Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

Guess I hadn't mentioned it before on the thread but I decided to give Amazon Cloud Player Premium a whirl about a month ago, after idly pondering further offsite backups (not flat out replacements, obv.) to my drives. I vaguely remember some mention of the changed service they provided but I hadn't realized they essentially were providing a steal in comparison to their general cloud data rates -- $25 a year for up to 250,000 songs. Hell, I'll take that (and since I have very little tied into things via Amazon unlike Google or Apple, I like the idea of it being separate from them, with full awareness that we're talking one Big Huge Data Loving Company vs. others). MP3 Store matched tunes are imported to the player at 256K, which I can live with, and it accepts all mp3 and m4a uploads flatout if not matched, which has been great when it comes to out of print/unreleased/rarities/mixes/etc. AIFF files etc are only worked with if matched, presumably to keep lossless bros from overwhelming the system with one Phish soundboard versus another. You can also edit track info, album info, etc. as needed. Not perfect -- it'll accept your image files but the matched songs sometimes get incorrect art, and that can't be edited yet, while sometimes it doesn't include it at all. And if you have a LOT of songs (hi dere) then better to do the manual import options group by group or however you've got your music folders organized. But for the crazy low rate and for the ease of accessibility -- web player, standalone program and phone app all work for me as needed -- then no complaints. The fact that I have my entire Jandek collection immediately to hand now alone is so wonderfully strange.

Oh and you can download from the player to your phone, computer, etc. once your songs are in place, so for long travel/avoiding battery drain as needed, cue up and download before you start and you're good.

Streaming is great if you're not really into music and are okay with it disappearing at any time or being replaced with an overcompressed remastered version at somebody's whim.

Ned what if, for instance, I want to be able to stream my MP3s of Katy Lied and not Amazon's UMG-supplied unlistenable ones, do you reckon it would let me upload and stream my own rip of something already "available" from their cloud like that?

Good question! Here's the basic file type breakdown:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201114020

In terms of 'forcing' a match, you may well be out of luck, and I don't discount that as an issue. (Not being a Steely Dan fan I can't speak to that specific example.)

This is long-overdue. Can't wait to try it when I get home

Hm I wonder if I could tag them as "The Dan" or some shit and trick it that way

You could try! Anyway, yeah, it's definitely not a holy grail, but it does seem to exist in a perfect sweet spot for the moment.

I'm sitting here at work, scrolling through my ipod, and thinking I really need to purge half the crap on here I don't listen to anymore. I got songs albums from 2005 on here that I haven't listened to since 2005. /Random

I hear you, by all means get rid of stuff you don't like, but sometimes crate digging in your own collection can reveal lost gems and forgotten favorites.

shuffle that thing for a week or so, you'll find something to save (and a lot to delete)

Do you need space? Otherwise keep it all

My normal iPod browse mode is by Artist, but when that starts to feel exhausted and uninspiring I find it refreshing to switch to all Albums A to Z, as if it were one big record crate with no author distinctions...

I put stuff into my iPod when I have to review it, and if I then forget to delete it I sometimes come across it weeks or months later and think, "Ugh, what the hell is this crap doing in here?"

Actually my second favorite thing about rockbox on iPod, after the parametric EQ and crossfeed, is ONBOARD DELETION. I can actually erase a song as soon as it displeases me.

My normal iPod browse mode is by Artist, but when that starts to feel exhausted and uninspiring I find it refreshing to switch to all Albums A to Z, as if it were one big record crate with no author distinctions...

― grape is the flavor of my true love's hair (Jon Lewis), Saturday, February 22, 2014 2:52 PM

I think that's my problem. It's the act of passing the same artists every day for years that makes me think I should purge. I'll try the view-by-album function. I'm not actually going to purge, cause space isn't an issue yet (and at this point, it'll probably never be).

This streaming stuff has never appealed to me and I don't know if I'm wrong for getting worried about it. Surely downloading will always be an option? Why would anyone stop that option? Too many people have bad internet connections for streaming to be a great idea.
Cant take your streaming music on holiday to somewhere with no internet? What if I just wanted to stop using the internet for a couple of months or suddenly couldn't afford the streaming subscription anymore? Just go back to my old cds and not be able to get new cds and downloads?

It just eerily reminds me of videogame companies wanting to give consumers as little power as possible by keeping the game online, ready to change it or end it whenever they please. I bet some pricks would like to make some music region coded.

I'm scared and paranoid, please someone convince me there isn't a conspiracy to make music less enjoyable.

no it's good

downloading isn't going anywhere. i don't like streaming either, but that's because i have old-school notions about why owning (rather than renting) desired music is important.

I've embraced the cloud but I just got the newly released 128gb microsd card for my phone so I have all my bases covered, cloud or no cloud.

Smart music execs certainly have a conspiracy to make all music streaming and then raise prices once you are locked in, but that will be easier said than done.

There's a 128GB micro ss card? Jesus!

Sd that is

Yes, this is the micro ss:

http://www.writeonnewjersey.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Mel-Brooks-The-Producers.jpg

there is a conspiracy to make music less enjoyable, it's the MP3

just kidding, i love spotify

Without reading the whole thread, what do people now recommend for storing/organising music on their computers (and burning compilation CD-Rs)?

iTunes for me

J River Media Center. It just keeps getting better.

going to borrow a Rasberry Pi this week and try RASP-FI

I used to have a Xbox set up to as an audio player but it was not very good and took up lots of space, hopefully this can slip down the back of the hifi and work just as well. I know there used to be issues with USB soundcards, but these seem to have fixed.

if it works, its going to put the price of a stable Audio server at £50.

Can J River sync with iPods/iPhones, allowing me to banish the abomination that is iTunes?

if I hadn't been using iTunes forever, I'd use Swinsian. A really good, fast iTunes replacement with some sadly lost iTunes features (opening multiple playlist windows at once!)

my library is too big for Itunes and I use FLAC, so I use a very well-organized hard drive and play things off it through VLC

listening to Charlie Parker right now

(on a Mac btw)

J River can sync with my iPod Classic, not sure what the situation is with iPhones, I suspect it can. It also acts as a music server and you can stream your library anywhere you've got a data connection.

I use foobar2000 for the playback. Lossless FLAC files organized by folder, with plug-ins to get bitperfect data to my DAC. I haven't made a compilation CDR in a while, but I guess I would still use Imgburn or Burrrn if I needed to.

I used to use foobar plug-in to load my ipod, but I don't use one currently.

At what stage is a music library too big for iTunes? I use iTunes for the front end and an 8 hard-drive NAS (network attached storage) server for holding the files. Laptop, or whatever, points the iTunes library to the server which holds the files. System works fine for 100,000+ lossless files. Plus you can set the NAS to have one or two hard drive failure tolerance without losing all your files. And if one hard drive fails, you hot swap in a new one and it rebuilds itself.

I was recently looking into finally building a NAS for music and movies. After a bunch of research, I decided that the only way to do it correctly would be to build a FreeNAS server using the ZFS file system, which prevents data corruption by using error correcting RAM. Then I would buy six drives (plus a cold spare) and run RAID6/RAIDZ2 configuration which means you could still recover if two drives failed at the same time. On top of that, I would want an offsite backup of at the very least the most precious of my albums, which would cost $5/mo at the cheapest.

After tallying the cost of server hardware to just over $1,600, I decided maybe I needed to seriously reconsider how important this data is to me. So, since then, I've been going through my cherished music collection and finding that there is just a ton of stuff that has accumulated over the years that I haven't listened to since I first purchased/ripped/downloaded it. I've been devoting a lot of thought to minimalism vs. hoarding lately with regard to physical belongings, but hadn't really thought of my digital stuff that way until now. All said and done, refusing to get rid of data leads to the same types of problems it does with physical goods: Clutter, the expense of having to pay for more storage, the burden of caring whether it all goes up in smoke one day, to some degree even environmental impact due to consuming more media with which to back things up, whether it be me purchasing the hard drives, or Crashplan/Backblaze buying more storage to handle new customers like me.

So, I suppose this means that I am determined to stop my hoarding ways and delete most of my digital music collection. Maybe I'll post back here in a few months and let you guys know how it worked out.

Is there any percentage of it that you could find a perfect torrentable copy really easily at any given time in the future, or is it somehow not the same?

As far as expense, it doesn't take a NAS. I have a single external drive that I use Time Machine on and backup online using Crash Plan. I never worry about losing data. Sure, my computer could die, external hard drive could die, and Crash Plan could go out of business, but what are the chances of that happening all at the same time?

I would want an offsite backup of at the very least the most precious of my albums, which would cost $5/mo at the cheapest.

A cheap external hard drive kept in a drawer in an office desk (or at a friend/relative's home) makes for effective no-cost offsite storage even for a few terabytes of data. Not always practical for daily backups, but it can be supplemented with local or cloud storage of anything added or changed since you brought the drive home. Having two such drives that you swap back and forth ascertains you'll always have one of them offsite.

I don't keep much real-life stuff, but I'm a digital hoarder. Pruning out stuff i don't need anymore takes more time than it's worth, and given a 2GB external HDD costs about $99 deleting unwanted music won't save any money.

Re: digital clutter, I agree with Beard Papa - less is often more. Over the years I've found an easy compromise is to separate the critical stuff from the interesting-but-not-required stuff. I keep the latter in a separate archive folder and only occasionally reference it. It's hard enough scrolling through the stuff I love, moving the rest somewhere else helps a lot. As some ILXor once excellently said, "I am not a curator of music I MIGHT want to listen to."

I feel like we're soon approaching an event horizon where in a few years 4TB laptop drives are the standard and then The Horde just becomes part of everything else you carry around. The One True Hard Drive that is geographically redundant in pure transcendent harmony.

Horde or Hoard? (Both work.)

BTW updating my post a few months back there on Amazon Cloud Player -- continuing to put stuff on there without a hitch, similarly with playback. I continue to be interested in how this is all eventually going to play out.

Horde or Hoard? (Both work.)

Most definitely Horde. Do you how much $$$ I had to deficit spend to fund the Sacking of Mutant Sounds and Bodega Pop?!

My QNAP NAS is over 5 yrs old and still doing okay, but my online backup got screwed. I paid $60 for unlimited space on Bitcasa last year, and they went and upped the price to $99 a MONTH for unlimited! WTF! $49 for 5TB. It looks like Crashplan is just $5/mo for unlimited. Is that the best option these days?

I guess I'm outing myself as an asshole, but my desktop is hooked up to 10.5 TB of FLAC, CBZ, and ISO, and I spend much of my spare time randomly accessing these files to save myself a few minutes of walking across the room or re-ordering or googling a thing.

Fastnbulbous, Crashplan and Backblaze are probably the most popular ones these days.

Ned - a question about Amazon Cloud Player. It says they will "upgrade" your music to 256kbps audio when you upload it. But what if you have files that are encoded at 320kbps, for example? If your hard drive crashes and you want to download the stored music from Amazon, does it come back to you in the original format or as their 256kbps files?