Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

what the fuck is wrong with us

What, maintaining it or organizing it?

i mean, both really

Yeah, man, CDs don't take 25% as much organising and backing-up as MP3s do.

i mean fucking honestly what an enormous waste of my life

i am still rating and deleting. i think i have almost rated 20,000 songs. less than 9,000 to go. i'll be finished in april, i guess.

cool snarky comeback bro, but i have like 80 gigs of music i've collected over the year clogging my itunes and now i have to waste a day figuring out what goes over to a hard drive and what gets deleted, and then move it all over folder by folder? get fucked, mp3s

and it's not like you can drag straight from itunes, you have to drag the FOLDER into your hard drive or the trash and then go BACK to itunes and delete it. So much easier than CDs thanks for breaking it down for me man

I'm not joking or being snarky; organising CDs, even if you're fastidious as hell, is far less time-consuming than organising MP3s. Digital music makes database nerds out of everyone. It's dull as fuck.

Don't get the dragging a folder into the trash thing? Just highlight in iTunes, delete, and select to delete the source file too?

Yesterday Elvis Telecom posted this useful hint:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20091231160510142

ha, sorry for snappin, glad yr on my team. fuck an mp3. i'm TOTALLY gonna listen to this Akron/Family album again

i almost envy some 12 year old kid now who may not ever have to worry about this shit haha

i almost envy some 30 year old man who has more fulfilling things in his life than this shit

oh i definitely envy them

Don't get the dragging a folder into the trash thing? Just highlight in iTunes, delete, and select to delete the source file too?
--exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy)

this is what I do and it works great?

I don't mind the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with MP3 farming. It gives my hands something to do while I'm listening to music. Makes a nice change from doing the ironing.

no, what i'm saying

1. I go through iTunes to decide what to keep and what to lose
2. I go into the iTunes folders to drag and drop into my harddrive
3. I have to go BACK to iTumes to delete the folders I just moved

I don't get point #2.

not using itunes to manage your music may actually help you a lot

i'm cleaning my itunes and moving the things i want to "keep" to my external hard drive, anagram. it's mind-numbing and pointless

I don't mind the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with MP3 farming. It gives my hands something to do while I'm listening to music. Makes a nice change from doing the ironing.

― mike t-diva, Friday, 8 January 2010 15:07 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You need Pro Evolution Soccer and masturbation in yr life, Mike,

Also, "fantasy air-conducting".

Like "air guitar" but REALLY wacko.

oh, an external hard drive. gotcha. can't you do it all in one go, though? just make sure the iTunes folders only contain what you want to keep. then when you're done with that drag the whole lot to your external drive in one go.

Whiney, surely trimming your iTunes so it['s JUST what you want to keep and then copying EVERYTHING OVER AT ONCE to the HDD while you go and do something less boring instead would make more sense?

xpost!

xpost Nah, who needs soccer and wanking when you've got Doodle Jump?

hah!

Whiney, surely trimming your iTunes so it['s JUST what you want to keep and then copying EVERYTHING OVER AT ONCE to the HDD while you go and do something less boring instead would make more sense?

― exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy), Friday, January 8, 2010 9:21 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

but i'm also freeing up itunes to get another 80 gigs of 2010 music! so "Want to keep" and "want to keep on my hard drive" are two different animals

After a long talk with my roomate, i think i'm giving up on having a tidy "digital music collection". Its a complete waste of time considering how easily you can just steal shit when you need it.

I'm just gonna transfer EVERYTHING over, keep my external harddrive sloppy and patchworky, and then just go on wild deleting sprees when i eventually run out of space.

The librarian / IT guy in me just died.

is the external HD something you use to play music or is it basically a closet?

closet, yo

I just keep my external HD permanently plugged in, with my iTunes library switched over to it. I uncheck stuff that I don't want synching to the iPod, and that's about it.

Yeah, my laptop moves around too much for that to be really possible.

i need to get an external hd that'll hook up to my router. then things will be cool.

Yeah, my laptop moves around too much for that to be really possible.

― steady mmmobyn (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, January 8, 2010 9:51 AM (20 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah exactly

yeah the existence of my external HDs as essentially "put them here so I don't feel like they're gone forever" things has given me occasional pause over the past year, because I have used them exactly once to retrieve stuff - they're graveyards. once the stuff is off the devices I use (pretty much only the computer now - my iPod hardly ever gets any use these days), it's not in play. this makes me think a lot about how I relate to music & storage & all that stuff

btw f this thread for forcing me to spend 1/2 hour and counting putting tags on my "unknown artist" files

I'm just gonna transfer EVERYTHING over, keep my external harddrive sloppy and patchworky, and then just go on wild deleting sprees when i eventually run out of space.

― steady mmmobyn (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, January 8, 2010 6:41 AM (18 minutes ago)

The librarian / IT guy in me just died.

― exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy), Friday, January 8, 2010 6:42 AM (17 minutes ago)

The future, summed up.

Just a quick heads up, and clearly in this area ymmv, but for those external HDD users or would-be purchasers I'd strongly recommend against using anything made or badged by LaCie, assuming you want to keep the data thereon for any length of time. A friend has just had two separate LaCie devices fail beyond any repair within a month (both less than two years old) and my workplace colleagues who deal with such matters see LaCie HDDs fail more often than any other brand.

(sorry for turning this into oh noes boring computer questions)

+1, my LaCie is on the verge of dying as well after less than a year. do you have any recommendations for other brands?

Where did kshighway go btw?

heard this too. i'm still on lacie, but with backup on another hd.
btw is there a way how to do a fast search on external usb drives? a simple search hangs up my expicula/explorer...

Seagates are great

Yeah, where is kshighway? I just made the sod a website.

I have two western digital "mybook" hds that I've used heavily and have never had any problems

Also MIA:

Kate

it makes me sad to even think about how much time I've spent tagging mp3s

> do you have any recommendations for other brands?

I've heard good reports on the WD Mybooks too; my network storage colleague has been trialling Buffalo TeraStations as a "personal" storage solution with good results.

Agreed on WD Mybooks, been working for me just fine.