Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

And often you can just add a jpg to the directory and it'll use that.

I use Sonos but that sort of setup, with an NAS and really good separates system is pretty much ideal (plus smaller speakers for rooms where sound quality doesn't matter as much, like the kitchen).

That's possible with Sonos, isn't it?

yup - sonos connect.

nas drive > sonos connect > hi-fi amp.

its bloody wonderful.

What???? This is what potato salad looks like:

http://www.itsyummi.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/mustard-potato-salad-feat.jpg

And the Sonos Connect integrates Spotify etc as well as local files?

Why is the potato salad here?

Wrong thread. But I do eat potato salad while tagging MP3s.

i use Mp3tag (puddletag on Linux) for tagging things. It's quite a manual process, but useful for bulk tagging and lets you define macros.

― koogs, Friday, February 17, 2017 5:01 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I love MP3tag and use it a lot for an album at a time, but I have a question about it -- is there a way to have it bulk process a bunch of folders, simply tagging 'Album Name' for each one to match its folder title?

Basically I've gotten really sloppy in the last couple of years since I've been using folder-based media players and I have a ton of music that's untagged where I just want the tag to match the folder name. Can MP3tag do this?

Will MP3tag edit FLACs though?

Yes

Goodo.

Tag&Rename is my editor of choice - http://www.softpointer.com/index.htm - I find it more flexible than MP3Tag.

does that work on newer Macbooks? I used to use Tag, but it's not compatible with the newer OS.

can tag & rename do the thing I was asking about?

And the Sonos Connect integrates Spotify etc as well as local files?

Yep.

i've given up control of my tagging and left it to http://beets.io/

i'd recommend it if you're comfortable with the commandline. with a bit of configuration, it now fills in the tags based upon musicbrainz, downloads the album art, moves them into my music folder structure, and alerts plex to rescan my music dir.. all with a single command: "beet im ./folder_to_import/"

also i've been bitten by the FLAC bug and have been ripping all my cds all over again.

i perversely kind of want to go through that process even though 320 bit is good enough for my aging ears

I'm honestly kind of glad I can't tell the difference between v0/320/FLAC

so glad I went with FLAC from the get-go

yeah i can't really tell the difference either, it's more of an archival ocd thing for me

as someone who likes to carry around a ton of music as a digital library (not streaming), I can't fathom needing 300mb or whatever per 40 minute album

can tag & rename do the thing I was asking about?

I don't think so, though it can fetch tags from the filename, I don't see where it can grab the folder name.

I stick with 320 as well, suits me fine.

that beets thing sounds like my type of shiz

We only really went with flax because we could, and why not? The NAS drive we bought can take our whole collection twice over, and we'd definitely want to upgrade from what we had ripped anyway, which wasn't the whole collection.

In the living room the plan is that this will become the main way we listen to anything we haven't bought in any given calendar year, so we want tit to be as good as possible.

And much as ripping everything might potentially be an arsehole, it's actually quite refreshing to relearn what we have, and listen to it in chunks as more and more becomes available.

You'll find crate-digging in your own library becomes very rewarding and revealing as well. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad.

I've already ripped all 2600+ CDs I've got to FLAC, and pretty much all my records too, that was a chore and a half, but I kinda like ripping vinyl, gives me something to focus on and take my mind off things.

Unfortunately the DVD drive on my laptop has packed up now and barely recognises CDs, I usually have to insert and eject them 5-10 times before it'll recognise them, so I'm looking to buy an external USB DVDRW drive, but I want one that will rip HTOA (i.e. hidden tracks before track 1) and it seems like it's pretty impossible to actually find a drive that does this. There is a database of drives that can do HTOA here but it doesn't specify whether the drive is external or internal and it also doesn't say anywhere how old this database is so for all I know these could be years out of date now.

You'll find crate-digging in your own library becomes very rewarding and revealing as well. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad.

this this this ..

xp man, that sounds like a hassle. I don;t think I actually have any discs with that kind of "pre-disc" audio, but if you can rip vinyl couldn't you just play the CD track into the same input and record it in analog? crude workaround, but I've done it for some things like Soundcloud tracks that don't have download.

I stick with 320 as well, suits me fine.

― Ned Raggett

ditto.

I had a drive in my ancient PC that would rip HTOA so everything I own at the moment is done, but yeah before I had that one I did the CD player->audio input way. And the ancient PC won't start up any more. I do have one of those hard drive -> USB connectors I wonder if that works on internal CD drives, it might well do.

I often don't even KNOW about track zero's until years later when someone mentions it in a thread here. Then I check on slsk and there it is.

By and large I am unable to tell the diff between 320 and lossless, but I listen to a lot of "edge case" music in which the frequency mix, proportion of noise to signal, transients etc. are quite unlike the music used to derive and test the codecs. In that case I prefer that what I hear out of the speakers reflects the decisions made by the artist and mastering engineer, not a general-purpose algorithm. Purely psychological, probably, but lossless has no penalty these days (3000+ album collection on a 1TB external drive, no sweat) and why remove future possibilities?

Tagging: I use MP3tag for FLACs and MP3 Tag Tools for MP3s -- and play everything via Mediamonkey.

Bitrate: I use 800+ kbps FLACs on my audiophile gear (low-bit FLACs, while still lossless, are a waste of time), and 320kbps (or whatever) MP3s on remote/vehicle/garage set-ups. I just bought a 5TB WD Caviar Black for $275 so that should be able to handle my centralized needs for the duration of its 5 year warranty.

Best value in headphones come NOT from a big box store.
A quality DAC in a cellphone can really make a big difference on MP3s.
Current bluetooth tech is "lossy" as well, making FLACs a superfluous source.

some quality autovisualization from Musicbee

https://scontent-lht6-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/16904604_10154363357942671_6814444450014916029_o.jpg?oh=12223a9463034031515264904079b15c&oe=5924CFCC

does nobody like foobar these days or what?

still prefer Foobar, just trying something different

every few years i make a new effort to customize foobar how i'd like it and i'm never successful

I use nothing but foobar. I've given up on customizing its appearance because it's hidden 99% of the time anyway.

foobar here as well, I'm boring and a few tweaks to one of the default layouts is all the customising I need, nothing fancy. I'm also lazy and backup the config files so I don't have to do it all over again when reinstalling.

I've got fbar customiZed pretty well... Don't like having the plain ugly windows-style menu bars and such, though

All the skins I've seen on the net are either maximalist and horrible looking or 'clever' and horrible looking

so i have too much music on my hard drive and i need that space for other stuff (like installing Total War: Warhammer). why am i so loathe to back up all my music and delete a bunch of it? it's not like i use 99% of it and if i need to find something i can always check my backup. :/

I've taken to using portable external HDs (one offsite), and SyncToy.

isn't it annoying tho not having everything readily available on hand? like if you want to listen to something and it's not on spotify and you're not sure if you have it already... or maybe that's the trick i should make an index i can easily search?

It's on hand, just on the USB-attached 2 TB HD. I keep an identical drive at rental storage, and update/exchange the two when I need something from there.

yeah I use external drives as well - def. back it up, music is sacred

it's already backed up i'm more iffy on not keeping it on my laptop for always available convenience. i guess i could go through it and prune my local library down to the most necessary 10gigs or so but it's so disorganized (everything in album folders but no organization beyond that) that it would take a while to do

The file management ship has sailed. It's done in-app. Don't worry about your folder structures.

Another option: get a bigger HD?

For those outside the iTunes-verse, file hierarchies are very, very handy. It took months to get everything in order, but now its 4 clicks to get to a genre, subgenre, artist, or album and play everything within that level alphabetically, randomly, chronologically, etc. Plus when I want to load a whole subgenre/artist discography/focus year of music on the car USB drive, its click and paste.