Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

hard drives are cheap. Spend 100 dollars and don't sweat it.

My music library is well over 300 gigs. I've moved it from 1 drive to another several times with no problems. I've also restored it when an old hard drive crashed with no problem.

I avoid LaCie as I've had multiple external drives of theirs fail. The drives are Samsung or Hitachi or WD or Seagate anyway, so you're paying for the box and controller card and power supply. I had a LaCie 1tb(2 500gig drives in 1 box) die on my, then a year later I cracked it open, pulled out one of the drives, stuck it in my computer, and it works great.

Gtech drives from Hitachi are good. I'm all internal and everything is Western Digital. I also have an old Maxtor external that's held up really well. If you research all the major brands you'll hear complaints. Hard drives fail. But researching on Newegg led me to the Western Digital Caviar Black internal drives and I now have 3 of them. I had 4 but that's the one that died after several years and two computers.

I'm waiting for SSDs to be cheap, or eventually I'll just by a Drobo.

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Robotics-FireWire-Storage-DR04DD10/dp/B001CZ9ZEE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262965209&sr=8-1

330 dollars and just fill it with the internal drives I already have! Automatic raid mirroring. If 1 drive dies, you replace it with another and your computer never notices the difference.

knowing that there are 1TB SSDs out there is just mindblowing to me.

whiney otm x1000000000000000000

all my songs are on a NAS which makes syncing verrrryy slooooww

i once had a dream that my ID3 tags were actually organized and that every song had the lyrics field filled in corrently - that was fucked up

i swear i think half my motivation to make money is so that some day i can pay someone to spend three days putting the record label into the genre field

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

― exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy), Friday, January 8, 2010 3:17 PM (45 minutes ago)

I am reading Powell's essay now!

So, taking a month or two off was good. Glad to see Whiney's bringing further attention to my thread. Thanks dude.

>Automatic raid mirroring. If 1 drive dies, you replace it with another and your computer never notices the difference.

On a final LaCie=Junk note, and for those who might not be au fait with RAID etc, I'd only add: Avoid any RAID device which only uses RAID 0 - if that fails then any data on it will be irretrievably fucked (unless yr prepared to drop the £££ to get it professionally looked at).

>i once had a dream that my ID3 tags were actually organized and that every song had the lyrics field filled in corrently - that was fucked up

proper lols.

fwiw i have completely given up trying to organize the actual music files i own - if i have to actually copy or export actual files anywhere i use one of doug's applescripts for itunes. it was a good moment when i realized i could do that with no negative consequences to myself or those i hold dear

My dream is simple. MP3 tagging should allow for multiple albums. For instance, let's say I have a song by a band on their own LP. I also have it on some seminal compilation. Sometimes I want to be able to view by artist and album, but other times I want to click on the compilation. For this reason alone, I have multiple copies of the same song. It's not that simple though, because it would really screw with iTunes folder hierarchy.

My (admittedly partial) solution to that problem is to make a playlist with the same track listing as the compilation.

i'm keeping my cds and vinyl yall, fwiw

like in the next 10 years there's gonna be some way you can stream records superfast and in super high quality and those thousands of hours spent making sure that Alvo Noto was filed under Classical is gonna make us feel like total chumps

I actually managed to get rid of all of my CDs by the end of the year. I don't really "manage" my mp3s. They just sit there and I listen to them.

That being said, I think it makes more sense to keep your CDs than to do what I'm doing. For all of the reasons everyone's already said. But I buy a lot of books and didn't want to deal with two physical media collections in my life. Also, I just prefer the digital format for music now. So, just personal preference.

Your mp3s are all backed up though, right?

I recently (finally) completed ripping most of my collection -- I'm down to a small amount of vinyl and a slew of traded CDRs -- and spent some time packing down what I was going to keep into binders and the like. Basically I just wanted to make it all easier to move.

xpost

Apple Time Capsule backs everything up automatically.

yeah, I kept my 300 most crucial, most listened to CDs in a binder and sold the rest, and made a KILLING.

But vinyl? Yeah I have thousands and while it needs a big purge, they're not going anywhere.

I'm still doing my planned donation of things to KUCI here soon, I really want to get some paintings up on the wall instead of CD racks.

You're taking down all of the racks and switching to binders?

i will say a silent prayer for all of you. good luck and godspeed with all of your sorting and saving!

http://api.ning.com/files/SKpnRD7cBshuv9Vuz7vRwzVih24jVn6p9DWsLk-FHn0*ZB7YimhZuL3PyvGKdx6moc6k0cTmU9vngc47u7QBeW2u3A4bXGUt/babyprayinghands.jpg

Hahaha.

Seems like a good moment to mention these supercool space-saving CD sleeves which I praised on another thread recently:

http://www.jazzloft.com/p-34281-space-saving-cd-sleeves.aspx

anagram do u find that u can't really see the spines with those?

No I can see them just fine and dandy

although it does depend on how tightly packed they are

How are they on the actual discs? We had a discussion a few months ago about . . . binders . . . and me and someone else who's name I can't recall right now were talking about how the old binders--at least of the type we owned--used to scratch the CDs. (Not as awesome as the *CD player* I had once that carved deep-ish circular grooves into all of my CDs. Thankfully I didn't own many records back then, although it basically fucked up most of the Metallica discography at the time.)

they're fine on the discs. the playable surface rests next to the tray card.

Sweet.

For car listening, do you folks hook up your mp3 player, or just stick with CDs?

I pretty much listen exclusively to the radio when I'm in my car nowadays, but my car has a tape deck, so I used to just use one of the type of things

http://www.newertech.com/products/images/cassette_adapter_400x250.jpg

and my iPod.

i actually kind of like the sorting/tagging of mp3s. it satisfies my ocd

i use cds--my car doesnt have a tape deck and fm transmitters blow.

I have heard nothing but negative reviews of FM transmitters. Interference. Bad sound quality. Bleh.

tried FM transmitter but it didn't work. Tried above tape doo-hicky but that didn't work. And now the CD player is having trouble so I'm hoping to one day replace the car stereo with something fancy.

^ks, Yes the iTrip, I remember those well.

I personally get too distracted by music, especially busier music, while I'm driving, so I tend to stick with Radio 4 or 5 these days. Or stuff that works just as well in the background. This makes me sound much older than I am..

Yeah! I've never actually used an iTrip, but my best friend did back in the day and it seemed like he was always having problems with it cutting out. I've used a bunch of tape adapters, and sometimes you heard some additional noise in the music you're listening to, but if you turn it up loud enough it's fine. Which isn't ideal, but if all you have is a cassette deck like me, it's the cheapest way to listen to music in the car. But now I just mostly listen to NPR and the local pop, hip-hop, and "alternative" radio stations.