Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

> This thread often makes me think vinyl isn't that much of a pain in the arse after all.

yeah, but i also look at the spotify thread and see people complaining about functional or ui changes every couple of weeks so...

(update. number of unripped mix cds now > 100 thanks to Knowledge cover cds numbers 5 to 60. number of empty cases found: 1 (and not just any old case, one of those Fabric tins with the artist name embossed in the metal))

For the most part I use the two-pass test/copy method and only scrutinize the audio when those CRCs don't match. Sometimes it's nothing I can discern, but other times it is audibly fucked up. AccurateRip is another layer of error checking and doesn't require any additional effort so I leave it on. About 1 in 20 CDs have problems on average, mostly brand new ones (since that's mostly what I'm buying). About half a dozen out of 3,000 have been completely hopeless and unrippable.

i had never ever thought about CRC checks for any of my rips.
if i hear a skip on a ripped cd, then i get the cd out and re-rip said track after a wipe clean, and 99% of the time, that does the job.
clearly i have a much less discerning ear to most here.

At this point when I hear a glitch in one of my rips, it's almost always on the source (latest: Waco Brothers, first track on "Freedom And Weep").

usually it's very apparent because for years now I buy a CD and rip it in order to be able to listen to it, so any problems tend to be obvious. But back in the day when I was ripping 100-200 CDs at a time, you couldn't check them all by listening so good error correction was worth the effort.

> AccurateRip is another layer of error checking and doesn't require any additional effort so I leave it on

this is underselling it, assurance that someone else out there, with a different physical copy, obtained a rip that is byte-by-byte identical to yours is as good as it gets

i seldom bother listening to suspicious rips, if there are potential problems with mine i download a replacement. plus some copy protected cds are unrippable with my drive, there's no solution other than torrenting for those

I check them out sometimes because I'm curious about if I can hear them or not, but yeah usually I just sigh and re-rip them until I get a clean copy. lately though I'm buying most physical media from Bandcamp so I don't even bother ripping... just download the FLACs.

Sometimes when I'm ripping a CD one track will come out all distorted and fucked up, and the solution I've found is to double click the CD on my desktop so it opens up like a folder, and simply drag that track to the desktop. It arrives as an AIFF file, which I can then convert to whatever I want.

Unrelated to recent discussions: substreamer for iOS just released an update after years of silence and I'm stoked. I had to change my server from libresonic to airsonic, which was kind of a pain, but the app has a dark mode and is almost gapless (this may be more about airsonic than substreamer).

I dumped Plex (for playing music) in favor of libre/airsonic years ago and never looked back. substreamer is one of the few iOS apps that work with the sub/air/libre sonic backend. I wish I could actually pay the dev.

The *sonic ecosystem seems to be pretty alive and developing well I have to say. I've tried Airsonic but settled on Navidrome, and using Play:Sub as the iOS app. I still like Plex but its bad handling of compilation album really lets it down.

Can Navidrome do smart playlists i.e. 'music added in the last two weeks'? Can it interact with scripting, i.e. as soon as a file hits folder (x) it gets added to the Library?

Smart playlists is now under development but not there yet. Navidrome does automatically pick up new files in the folder every 1h (or shorter if you set it to).

As *sonic server for 3rd party clients, Navidrome is more or less the same as the others (Airsonic/etc), what I mostly like about it is the web UI which doesn't look like it's from the 1990s. The Spotify-clone theme for it is really almost a 1:1 copy.

Thanks.

I tried it with macos but the installation was a little beyond me. I followed their instrux but got permission errors.

I'll have to take a look at substreamer - I've been using iSub for years, and play:sub has never dealt well with my (very large) library. I moved from madsonic to airsonic-advanced recently and it's much faster, except that for some reason loading an album on the web player takes 10+ seconds. On the other hand I very rarely use the web UI so it's not a big deal.

Navidrome seems seriously impressive - much easier to install than any other subsonic clone I've used, and it's using way less RAM (literally 50mb versus 4gb...)

i literally could not get it to install on macos. you have to create a directory in /opt and put a bunch of files in there, and another file in your Library folder, and i kept getting permission/ownership errors and i have no idea how to fix them.

I didn't do either of those things! I literally ran it from the downloaded folder, pointing it to a config file I'd made:

/Users/admin/Downloads/navidrome_0.42.1_macOS_x86_64/navidrome --configfile '/Users/admin/Dropbox/dotfiles/navidrome/navidrome.toml'

The config file is very basic, it looks like

LogLevel = 'DEBUG'
ScanInterval = '1h'
TranscodingCacheSize = '150MiB'
MusicFolder = '/Volumes/Music 2TB/'
DataFolder = '/Volumes/Music 2TB/navidrome/'

and tbh I think the only thing here that actually really needs to be there is the MusicFolder entry.

Okay will try! There's a page on the navidrome site that has all this other junk you're supposed to do

Navidrome is not feature complete yet (smart playlists not done yet, genre navigation etc) but it’s developing at a pretty breakneck pace at the moment, saw they’re now working on chromecast and sonos integration.

Wish one of these would have gapless playback in web player.

Apparently very hard to do in-browser…

and sonos integration.

i dug in about this, and its already possible according to several posts about it.
definitely gets around the dreaded 65k limit.
but i think i will stick with my own current system as its now bedded in and i find it very easy ..
but still, it could be a very good solution to a crap problem.

Apparently very hard to do in-browser…

I want a box on my home network that has RCA cables running out to my receiver. The box would have a web interface to browse albums and play stuff, but it's not actually playing music through the browser. Can Navidrome etc do gapless playback in this case?

That's "jukebox mode" (music playback on the server itself), the original Subsonic had this, but it's currently not implemented in Navidrome but it's one of their projects for this summer (#2).

so, working around the flat clockwise from the bedroom i am now at the last chunk of cds, pop/rock a-t, two 4-sided carousels, 8 shelves to a side = 64 shelves of about 20 cds per shelf. currently on shelf 15, Crimea to Dead Can Dance.

and i must've done a good job of ripping these originally because so far i have found exactly 1 thing in this batch that i didn't have lossless copies of - Cocteau Twins, Otherness EP. i also ripped the three Belly Gepetto EPs because there was some confusion over the numbering (identical catalogue numbers a year apart, different lead tracks, typo on track 2...)

keeps me off the streets

Did not know that MP3Tag is now available for macs.

could somebody please recommend a decent file converter for mac? FLAC to 512 AAC. mediahuman wasn't working right...

ALAC gives me gapless playback issues on my ipod classic and FLAC doesn't play on them at all. it's a nightmare...

i installed rockbox but the battery life is practically cut in half with it. a shame. running musicbee for playback and tagging on windows. so efficient.

― maelin, Sunday, February 28, 2021 6:58 PM bookmarkflaglink

are you 100% sure about rockbox cutting down battery life?
because it's usually the other way around, rockbox improves battery life, and it would also take care of your FLAC and gapless playback problems.

thank you, but it's too late now... i switched my entire library to 512 aac.

there's an OS X version of Foobar 2000 that should do FLAC -> AAC conversion

<3333 thank you! i loved foobar on windows!

XLD: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xld/

i never got into the ipod or mp3 players as the only thing i do is convert youtube videos to mp3 and make my own cds of the music i can not collect on cd.

my guy xzan, you need soulseek in ur life.

for those missing classic itunes on mac:
https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive
i'm so happy!

What’s so desireable about the old iTunes? As far as I can see the new Music app is the same application, only with video stripped out and a couple bugs fixed.

They dumped the XML format which broke a load of DJ apps and other integrations iirc

Ah yes that - Apple deprecated the XML file back in High Sierra already and finally removed it in Catalina. Apps are supposed to use the iTunesLibrary API instead, but yeah a lot of older applications were never updated. You can still generate the XML manually btw, File > Library > Export Library.

easier to manage ipod stuffs on the old one. also cover flow. probably more things.

Music app makes my little search window go away all the time and then I have to click a dropdown menu and select "show filter field" or some shit and I hate it.

Finally broke down and got a standalone mp3 player a while back. First I had a Shanling Mofi which I liked a lot because it was so tiny, but after a little over a year it's batter crapped out and started swelling and destroyed the thing. Shanling offered no support.

Now I'm using a Hidizs AP80 which is a little bigger but seems to work well. But with both units, once a card is loaded up with a ton of music most of the features are lost and you can only use it with files.

The SD card based Walkman is hardy and sounds great and has long battery life. Only real drawback is proprietary usb cable.

On the el cheapo side I love the fiio M3K now that someone made a Rockbox port for it. Battery life pretty good too, though not as long as the Walkman.

NB I only do folder and file browsing no database stuff

The SD card based Walkman is hardy and sounds great and has long battery life. Only real drawback is proprietary usb cable.

Agree; I've had one for several years and love it. You can't really make playlists on it, though, at least I've never figured out how.

lo l I still can't figure out how to create a playlist in Plex. I kind of found one weird way of applying a filter to your entire Library and creating a smart playlist based on that but I just want to drag songs into a playlist for the gym.

it is a huge pain in the ass and not very useful!

It’s kind of wild

I think bandcamp allowing downloads may be the final straw in my attempt to actively maintain a collection or at least add new songs to it