Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

Which is good, because that's how I find out about a lot of music I wouldn't hear otherwise. When I was in college and just read indie rock blogs and shit, a lot of the time I didn't even know what the big pop songs were, which was stupid because I love pop music.

I think I'd have a better sense of what is truly happening in 'pop' music if I listened to commerical radio more, rather than snooped around forums like these or the Singles Jukebox.

But now I just mostly listen to NPR and the local pop, hip-hop, and "alternative" radio stations. Which is good, because that's how I find out about a lot of music I wouldn't hear otherwise.

There's your complete inversion of the college radio role model.

But often I will have been exposed to these songs by osmosis almost, so when you actually make time to listen to 'I Gotta Feeling', it's like 'oh that's what it is'.

Also, when I did tune into the radio, the overplay/heavy rotation robbed even the best songs of their gloss and freshness. You remember how sick we all were of Hey Ya! by the end of 2003, not that everyone like it in the first place.

*liked.

iTrip/etc is ok if you can get some dead air. Not so good in urban areas, or all of spain apparently, where every .05mhz has some guy shouting from the back of his garage.

Ned, as you said in your Stylus Decade piece: "pop is the biggest musical subculture among all the rest." As many people before me have said, in some ways you actually have to go out and seek out this shit in a way you wouldn't have to before. If I stop listening to the radio for a few weeks, I don't even know what's going on in pop music, except for the tidbits I read here and there online, which isn't much because I don't seek new pop out much online.

it is true about pop music though...when I get tired of the few CDs at hand I just listen to the radio, and since I started driving more I've become much more familiar with the likes of Pitbull.

Poker Face sucks though, am I right?

I just over xmas succumbed to iTunes and got all my mp3s on an external drive --- this article was real helpful

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive/

I've been maintaining a digital music collection for 8 years and all the effort has been TOTALLY worth it for me. But then, I like having a neat, organized house - things go where they're supposed to go. Same with music - when I acquire new music either physically or digitally, it's easy to drop it into the appropriate folder in the appropriate section in my library. It took a few iterations to come up with the structure that I use but now there's not much 'maintenance', just regular use and enjoyment.

I can understand the angst involved if you've never had things organized and you've got a mountain of music to comb through, but you can chip away at it over time, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing chore. And maybe, just maybe, you'll find it enjoyable to pull out everything you've got by your favorite artists and listen to it while you fix tags and add album art.

Do you do spring cleaning in your home? Do you go through all the stuff in your closet and desk, chucking things, filing others, etc? Not everyone does and I suspect that behavior will correlate with how you handle your digital media.

i should seriously start a business offering to organize peoples' mp3s

more like gerald mcboring boring

i was given a gift certificate to an electronics store for xmas, so i went to see what they have.
they had a usb drive with the "twilight" soundtrack pre-loaded.
they had a toothbrush that played one song on it so you could tell how long to brush your teeth.
they had some mp3 players, and one of them had a feature where you could buy miniSD cards by genre, that had a proprietary playlist on them, but you couldn't access the songs individually, or change the play order, or rewind, but you could skip a song.
they had another mp3 player with NO FOLDER SYSTEM.
i didn't buy anything.