your music, spread out over how many hard drives you like. Then you have your iPod and you put the music on it that you want to listen to.

That's the answer, I think! I've been automatically sync'ing everything I download to my iPod; how do I stop that, and how do I begin removing stuff that's now on the iPod (to clear space)?

Not sure how much room I have on the external hard-drive. Maybe 500GB? Anyway, not close to reaching capacity on the drive, just on the iPod.

(Thx for info, BTW)

I have only a 4GB ipod, and something like 200GB of mp3s on an external drive. Right now I just copy the albums I want to my laptop and sync using playlists. Its not perfect. But like others I move the laptop too much to use my external all the time (I've tried).

I assume you'll have to do some version of what we Nano-ites have to do, which is to instruct iTunes to load only specific playlists (which could be huge with an iPod proper). As you probably know, this is done by clicking the boxes you want next to the playlists in the Music section of the iPod controls. I usually just create a smart playlist to randomly pick about 7.4gb of music (I want to be surprised, though I usually limit the "date added" in some way), which fills up an 8gb Nano. But you can choose multiple playlists, too, of course.

I'm guessing that for the next few years our collections will outpace our iPods' memories, so we'll have to limit what goes on them from our larger libraries (stored on increasingly cheap externals). But eventually devices will have more memory and this will be less of a problem...unless we respond by using up the space with higher fidelity files.

Yeah, I've never had an iPod of any size (8GB being the largest), so syncing the whole collection has never been an issue. Never wanted to at all to be honest, there is too much stuff I only listen to once every few years literally, don't need to make finding stuff any harder.

You know what I am desperate for now is the latest version of iTunes; there's a bug in 9.02 where none of my smart playlists are recognized by the device. I have seen others with this problem but none of the suggested fixes work. So I have been without them for several months and it's a pain in the ass.

I don't know what the "Grouping" field is supposed to be for in the iTunes metadata, but I use it to give tracks a second genre or subgenre.

Plug in iPod. Click on iPod under "Devices" on the left side menu. Click "Manually manage music and videos".

That's it. When you click on the iPod, you will see what's on it. Remove what you want. Go back to your library and select various files and drag them to the iPod and they will move to the iPod. Or drag entire playlists to the iPod or get more advanced with smart playlists. I have 321 gigs of music, so syncing hasn't been something I'd consider for a long time. But I also have never felt the need to carry close to my entire collection with me. I bought the 8 gig Touch, and I have some stupid big apps on in. Even with all of that I've still got 6 or so gigs on there. But it's fast enough that I can sit down before leaving for work, empty the entire iPod and decide "oh, I want these 20 playlists". Currently I have 89 albums by 29 artists, all suited to my mood this week for commuting.

the problem is that if you want to actually browse your collection BY genre, you end up with some as…

This is where search is your friend.

yeah, but it's sort of inelegant.

is there some website that classifies artists by genre in an intelligent way? NOT amg.

Genre is easy - everything after 1991 is "Alternative/Punk"

or "World/Other"

The one iTunes feature I've always longed for is an ability to click on a song and see which playlists, if any, it appears on. I have a bunch of duplicates, but I don't always know which of the two versions of a song I should delete, because one might be the version I've put on a mix.

― Hoisin Murphy (jaymc), Tuesday, 19 January 2010 02:52 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I discovered by accident that you can do this - right-click the song>Show in Playlist. It's really handy!

1 have two terabytes and i use one as a backup and this method seems to work fine. I'm due to clean them both up though.

does anyone have some system for dealing with genre?

since the tag is basically useless, I just put the record label in there. doesn't make much sense for major labels but it's kinda cool if you want filter for all releases on basic channel or whatever.

I also use the genre tag for labels if they are distinct, like Basic Channel, Mo Wax or Factory.

Genres are so useful! Pick broad genres and don't nitpick about it (probably asking too much of ILM). Then if I want to listen to electronic music, I can just put on that genre and know that I'm going to get similar music, but not so similar because I don't have these rigid rules for genre selection. Sometimes, I just want to hear metal, not specifically Chilean death metal or any other granular genre.

I discovered by accident that you can do this - right-click the song>Show in Playlist. It's really handy!

Wow, thanks!

what is last.fm?

Seek and you shall find, Rolling last.fm thread 2010.

last.fm was cool, till I got paranoid that it was eating up resources to be uploading that information in the background, though I'm sure it wasn't. Also when DJing weddings and whatnot I'd listen to lots of terrible music and was too lazy to always be turning scrobbling on and off. What I forgot however is that my Squeezebox still reports, so what shows up on my Last.fm only represents what my girlfriend and I listen to in the living room.

didn't manage to read all 80000 messages (made it through about 300 of them) but i just really want to say one important IMPORTANT thing on this subject of maintaining a digital music collection:

BACK YOUR SHIT UP!

one day your hard drive will crash, period, end of story- it happens to every last one of them sooner or later.

buy a time capsule if you can afford it, or a second hard drive if you cant, maybe every month on the first burn all your new shit to dvd's and sit it on a spindle, whatever. but the less you have to think about it the better, manual backups just don't really work that well - your hard drive crashes and you're like "oh shit i haven't backed up in 7 months!" get a program to back it up automatically if at all possible (superduper is great and tres cheap if you run mac)

you guys sound like you're being too anal about the genre tag. your tag is not the final say on categorizing the music for future generations. just tag stuff how it makes most sense and is most helpful for you. course, i don't listen to much "rock" and so anything from Led Zeppelin to Lush gets the same "rock" tag from me.

Is there an IMDB for music? There's gracenote/cddb/freedb and trouserpress and wikipedia and such, but has anyone tried to combine them all?

^allmusic or discogs

is there anything wrong with them that you wouldn't feel comfortable letting some software automatically tag and organize your music according to the site?

I use both once in awhile... allmusic is good for a general overview. Discogs is better for collectors. It has details of different versions of the same release, etc. I've never paid much attention to genre tags in either tbh.

discogs is by far my fave

discogs is fantastic, yeah. I haven't bothered with genre tags for years! until you can tag songs with multiple genres in a sensible way, it's just too much subjective hassle.

mediamonkey and i think winamp does multiple genres

and has a separate field for publisher/label. itunes does too iirc? solutions exist! yr ocd is not going to enable itself

What do you all use the "grouping" field for in iTunes? I put in geographical info for selected places (e.g. New Zealand, Manchester, Australia, Japan, Netherlands, etc.) and then have smart playlists gather them up for quick access.

the only fields i bother with are track name, disc #, track #, artist, album, and year. that being said, i think people should use whatever fields they want to use as long as it makes listening to their music a more enjoyable experience. using grouping to denote place is an awesome idea.

I've always wondered why Primus is a recognised ID genre tag?

perhaps someone can tell me.

For all of you who are using a second HD to back-up your collection from a Windows PC, I commend the MS tool Sync Toy for quickly updating a mirror of any set of folders on your main HD.

I use it with a 500 GB 2.5" HD in a mp3/movie playing enclosure, so I can play anything anywhere there's a TV/stereo to plug into.

syncback is good too, the free version for regular backups and the paid does sftp if you want to do offsite syncing and want a little more control (backup to zip, more extensive backup types). haven't tried synctoy, sounds great. MS' 'windows live sync is also good and free but i don't think it does as much

I use RsyncX to mirror my OS X machine to external drives. It's free. There are various Windows versions of rsync too.

I use it with a 500 GB 2.5" HD in a mp3/movie playing enclosure

What enclosure are you using?

Does Sync Tool work with FAT 32?

discogs is fantastic, yeah. I haven't bothered with genre tags for years! until you can tag songs with multiple genres in a sensible way, it's just too much subjective hassle.

I use genre tags for country (France, Germany, etc.) when there's no greater overriding tag (Kraftwerk gets tagged "Electronic"). Still I'd rather have multiple metatags ("Electronic" "Germany" "New Wave" for NDW stuff) than groupings or genre tags.

Sublime Frequencies releases get tagged "Sublime Frequencies" as a generic country tag doesn't seem adequate.

i hate genre tags. i replace it with the record label name

http://my.opera.com/Wakajawaka/homes/blog/1herbinchair.jpg
GET YOUR GENRE TAGS OFF MY LAWN

ogg and flac can have as many arbitrary NAME=VALUE tags as you want, even multiples of things like ARTIST. but it's a tossup as to whether your favourite player uses the first instance or the last.

my portable player handles oggs well but doesn't display the information unless the tag names are all upper case. and mp3tag uses "Artist=". it's a pain, but i have scripts that'll sort it.

think i will give in and start copying spotify with hyphen instead of brackets for remixer credit, guest artists etc.

xp Gerald:

The incremental cost of the media player HD enclosures isn't that great over bare ones considering their utility for visits/vacations/second listening rooms. I have a Argosy HV256T - its a cheap little 2.5" (laptop HD) enclosure with some serious limits wrt formats and limited video resolution, but I found it w/o a HD for about $45. Today, I'd consider the more expensive Patriot Box PCMPBO25 (2.5", unbundled with HD), or the iomega 34499 (3.5", with TB HD), both of which play everything at 1080p with few format restrictions.

so presuming i buy another hard drive, what cheap or free backup software for mac (OS 10.4.11, i know i know) would anyone recommend?

SuperDuper. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

you can use the free version but at 25 bucks, it's well worth it to buy the license.

thanks!

if you buy the license, the 2nd time you backup, it will only need to copy new/changed files since the last backup. can cut down backup time from 2hrs to 20mins.

Plug in iPod. Click on iPod under "Devices" on the left side menu. Click "Manually manage music and videos".

That's it. When you click on the iPod, you will see what's on it. Remove what you want. Go back to your library and select various files and drag them to the iPod and they will move to the iPod. Or drag entire playlists to the iPod or get more advanced with smart playlists. I have 321 gigs of music, so syncing hasn't been something I'd consider for a long time. But I also have never felt the need to carry close to my entire collection with me. I bought the 8 gig Touch, and I have some stupid big apps on in. Even with all of that I've still got 6 or so gigs on there. But it's fast enough that I can sit down before leaving for work, empty the entire iPod and decide "oh, I want these 20 playlists". Currently I have 89 albums by 29 artists, all suited to my mood this week for commuting.

dan, thanks for this. i'm nervously about to try it now. i say "nervously" because things have worked fine with my iPod for a while now, and so i'm afraid to tinker with it (when i have, bad things have happened!). but i've got to solve this problem sooner or later, so i'm acting now.

my screen is a little different. when i plug in the iPod, i see "options," which includes an open box for "manually manage music and videos." i assume i need to click that box. but what then? will all my music on my x-drive automatically be stripped from my iPod, forcing me to opt-in anything i want?

so anyway i sold all my remaining vinyl and CDs last Monday :o

will all my music on my x-drive automatically be stripped from my iPod, forcing me to opt-in anything i want?

yes

wau at steve! living in the future already

it worked like a charm (so far). i feel like i've unburdened myself with all the stuff that i won't be carrying around on my ipod unless i want it.

now my other fear kicks-in, i.e., that something happens to my x-drive and i lose my music collection. so my next set of posts, for some time in the future, will be on the mechanics of saving the stuff on my x-drive to a second (backup) x-drive.

anyway, thanks everyone for the help.

I realized later this works differently at times. With my iPod Touch, under devices I click on my ipod, then click on the MUSIC tab and click off Sync Music.

It's really not a big deal. And if you lost your x-drive, which I guess means external? you'd still have a hassle getting the music off the ipod. It's not supposed to work that way but there are ways I think.

Still the easiest thing to do is just use time machine or super duper and back everything up. It's really easy and really cheap.

another good backup program is Syncback - the free version is good enough for most people. You can customize various backup routines between various devices. Works like a charm.

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/3607/empty.jpg

I've just entered 2003: I'm 100% digital now.

respec knuckles

Congratulations. Welcome to the rest of your life.

i feel new

I pity anyone without an excuse to get excited about going to a record store on a Monday morning. Or a Tuesday in the States.

^^^YES

a Monday morning? wtf get a job

my stuff actually went to a guy i know who DJs but also hoards ridiculously. he said me brutally getting rid of it all (not a whim really, just had to move and will likely be moving again in a month or 2 so tired of lugging it around to each place when all they do is sit on shelves/in boxes) was actually inspiring him to start doing the same. it didn't really make any sense! but v relieved he took them.

My wife and I are ripping our entire CD collection as we move to a new apartment to try and make room for baby stuff. It's taking forever but we are making some extra $$$ as we gradually sell them which is nice. I'm holding on to our record player and records though. Next I get to figure out how to set up Time Machine to back up our music.

hey congrats re baby

Are you planning on selling all the CDs after you're done ripping 'em?

(Seconding blueski too: congrats!)

I want to sell all my records, but wow, what pain in the ass. I thought about ebay, but I don't want to have to create all those listings and then deal with it when someone says it isn't the quality or something they were expecting. Plus I have no idea what any of these would go for these days.

Yeah we took one batch to the record store already, and we've got another set about ready to go. We were hoping to not overwhelm them but dude who had to look through our stuff seemed kinda pissed when we brought in three grocery bags of CDs last week. We're going to a different location this time.

Jeff, just take them to Reckless or Laurie's. You probably won't get as much $$$ as if you sold them yourself but it's no hassle.

The guy at Laurie's was kind of a dick (in a "funny" way) when we brought him the CDs that Reckless rejected from our first batch.

I'm still on track to donate to KUCI though I admit I haven't heard back from them in a bit. I'd half-heard that their library is kind of a chaotic mess at this point in terms of sheer volume, which wouldn't surprise me at all.

So I'm new to Mac and also finally ripping all my CDs. I'd like to let iTunes do everything but I'm curious if the iTunes LAME encoder works transparently (i.e. pop the disc in and encodes LAME in the background, adds to iTunes library and ejects disc) or if I would have to click something for every disc (trying to avoid that). Otherwise, just going to encode everything using iTunes 320 CBR mp3.

I pity anyone without an excuse to get excited about going to a record store on a Monday morning. Or a Tuesday in the States.

^ Real talk. I still buy CDs on release day, don't download in advance (or at all, honestly).

I've just entered 2003: I'm 100% digital now.

Better fill up those shelves with some BOOKS! :)

spencer the itunes LAME encoder is great--it just pops a little window where you do your encode settings but otherwise it's exactly like a regular rip to itunes.

spencer I think the program called Max may be what you want fir industrial strength ripping

I'll try both, thanks!

Max is great. Switch is another one, but Max is awesome. When I was djing weddings with my CDJ400s, which only read the file name and mp3 files, I'd make an iTunes playlist, then copy everything into a temp folder, then drag them into Max. Max would convert everything from AAC to 192 MP3, then re-name the file Artist-Song.mp3 by reading the ID3 info.

Nice, I'll definitely try it out.

I'm also wondering if there's a way to save CD images as files, which could then be read by iTunes as an actual audio CD?

I'm thinking that might be ideal for archiving, since WAV/AIFF don't have tags.

itunes ripper fucked up so many tracks for me. i could do with a program that does a quick scan of your mp3s and reports any bits within the tracks that are completely muted/silent (thus likely to be a ripping error).

I use CDex to rip CDs which tells you if there were any errors

And then some discs that error in the computer CD drive can still be ripped if they play OK in your hi-fi CD player via line-in like ripping vinyl.

if you're on windows, the *best* is EAC - exact audio copy - plus LAME. EAC can actually do 'data recovery' on scratched CDs.

on Mac, like mentioned above, Max is pretty good.

if you're set on using itunes, open up preferences and enable 'error correction' for importing, should help a little bit.

i <3 EAC

a Monday morning? wtf get a job

Yeah, alright - Monday lunchbreak...

anyone gone down the XBMC/HTPC route? looks nice
http://cache.lifehacker.com/assets/resources/2008/07/aeon.png

once you realise what kind of maintenance is required to keep your digital video collection in that kind of clover you will realise that the only people with such a nice "jukebox" setup are people who literally enjoy admin work

It's because I didn't get to the record shop first thing on a monday morning, that I didn't get "Stutter" Elastica on day of purchase. (1000 limited edition, numbered)

Still, irony, I now own copy numbered two.

ha tracer! well you know its worth all the work cos i will retrieve and watch stuff several times at least. maybe more than several times. fuck i might spend my whole life storing and retrieving stuff.

hahaha

i say this as someone who spent >1 hr last night getting the "in our time" episodes from 2008 in the correct order

Some of my albums have a track of two that is missing artwork. What causes this? Is there a specific way to import artwork? I've just been selecting the album, cmd-i, and dragging the art to the art box.

If you're using iTunes, select the track(s) you want to get artwork for, and either right-click (PC) or ctrl-click (Mac), then go down to "Get Album Artwork." Or, you can add it manually, which seems to be the way you've been going.

yeah... I do the steps I described (its a Mac), yet still one or two tracks within the album are sometimes missing art. Its driving me nuts because I don't notice them until the song comes up on my ipod. The albums all look good in coverflow.

Yeah, this is annoying; not sure what causes it beyond adding songs and retagging them at different times and not catching all the artwork. If the artwork is right on the first track, or the majority of tracks, it'll appear fine on coverflow.

Best way to solve it is to note each album that's missing it from even 1 track, highlight the whole tracklisting, and re-add the artwork to its details. Annoying, and time-consuming, but the only satisfactory way I've found around it.

You can also add art to a single song by just dragging the art into the lower left box while that song is playing.

iTunes is funny about art--even if a particular song lacks the art in its metadata, it might still display it if other songs from that same album do have the art. So if the songs came in at different times, a song or two might be lacking the art, but the art will still display if they're part of a larger album. But if that song ends up isolated on your iPod, the art won't be there.

I have that issue plus sometimes if I select all the tracks on an album and change the genre, 1 or 2 tracks won't be changed. God I hate computers.

^I've noticed this too, and need to reboot iTunes before it will resolve itself.

Has anyone tried any of these art-finding software tools for mac? I tried to use the built in iTunes tool once, but it badly mismatched a lot of songs so I've been doing it manually since. But doing this song by song ain't going to happen.

Generally, I use the built-in functionality, then manually add everything else. Or leave the stuff it can't find without art if I just don't feel like it.

I manually add all artwork on my Mac iTunes stuff.

ugh, this drives me nuts too. my ipod will JUST. NOT. DISPLAY. certain artwork. shows up in itunes but not on the ipod. I'm guessing it has something to do with resolution or filesize or something?

the whole getting all the right artwork for my mp3s racket really barely matters to me though -- i mostly just want to listen to the music and not worry about all the metadata so much

It can help if you make sure to click the "Display album artwork on your iPod" button when you sync to your computer. Even if it is already clicked. This is found at the bottom the "Music" page (where all the playlist check boxes are) of the iPod management section.

Would seem you shouldn't have to click it each time, but it's no huge chore.

my ipod will JUST. NOT. DISPLAY. certain artwork. shows up in itunes but not on the ipod.

You should also try "restoring" the software on your iPod, assuming you haven't already.

I found EAC truly a pain in the ass. For the sheer massive number of CDs I ripped (7,000+), it was well worth paying the $30 or so for a subscription to the multiple databases via dBpoweramp to ensure accurate tagging and album art. It also checks to make sure the rip is accurate. Avoid regrets and rip to lossless! It takes less space than you'd think -- I have yet to go surpass 2TB. You can get a 1 TB drive for $60 now.

I don't add artwork because the majority of my mp3 files are from torrent sites; fucks up the seeding.

For the sheer massive number of CDs I ripped (7,000+)

O_O

How long did that take you??

I think there is a difference between adding artwork to a selected track (by right-clicking and saying "Get Info" and adding to the box there) and dragging it to the window while it is playing. One way it embeds it in the mp3 itself, the other way it just keeps it in a database and associates the art with it. I could be wrong about this. But iTunes in general is pretty crappy about artwork for some reason. Too much manual work. Once again: a computer should be doing the computer stuff, not me.

I'm too far behind to play catch-up, though I'd love a week to do it, but I've found hitting get info and adding the artwork there is the only way to do it, especially to multiple tracks. If I just drag it to the window it never works right.

you have to make sure your bottom left artwork window is on Selected and not Now playing when adding artwork that way. click the artwork window title bar to swap between the two and be sure Selected is showing.

You should also try "restoring" the software on your iPod, assuming you haven't already.

yeah, I've tried that before to no avail. I've noticed this issue intermittently across two different ipods. sometimes if delete the files from my library, rename the folder they're in, and add them back to the ituens library, that does the trick. *siiiigh*

anyway, this bug really shouldn't matter much from a logical standpoint (as others have pointed out)... but I can be ridiculously detail-oriented sometimes and these types of things bother me way more than they should. oh, well.

Took me a full calendar to year to rip...how many CDs would it have been. Let me think here...something like 4000 to 5000, I guess. Then there were the CDRs and etc. etc.

It was about six months for me. I never did get any real writing done while doing it, takes too much focus to remember to keep the CDs flowing regularly. I did read and post plenty in ilx though...

I just started ripping the "D" section of the CDRs, gonna have to wait until I have another hard drive to rip the 1500 CDs and god knows how many burns from vinyl.

the curse of having too much music. one remedy, a music blog project. listening to the stuff in a different order, from a different angle. it works wonders.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2010/03/listening-to-my-life-lost-in-the-shuffle.html?variant=print

Maura wrote that, btw. off to read it now

Nice article.

Extremely nice.

Well-written as usual!

I don't add artwork because the majority of my mp3 files are from torrent sites; fucks up the seeding

Happened to me as well at first. Just add the artwork to the copy on your iPod, not the copy on your hard drive.

I liked that Paste Magazine article, but as with everything, a new paradigm can be a positive or a negative. Personally I'm finding lots of stuff in my own collection that I hadn't pulled out in years, and I've got playlists that help that process along. Sure, old favorites can be easy to gravitate towards but all it takes it another click or turn of the wheel and, hey, I haven't heard that in a while!

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/03/31/apples_streaming_music_service_could_arrive_in_july.html

It's inevitable, the question is what's the downside of cloud-based streaming of your music collection:

1) Sound quality will be further reduced
2) Not everything you own would be available via the cloud
3) You can't organize your music (e.g. singles) the way you might want to
4) You won't always be in a situation where you can access the wireless web

I don't know if any of these will be true but they're the first that come to mind.

1) right now the sound quality of streaming audio generally seems to be sub-CD, but that will inevitably change, and soon
2) this is a point i've ignored in the past, but it's definitely true. streaming from iTunes will not replace listening to music in other ways, especially for music nerds
3) i doubt this is true. can't you create Spotify playlists? i'm sure there'll be a way to organize the songs/albums you want to stream in a bunch of ways
4) Spotify mobile app already lets you listen to songs offline -- no doubt, iTunes will follow

no idea how a pricing scheme for an iTunes streaming service would work, but if it were a flat, monthly fee to listen to as much music as i wanted to, as long as the price wasn't too high, i'd be in. still can't imagine this'll be a good thing for a lot of artists, especially if they'll get paid per song streamed.

i think most artists realize by now that they only way to get paid is by touring/playing shows

you're totally right, but i also think there's a solid chance that mass adoption of a streaming service could mean that musicians will make even less from people listening to their records than the pittance a lot of them make now

warner bros. already rebuffed spotify's invitation to add the label's catalog to a US streaming service. fwiw, emusic is apparently considering adding a streaming service, too. no idea how they'll try to do it, but i have serious doubts about whether such a service can succeed.

this is another one of those things where whatever's left of the music industry is going to do all it can to maintain whatever small amount of control they still have over their product, even though it's pretty much inevitable that most of their shit will be streaming someday, in some form, from some service

Spotify also has zero traction in the US, since it's not available here. iTunes is huge

if it's cheaper than rhapsody and i don't have to use itunes it might be cool. or is it only gonna stream what you put there in the first place?

knowing Apple, any iTunes streaming functionality will be strictly controlled by them. you'll probably be able to stream via iTunes, your browser, and your iPad/iPod/iPhone, at least at the beginning. the possibility of their being, say, an Android app that would let you stream iTunes content probably won't happen anytime soon, if ever

it seems like the model for an iTunes streaming service will be that you'll buy tracks and albums as you have in the past, except instead of the program downloading local copies of that content to your computer, one-time only, you'll be able to stream it from iTunes at any computer you type your credentials into. this solves the problem of the user having to manage all those files, but it also locks you into iTunes, assuming that there is no way for you to keep a permanent, local copy of your files

ideally, i'd like to pay one flat fee to listen to as much music as i wanted to, but i don't see this happening anytime soon, and, as i said upthread, i can only imagine that, monetarily, that'd make the current situation even worse for some artists

> i'd like to pay one flat fee to listen to as much music as i wanted to, but i don't see this happening anytime soon

it's already here, has been for a while. i work for uk based company who supply music for vodafone uk, sweden, norway, vodacom SA, telenor, sky songs..., all of which, i believe, are subscription-based, unlimited streaming services, albeit with platform / region limitations. (i could be wrong, am tech side, not marketing. sky songs, looking at the website, appears to be £5 a month). i get to use it at work and, in answer to the points above 1) quality is ok. it's not cd quality but then people are happy enough to BUY things that aren't cd quality and 2) it doesn't have everything i own available (far from it) but it also has a shedload of good things that i don't own and 4) tracks are cached so you still have things to listen to if network goes down, but there is drm and you do lose things when your subscription lapses (i think some services give you a monthly quota of non-drmed tracks that you can keep)

(nothing in the US though)

I think you're right about sound quality, though there will always be a segment of us (myself included) that doesn't want to settle for less than we already get from ripping our own CDs and an iPod headphone out (which many feel is compromised to begin with).

Additionally, I suppose the appeal of such a service depends on how you listen to music in the first place. If you're not tied to your own collection, and/or can find most of what you want to listen to from a streaming service, then you're all set. But I suspect for the people like ILMers, it won't suffice. The obvious solution is a hybrid device, one that has on-board storage for your own music and can stream from a dedicated service.

The obvious solution is a hybrid device, one that has on-board storage for your own music and can stream from a dedicated service.

OTM

ie a mobile phone.

re: reduced sound quality, i kind of assume everything will go lossless eventually, right? i can't see record companies getting bent out of shape about it when most consumers of digital music files don't care about the difference between 192 & lossless anyway.

i'm actually seeing more lossless digital music for sale - boomkat have done flacs for ages but now bleep and several other dj-centric sites have started selling wavs* (all at a premium and, laughably, often more expensive than buying the actual cds but...)

but streaming services, yes, will always be lossy because of the bandwidth issues. some of the phones use he-aac v2 which has very listenable sound in *tiny* filesizes, 24kbps or so. but is patent encumbered and requires a licence.

* new autechre available as 24bit wavs ie better than cd quality

re: reduced sound quality, i kind of assume everything will go lossless eventually, right? i can't see record companies getting bent out of shape about it when most consumers of digital music files don't care about the difference between 192 & lossless anyway.

― hobbes, Monday, April 5, 2010 5:50 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

wait, why? I don't get the logic

For most people, sound quality isn't as big of an issue. As long as it sounds OK, it's fine.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

ie a mobile phone.

Haha, yes of course, I should've mentioned that but I just don't think of mobile phones as having sufficient fidelity. But that's my problem. You all are right, "sounds OK" is sufficient for 95% of the population - I mean, iPod earbuds are godawful to me but most people are fine with them. I'll just crawl back into my log cabin...

it's not even the earbuds - most music is being played back on computers and ipods both of which have shitty line out jacks. you wouldn't be able to tell a FLAC from a 128kbps using what most people have these days.

I know it's been talked about before (probably on this thread!) but what's the best solution to the lineout jack problem? For instance, I have my MacMini chugging along well enough otherwise, so what can be done with it?

get an external DAC - they are (relatively) expensive but if you want to use your computer as a source for your stereo system they're a worthwhile investment. I splurged and got an iBasso one with two DACs, one for each channel:

http://ibasso.com/en/products/show.asp?ID=44

ie a mobile phone.

― koogs, Monday, April 5, 2010 4:44 AM (6 hours ago)

yeah, at least when they're out and about, everyone will be listening to music on something like an iPhone soon enough

Perhaps that's true regarding computer/latop speakers but the iPod headphone out isn't so terrible. I can certainly tell the different between 128 and 192+ when lower bitrate tracks pop up on shuffle. But then I've also been to so many concerts that, frankly, I can't tell the different between high-bit VBR and WAV anymore.

Ned - the best solution for lineout -> headphone is a headphone amp.

to expand a little...an external DAC moves the digital-to-analog signal conversion outside of your computer. the inside your computer is very noisy elecronically speaking - lots of electromagnetic radiation &c. as a test, try plugging in a pair of earbuds into your computer and turning the volume all the way up - that hissing you hear is all the interference.