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

These days a text file with your whole collection listed on it is pretty much as good as a drive full of mp3s. Someone who really cares to can find anything online - either streaming or shadier means. Based on my own experience: For rare things if they have to work for it - they'll appreciate it more when they do eventually find it.

She's mailing me an old, unexpurgated Grimm's Fairy Tales I remember reading as a kid. If you've never read it, that shit was dark.

― but also fuck you (unperson),

not to derail the thread too much : but how do you know if unexpurgated ?
i have this version, and have no idea :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Fairy-Tales-Brothers-All-New/dp/0553382160/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=the+complete+fairy+tales+of+the+brothers+grimm

and yeah, the stories are deliciously dark.
not read it all as yet.
i read it for a few days at a time.

how do you know if unexpurgated ?

Well, it included the scenes where Cinderella's stepsisters cut off pieces of their feet to make the glass slipper fit, and it had the anti-Semitic stories.

Weird, Jaime Brooks published this today, which I'm looking forward to reading, feels relevant

https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-future-of-streaming-services-may-be-in-the-past/

Well, it included the scenes where Cinderella's stepsisters cut off pieces of their feet to make the glass slipper fit, and it had the anti-Semitic stories.

― but also fuck you (unperson),

blimey !
going to have to check re my version.

anyways, back to NAS drive chaos ..

is this why it was glass? ayeeee

A number of xposts to Brad C -- there's something else going on there; all of my iTunes playlists transferred over to the Music app with no problem, and that was well before I subscribed to Apple Music. And as noted above I've been wary about syncing my local library with Apple Music so still haven't flipped that switch.

I have a 1TB hard drive in a drawer, that represents the long long hours I spent in the 00s and 10s, buying, receiving (for reviewing purposes) and nicking stuff, then tagging, curating into playlists, sharing etc - and I access it maybe twice a year to find something? In truth, I've not found a way to successfully manage the transition to a 'one library' digital space - the infinity of that hard drive and the work it takes keep it accessible and navigable is too much; the possibilities are simply too broad and wide, and I need the anchor of physical media to help deal with the tyranny of choice.

This probably says more about my daft brain than anything else but the move to digital is indicative of something, at least: how attics and basements have shrunk or morphed into digital space, and how much easier it'll be for the next generation to simply smash extant hard drives with a hammer and be done with it.

A Frightened Rabbit lyric comes to mind: "Well, here's the evidence of human existence/A splitting binbag next to two damp boxes/And I cannot find a name for them/They hardly show that I have lived" - swap out binbag and boxes for some form of obsolete tech and there it is.

otm

is there really nothing that'll just let you dump files onto a hard disk and let you play them through a stereo?

my pi Jukebox does the job, uses phone as a remote / display, but it's very ghetto

xp thanks early rejector

it seems to me my playlists came through the initial iTunes-to-Music switch just fine, so I wonder if their recent disappearance is due to a macOS upgrade (I'm running 12.4 now)

xp I've use a relatively inexpensive (<$200) DAC for several years and it's a fanatic low-tech solution. USB from your computer to the DAC, which converts the digital signal to analog and sends it to your stereo receiver using RCA connectors. No, it doesn't play everywhere in the house but neither did the stereo.

is there really nothing that'll just let you dump files onto a hard disk and let you play them through a stereo?

this is exactly what Sonos Connect, now Port, is all about.

a NAS and a receiver that support DLNA i guess would be the simplest non-brand-ecosystem way

other than an old computer connected to a receiver aux

Years ago I put my music collection on my server (which also presents as a NAS on the network). I have Plex for movies and Airsonic for music running on the server. Last year I bought a HiFiBerry and hooked it up to my receiver. To listen to music I connect my phone to the HiFiBerry and stream either from whichever app I need to. For one person used to listening on the phone, this is pretty elegant and simple. The backend is a little complicated, but I could definitely see it being set up in an easier way with, like, a Synology NAS or something.

The frustrating thing is nobody in my house knows the system, so any time anybody wants to hear something on the stereo, they come get me. I see this is a flaw in _my setup_ - it's not on them. I've been trying to think of a way to make it more simple. Maybe I just attach a low-end iPad to the wall near the stereo and just have the Substreamer app open on it all the time. Or get a record player and be done with it.

hifiberry........ can you add buttons to this rig, to the Pi's GPIO?

i have an even less powerful little ESP32 based "Squeezeamp" that I've hooked buttons (pause/play, next/prev, couple radio station presets) and a rotary encoder (volume) up to. Logitech Media Server stuff. I realize it sounds a bit much. But any active branded systems drive me up a wall. The thing with the "Logitech" is that they've pretty much abandoned it and it's open source and community maintained and is kind of a beautiful thing. Shame about the name!

What's the best way to store a bunch of digital music files in the cloud in a manner that's easy to stream from?
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GxOds0DpFDKtiQWFSqteioB1Co8z1-jm

I'd like to be able to put all this somewhere where I can stream it to my phone and play it in my car so that the albums will actually play as albums.

Roon 2.0 now offers this feature.

Rent a VPS with lots of storage, run a music server on it like Plex, Navidrome, Jellyfin, etc.

The 2TB Lacie hard drive I bought in 2017 only has about 75GB of space left, so I just bought a 4TB and will begin slowly backing up my collection over the fall and winter.

You listen to all 2 TB of that music you already have to the point that you need more storage?

Yup.

Not hard for me to believe at all.

A lot of my collection — at least half, maybe more — is promos I'm sent. I only keep the ones I listen to and like enough to consider writing about, and it still adds up to at least an album or two a day. That's before the stuff I buy or download from elsewhere, which adds up to somewhere around 5-15 albums more each month.

Honestly I keep all my promos. Then again keep in mind I've got a 24 TB drive (itself backed up). I never regret the investment.

You probably don't get as many black metal albums or self-released smooth jazz projects as I do.

More of the former than you might guess but as for the latter, I concede the field.

smooth jazz self releasing is my favorite medicine album

I'm closing in on 5TB now, will probably need to bump up a size in the next couple tears

wait until you decide to store your blu-ray collection on a plex server

thankfully I only own like four blu-ray discs, and have no idea how to rip them, so those will stay in the physical realm

F Hazel - any tips for that? I only have a few blu rays but I’d like to be able to stream them on Plex

Plex actually is pretty simple to use! Some learning curve with folder and file naming conventions but the harder part was learning to rip Blu-Rays (I use MakeMKV). I leave the raw rips since video compression is too complicated to mess with for me. My collection is medium-sized... around 500 discs.

Plex app is on Roku so watching stuff from my collection is a pleasure. It handles metadata really well, all I fiddle with is the movie poster choices.

Raw rips! Handbrake isn't that tough to sort out, there's probably a preset you'd like and would save scads of space. Mind that I care about picture quality even less than audio (320kbps 4 life)

Plex got annoying and I ditched it for Jellyfin which was surprisingly easy. Sorry to any ilxors who ever used my Plex.

I need to try Jellyfin, Plex was good enough when I set up the media server so I haven't played around too much yet with Emby or the like... staying with raw Blu-ray rips because I don't want to repeat the rip to mp3 fiasco where I ended up moving to FLAC and had to re-rip a lot of CDs. Go lossless stay lossless and wait for storage sizes to catch up.

how do folks back their stuff up? Cloud services or an offsite duplicated HD?

o wait do apps like Plex etc handle that part?

i have an local external drive attached to my WD MyCloud.
there is a scheduled job that backs up MyCloud to the external every Monday evening.
not the greatest failsafe solution, and something i will revise once my finances improve.

xp They don't. It's really just spinning up a homemade Netflix based on your files.

I was using a USB hard drive to do periodic backups til recently. Had no incidents but recently switched to a 2-disk Synology NAS... one that can run Docker and handle my bit of server stuff too (Jellyfin, Logitech Media Server). So I don't have to keep an old laptop on all the time now to do that stuff. So it's smoother than what I was doing.

Anyone on Qnap NAS?

oh so now I still use the USB disk to periodically back up the Synology and store that somewhere else. It's easy, but now I'm attached to their ecosystem in that way.

€10 a month for 2TB Google Drive space works for me.

I've just remembered that I'm a PlexPass subscriber but I can't remember why.

The privelege of downloading your own files? "Plexamp"?

Right when I got into Jellyfin some guy put out a really good music app that can use it or Plex: "Symfonium".

Plexamp sucks. I don't need download ability. Maybe I should cancel.

sounds like!

Prism is a pretty good alternative music player for Plex, well worth the small price.

I'm using Serviio. Pretty easy to set up with my Yamaha MusicCast reciever, or VLC on my phone. You can pay for remote access but otherwise it's free.

I hated Plex, it was too buggy for me.

as a few of you on here know, i'm on 32tb of plex data these days