Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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'

I keep thinking I should upgrade my Chromecast audio to a better DAC but, well, I'm not 100% sure what I'm buying. 95% of the time, I stream to my Chromecast - plugged into the back of my Cambridge Audioi amp - from either my phone or my laptop. What's the best thing to go for, currently?

I was looking at the AudioQuest Dragonfly, but not sure it's what I need...

I just got a Wiim Pro Plus which seems pretty good so far. it's my first proper DAC though so my only basis for comparison is an aux cable plugged into my laptop's headphone socket

how is your chromecast connected to your cambridge audio amp?

It's plugged into one of the aux ports in the back.

i meant what type of connection, and also what kind of inputs/outputs does your chromecast have? what model is the chromecast, what model is the amp?

Sorry, for the tardy response (and that was a dumb answer!): some realmax cables and it's a Azur 540a.

do you know if your chromecast supports some sort of digital out like toslink?

It's been a brilliant device for the cost but no digital out, no.

which model is it? what’s the model #?

if you don’t have a digital out then you won’t be able to use a dac

Ah, well then. I was thinking the DAC would be a replacement for the Chromecast, not an add-on - something like Colonel Poo suggested.

i'm still puzzling at how your chromecast is connected to your amp. is your chromecast this?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/64/Chromecast_Audio_RUX-J42-5811.jpg/250px-Chromecast_Audio_RUX-J42-5811.jpg

if so, it's got a combined 3.5mm/TOSLINK output. you could buy a DAC and then output the digital signal to the DAC from the chromecast. if you did that you'd be offloading the DAC responsibility of the chromecast onto whatever DAC doohickey you buy.

alternatively, you can replace the chromecast entirely with something like this wiim streamer which has a built-in dac that's "audiophile" grade: https://www.wiimhome.com/wiimpro/overview

fwiw the Wiim I got supports Chromecast so you can cast to it (instead of a Chromecast, you don't need both)

oops, i didn't see that you had bought a wiim colonel poo

I don't know how many standalone HD upgrades I've done over the years -- something like maybe eight or so since the start of the century, and the oldest tracks in the library absolutely date from 2000/2001 for sure -- but did my latest over the weekend, from a 24 to a 28TB (I had plenty of room left on the 24 but it's some months out of warranty and I wanted a new updated physical backup which I can leave at my folks' place in a couple of weeks). One of the smoothest transfers I've done so far -- even if it *did* take an almost literal 24 hours...

ha I just did this as well, although I am still hovering just below 5TB

offsite backups FTW

i recently transferred over from old NAS styled spinnng disc device, to a matchbox sized SSD drive.
(only 2TB to be fair - suspect cos i am happy with 320 mp3s)
felt good to do it as the old NAS thing is 10 years old and i was getting concerned.
weird to think that the NAS drive is now the back up device.
don't have upload speeds to make offsite backups an option.
current situation :
Live device for my Sonos Library = 2TB SSD device connected directly to my router.
Backup device(s) = WD MyCloud (10yrs +) which then backs up every week onto a connected spinning external drive.

xpost Yeah, it's definitely the way to go when possible. Also there was a sale on the new one which added an extra year of warranty. (I should, I realize, clarify that the 'new' backup offsite is in fact my older drive, which will join a couple of even older drives that are already there.)

My current setup: 4 TB SSD hanging off a Mac Mini, Apple Music, Rekordbox, Navidrome, Plex.

Time Machine backups to attached HDD, and once every 6 months an extra backup on another HDD stored elsewhere.

I back up my music drive to BackBlaze but that's it... makes me a little nervous... Feels crazy to get another 8TB drive just for backup but I probably should

You guys are freaking me out a little, I'm going to resume backing everything up on my programmer friend's personal cloud system they set up.

I'm building a respectable obscure classic indie digital library to archive what might otherwise be lost cassette rips and rare demos, comps, singles, albums etc. It's been a passion project. Would be pretty devastated if my SSD crapped out.

I have a 4TB drive plugged into a RaspberryPi. that's backed up daily to IDrive, so if the 4TB drive dies or explodes or gets stolen I can restore from the cloud

You guys are freaking me out a little, I'm going to resume backing everything up on my programmer friend's personal cloud system they set up.

Wise goddamn idea. Seriously! Think of it like insurance -- you may never need it but if something happens you will be damned glad you had it.

ILXors, back up your data. One local backup, one offsite. If you have less than 28TB of data, this involves buying two external hard drives.

I started using MonkeyMote to control foobar on my iphone and it works rather well. Kinda hate shit with “monkey” in the name, tho.

what's kinda freaked me out recently is a i have a lot of files that are 20, 30 years old now. there is a phenomenon known as bit rot whereby files may degrade over time - and if not caught the degraded file will perpetuate itself into your backups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation

there are ways to detect/prevent this but it gets pretty nerdy.

anyway if you are listening to an old mp3 and it sounds crappy or distorted you may be a victim of bitrot!

this has been a PSA.

modern hardware + filesystems do a really good job of preventing that kind of degradation via ECC and CRC if you're talking about hard drives, as long as you're replacing your disk media every decade or so it's unlikely to be an issue, it's catastrophic failure you need to be worried about - hardware issues, power surges, theft, floods, etc.

optical/tape media a different story maybe if you're bouncing data between them and HDDs over time

you know that's what i thought, but then i found out via john siracusa that APFS, i.e. what all macs use these days doesn't do checksums, and i imagine a lot of ilxors are on macs

some of the use cases being described here (single external, transferred to bigger and bigger externals over time, without backing up to a system that has checksum / bitrot prevention) does sound like there is potential for corrupted/degraded files to be copied over and over without detection/prevention!

interesting paper by someone who tried to purposely induce bitrot on jpeg files: https://openpreservation.org/system/files/Bit%20Rot_OPF_0.pdf

like to properly prevent bit rot you have to (i) detect that a file has become corrupt and (ii) find a known good copy of the file and replace the corrupted file. the detection part simply doesn't happen if you just have one copy of data or if you're backing up in a way that doesn't verify data integrity (i.e. no checksum process)

basically - keep the cd.

like to properly prevent bit rot you have to (i) detect that a file has become corrupt and (ii) find a known good copy of the file and replace the corrupted file.

for (ii) error correction files will do the job, even 1% redundancy should be enough, create them for finalised files and propagate them across all backups and archival copies.
par2 files do double-duty by taking care of both (i) and (ii) but for (i) user created hash/checksum files or the filesystem scrub feature if available are more convenient.

bitrot is overrated, catastrophic failure is more likely, but regardless PSA for SSDs/flash memory: if left powered off for months they suffer their own specific type of bitrot, so if your relying on them for infrequent backups or god forbid long term archival good luck with that.

I just throw everything into Google Cloud Storage