Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

question that i'm almost embarrassed asking:

if i have a compilation on cd, how do i convert it to a single mp3 file?

on iTunes on my Mac you select all the tracks on the CD and then from the Advanced menu pick Join CD Tracks. Then import as usual.

thanks.

how about without itunes?

on linux i use abcde with the -1 (one) option

Why would you want to do that?

To upload a mix compilation to the net.

it's getting to where if i need to hear a PJ Harvey album or something i just type "PJ Harvey+rar" into google and i have it in like 2 minutes. I don't know if yall digital tag-and-organize hoarder types are expecting that to go away any time soon, but it don't look likely.

I'm not but knowing how badly compilations usually get tagged and organized by others I'm content to do some trawling just to get that under control more. (Was doing that yesterday with the American Pop: An Audio History files -- when everything has as its artist 'Various Artists,' I was happily cursing whoever entered THAT into the CDDB...)

I'm not either but (a) I like owning the music, rather than just streaming it (although this is becoming a little less significant to me (n.1)) and (b) I don't mean to sound like a tool, but is the "artist + rar" formula legal? I'm not judging anyone else, but I'm sticking with legal downloads and/or streaming.

________________________________________
(n.1) Between my old discs and MP3s I acquire from eMusic and Lala and Juno, I have so much that sometimes I feel like it's akin to having nothing (if an unheralded, unheard album cut is lost amid 13K songs (which is what I estimate I have now on my iPod, spread over 1448 albums), it's like not having that song at all).

Are there people out there spending hours organizing their mp3s? If you're importing a CD into iTunes, it will pull in the artist name, track names, and album art for you. If you're buying mp3s, all of the metadata's already there. And even if it weren't, it wouldn't take too long to just look it up on Wikipedia or allmusic and enter it manually. As far as keeping the files themselves organized, iTunes can do that automatically for you, or you can just put them in folders by artist or something, so you never have to think about where any of it goes. If you actually have to think about this too much, you're making things way too complicated for yourself.

As an aside, I also think it's hilariously odd that we've reached the point where a bunch of CDs are cheaper *new* on Amazon or my local record store than they are as digital files on Amazon Mp3 or iTunes. The big chain of indie record stores around here, Newbury Comics, have started selling a bunch of records brand new starting at $6.99. So, as people have noted before, this is a really good time for all of you who still buy CDs.

Daniel: Typing the artist name and ".rar" into Google and downloading whatever comes up isn't legal.