Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

Genre is easy - everything after 1991 is "Alternative/Punk"

or "World/Other"

The one iTunes feature I've always longed for is an ability to click on a song and see which playlists, if any, it appears on. I have a bunch of duplicates, but I don't always know which of the two versions of a song I should delete, because one might be the version I've put on a mix.

― Hoisin Murphy (jaymc), Tuesday, 19 January 2010 02:52 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I discovered by accident that you can do this - right-click the song>Show in Playlist. It's really handy!

1 have two terabytes and i use one as a backup and this method seems to work fine. I'm due to clean them both up though.

does anyone have some system for dealing with genre?

since the tag is basically useless, I just put the record label in there. doesn't make much sense for major labels but it's kinda cool if you want filter for all releases on basic channel or whatever.

I also use the genre tag for labels if they are distinct, like Basic Channel, Mo Wax or Factory.

Genres are so useful! Pick broad genres and don't nitpick about it (probably asking too much of ILM). Then if I want to listen to electronic music, I can just put on that genre and know that I'm going to get similar music, but not so similar because I don't have these rigid rules for genre selection. Sometimes, I just want to hear metal, not specifically Chilean death metal or any other granular genre.

I discovered by accident that you can do this - right-click the song>Show in Playlist. It's really handy!

Wow, thanks!

what is last.fm?

Seek and you shall find, Rolling last.fm thread 2010.

last.fm was cool, till I got paranoid that it was eating up resources to be uploading that information in the background, though I'm sure it wasn't. Also when DJing weddings and whatnot I'd listen to lots of terrible music and was too lazy to always be turning scrobbling on and off. What I forgot however is that my Squeezebox still reports, so what shows up on my Last.fm only represents what my girlfriend and I listen to in the living room.

didn't manage to read all 80000 messages (made it through about 300 of them) but i just really want to say one important IMPORTANT thing on this subject of maintaining a digital music collection:

BACK YOUR SHIT UP!

one day your hard drive will crash, period, end of story- it happens to every last one of them sooner or later.

buy a time capsule if you can afford it, or a second hard drive if you cant, maybe every month on the first burn all your new shit to dvd's and sit it on a spindle, whatever. but the less you have to think about it the better, manual backups just don't really work that well - your hard drive crashes and you're like "oh shit i haven't backed up in 7 months!" get a program to back it up automatically if at all possible (superduper is great and tres cheap if you run mac)

you guys sound like you're being too anal about the genre tag. your tag is not the final say on categorizing the music for future generations. just tag stuff how it makes most sense and is most helpful for you. course, i don't listen to much "rock" and so anything from Led Zeppelin to Lush gets the same "rock" tag from me.

Is there an IMDB for music? There's gracenote/cddb/freedb and trouserpress and wikipedia and such, but has anyone tried to combine them all?

^allmusic or discogs

is there anything wrong with them that you wouldn't feel comfortable letting some software automatically tag and organize your music according to the site?

I use both once in awhile... allmusic is good for a general overview. Discogs is better for collectors. It has details of different versions of the same release, etc. I've never paid much attention to genre tags in either tbh.

discogs is by far my fave

discogs is fantastic, yeah. I haven't bothered with genre tags for years! until you can tag songs with multiple genres in a sensible way, it's just too much subjective hassle.

mediamonkey and i think winamp does multiple genres

and has a separate field for publisher/label. itunes does too iirc? solutions exist! yr ocd is not going to enable itself

What do you all use the "grouping" field for in iTunes? I put in geographical info for selected places (e.g. New Zealand, Manchester, Australia, Japan, Netherlands, etc.) and then have smart playlists gather them up for quick access.

the only fields i bother with are track name, disc #, track #, artist, album, and year. that being said, i think people should use whatever fields they want to use as long as it makes listening to their music a more enjoyable experience. using grouping to denote place is an awesome idea.

I've always wondered why Primus is a recognised ID genre tag?

perhaps someone can tell me.

For all of you who are using a second HD to back-up your collection from a Windows PC, I commend the MS tool Sync Toy for quickly updating a mirror of any set of folders on your main HD.

I use it with a 500 GB 2.5" HD in a mp3/movie playing enclosure, so I can play anything anywhere there's a TV/stereo to plug into.

syncback is good too, the free version for regular backups and the paid does sftp if you want to do offsite syncing and want a little more control (backup to zip, more extensive backup types). haven't tried synctoy, sounds great. MS' 'windows live sync is also good and free but i don't think it does as much

I use RsyncX to mirror my OS X machine to external drives. It's free. There are various Windows versions of rsync too.

I use it with a 500 GB 2.5" HD in a mp3/movie playing enclosure

What enclosure are you using?

Does Sync Tool work with FAT 32?

discogs is fantastic, yeah. I haven't bothered with genre tags for years! until you can tag songs with multiple genres in a sensible way, it's just too much subjective hassle.

I use genre tags for country (France, Germany, etc.) when there's no greater overriding tag (Kraftwerk gets tagged "Electronic"). Still I'd rather have multiple metatags ("Electronic" "Germany" "New Wave" for NDW stuff) than groupings or genre tags.

Sublime Frequencies releases get tagged "Sublime Frequencies" as a generic country tag doesn't seem adequate.

i hate genre tags. i replace it with the record label name

http://my.opera.com/Wakajawaka/homes/blog/1herbinchair.jpg
GET YOUR GENRE TAGS OFF MY LAWN

ogg and flac can have as many arbitrary NAME=VALUE tags as you want, even multiples of things like ARTIST. but it's a tossup as to whether your favourite player uses the first instance or the last.

my portable player handles oggs well but doesn't display the information unless the tag names are all upper case. and mp3tag uses "Artist=". it's a pain, but i have scripts that'll sort it.

think i will give in and start copying spotify with hyphen instead of brackets for remixer credit, guest artists etc.

xp Gerald:

The incremental cost of the media player HD enclosures isn't that great over bare ones considering their utility for visits/vacations/second listening rooms. I have a Argosy HV256T - its a cheap little 2.5" (laptop HD) enclosure with some serious limits wrt formats and limited video resolution, but I found it w/o a HD for about $45. Today, I'd consider the more expensive Patriot Box PCMPBO25 (2.5", unbundled with HD), or the iomega 34499 (3.5", with TB HD), both of which play everything at 1080p with few format restrictions.

so presuming i buy another hard drive, what cheap or free backup software for mac (OS 10.4.11, i know i know) would anyone recommend?

SuperDuper. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

you can use the free version but at 25 bucks, it's well worth it to buy the license.

thanks!

if you buy the license, the 2nd time you backup, it will only need to copy new/changed files since the last backup. can cut down backup time from 2hrs to 20mins.

Plug in iPod. Click on iPod under "Devices" on the left side menu. Click "Manually manage music and videos".

That's it. When you click on the iPod, you will see what's on it. Remove what you want. Go back to your library and select various files and drag them to the iPod and they will move to the iPod. Or drag entire playlists to the iPod or get more advanced with smart playlists. I have 321 gigs of music, so syncing hasn't been something I'd consider for a long time. But I also have never felt the need to carry close to my entire collection with me. I bought the 8 gig Touch, and I have some stupid big apps on in. Even with all of that I've still got 6 or so gigs on there. But it's fast enough that I can sit down before leaving for work, empty the entire iPod and decide "oh, I want these 20 playlists". Currently I have 89 albums by 29 artists, all suited to my mood this week for commuting.

dan, thanks for this. i'm nervously about to try it now. i say "nervously" because things have worked fine with my iPod for a while now, and so i'm afraid to tinker with it (when i have, bad things have happened!). but i've got to solve this problem sooner or later, so i'm acting now.

my screen is a little different. when i plug in the iPod, i see "options," which includes an open box for "manually manage music and videos." i assume i need to click that box. but what then? will all my music on my x-drive automatically be stripped from my iPod, forcing me to opt-in anything i want?

so anyway i sold all my remaining vinyl and CDs last Monday :o

will all my music on my x-drive automatically be stripped from my iPod, forcing me to opt-in anything i want?

yes

wau at steve! living in the future already

it worked like a charm (so far). i feel like i've unburdened myself with all the stuff that i won't be carrying around on my ipod unless i want it.

now my other fear kicks-in, i.e., that something happens to my x-drive and i lose my music collection. so my next set of posts, for some time in the future, will be on the mechanics of saving the stuff on my x-drive to a second (backup) x-drive.

anyway, thanks everyone for the help.

I realized later this works differently at times. With my iPod Touch, under devices I click on my ipod, then click on the MUSIC tab and click off Sync Music.

It's really not a big deal. And if you lost your x-drive, which I guess means external? you'd still have a hassle getting the music off the ipod. It's not supposed to work that way but there are ways I think.

Still the easiest thing to do is just use time machine or super duper and back everything up. It's really easy and really cheap.

another good backup program is Syncback - the free version is good enough for most people. You can customize various backup routines between various devices. Works like a charm.

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/3607/empty.jpg

I've just entered 2003: I'm 100% digital now.

respec knuckles

Congratulations. Welcome to the rest of your life.

i feel new

I pity anyone without an excuse to get excited about going to a record store on a Monday morning. Or a Tuesday in the States.