Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

get an external DAC - they are (relatively) expensive but if you want to use your computer as a source for your stereo system they're a worthwhile investment. I splurged and got an iBasso one with two DACs, one for each channel:

http://ibasso.com/en/products/show.asp?ID=44

ie a mobile phone.

― koogs, Monday, April 5, 2010 4:44 AM (6 hours ago)

yeah, at least when they're out and about, everyone will be listening to music on something like an iPhone soon enough

Perhaps that's true regarding computer/latop speakers but the iPod headphone out isn't so terrible. I can certainly tell the different between 128 and 192+ when lower bitrate tracks pop up on shuffle. But then I've also been to so many concerts that, frankly, I can't tell the different between high-bit VBR and WAV anymore.

Ned - the best solution for lineout -> headphone is a headphone amp.

to expand a little...an external DAC moves the digital-to-analog signal conversion outside of your computer. the inside your computer is very noisy elecronically speaking - lots of electromagnetic radiation &c. as a test, try plugging in a pair of earbuds into your computer and turning the volume all the way up - that hissing you hear is all the interference.

All good, dyao, will consider it! (Gerald -- don't need a headphone amp, this is for actual speaker listening.)

IIRC the mac mini has an optical out line built into its headphone jack - a cheaper solution would be to connect that to your receiver (if your receiver takes optical, that is!)

also sorry to get all headphone nerdy but a good headphone amp can serve as a decent pre-amp if you already have a power amp

I was actually planning on updating my receiver anyway -- might do that first. (Given the placement of everything in the apartment there are a couple of things I'd want to consider there...)

really want to invest in an high-performance soundcard now but also thinking about one of these Brennan JB7 jobs:

http://media.audiojunkies.com/brennan-cambridge-jb7-jukebox-digital-music-player-home-mp3-player-cd.jpg

anyone have any experience with these? advantages are the quickness/ease of use, detachment from PC...um, it has a clock...

What's the point of those? Larger capacity than an iPod I suppose. Otherwise, I just have cables to plug my iPod into a stereo on every floor in my house. (I'm too lazy to set up a media server)

But then I've also been to so many concerts that, frankly, I can't tell the different between high-bit VBR and WAV anymore.

OTM, and as far as i'm concerned this is a blessing in disguise.

Though my ears are nowhere near wrecked enough to accept 128kbps.

^^

Larger capacity than an iPod I suppose

also better sound than ipod, no pissing about with itunes or usb transfer via pc, rips CDs directly (tho i probably wouldn't use it for this), and i think i still like the idea of a home-based unit that isn't actually wearable/loseable.

also better sound than ipod, no pissing about with itunes or usb transfer via pc, rips CDs directly (tho i probably wouldn't use it for this), and i think i still like the idea of a home-based unit that isn't actually wearable/loseable.

Again, I can see the appeal for most folks, but I'm very particular about my digital library - I want to be able to organize it in a way that works best FOR ME. I want to group certain artist side-projects under that artists, combine singles, live tracks, etc. Also, by pulling everything onto my PC I can normalize the volume between albums - very handy. Basically I love the control I have and a single device like that would require I cede almost all control.

That Brennan site does a hand-wave regarding compression levels which probably means lower bitrate than I'd like.

Regarding the Brennan, it's £469 ($717 USD) for the 500GB jukebox. That seems like a lot of money for something that's not expandable, doesn't have digital out, and doesn't even accept lossless files. Seems kind of 2004 to me.

You can buy a 1TB hard drive for $60. For those who want to try wireless to different rooms, you can get a Squeezebox receiver for $150, which has it's own DAC that's pretty good. If your receiver has a better DAC, just connect via coax or optical. You can run it without a PC via a NAS, or get the upcoming Squeezebox Touch.

If you want to keep it simple, just have a cheap small laptop and external drive near the receiver, play music with MusicMonkey or, bla, iTunes.

With a separate firewire or USB converter you're not only removing the processing from the electronically noisy computer, you're also getting a better soundcard (how many dollars is your computer's manufacturer devoting to the conversion chip?), a volume knob (which is kinda nice), and probably some audio inputs as well.

Can be as cheap as $50, or as much as $5000. M-Audio makes some decent ones from $100 to $200. Even the cheapest ones should do the Digital to Analog conversion just fine, but the better ones will come into their own with the Analog to Digital, especially if you're ever converting at better-than-cd rates. Of course, this is mostly if you're very serious about vinyl transfers and are up for something like an Apogee or Metric Halo unit (and in which case you know all this already).

Some will come bundled with cheap audio editors, too.

Something like a cheap M-audio converter running out to the cheapest M-audio monitors, will sound vastly better than going out the headphone jack to computer speakers. (though by "vastly better" I mean "more revealing"--you can end up hearing defects, too.)

re: reduced sound quality, i kind of assume everything will go lossless eventually, right? i can't see record companies getting bent out of shape about it when most consumers of digital music files don't care about the difference between 192 & lossless anyway.

― hobbes, Monday, April 5, 2010 5:50 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

wait, why? I don't get the logic

― ain't no thang but a chicken ㅋ (dyao), Monday, April 5, 2010 3:09 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah i wasn't reading closely enough, i thought this revive was about The Future Of Music Consumption in general, not just apple's streaming service. what i meant is that if everything inevitably ends up going into "the cloud", what sense does it make for an artist to record in 44khz or whatever only to have the sound quality reduced when it's released? bandwith restrictions was the obvious answer i hadn't thought of.

Although you do get slightly better sounding compressed audio files if you start from files that were at higher than cd quality initially. Though the real reason, I assume, would be that nobody knows what technology is coming, so it'd be better to have the maximum fidelity now. And, of course, the more you're going to process the material (various effects, mastering, and so on) the better it is to have more bits to play with from the get-go. Generally best to record at 24 bits, and at least an 88.2 sampling rate, then do your tinkering, then knock everything down to cd quality (16 bits, 44.1 sampling rate) at the end.

Yeah, the cloud will come eventually, but I think it will take a few years for it to be consistently reliable and high bandwidth enough to sound good. I mean, how many people still have trouble with cell phone connections in their own apartment? Plenty, and they've been working on that problem for 15 years. Anything that involves people climbing poles and messing around with wires is going to take a lot longer to get right than something that just involves software.

hobbes - yeah I can see that the master servers (itunes, lala, last.fm) will preserve everything at CD quality or higher. that's how Apple was able to roll out the 256 kbps upgrade so fast - I assume it was just a simple job of transcoding their master apple lossless files or whatever. but I don't see anybody streaming lossless files any time soon! xxp

Regarding the Brennan, it's £469 ($717 USD) for the 500GB jukebox.

for this money you can buy a mac mini and set it up to be a booming media server.

BTW if you're setting up your computer as a music server and you're running windows and you're using an external soundcard or using digital out, your sound quality is getting degraded - basically windows has a kernel service thingy that remixes everything to 32khz. you need to install something called 'asio4all' to bypass this - google it.

macs, as usual, don't have this problem.

Read mixed things on this, but what's the general consensus on sound quality of AirPort thing.

Fine for me.

No better or worse than the headphone jack on the machine that's serving it.

are 128 mp3s really bad? I think my whole collection is 128 : /

so bad.

unless you have ears of cloth so then why bother? if they sound fine to you then great.

:____(

probably shouldn't go below 192 kbps. iTunes Store is at 256, and 320 is considered near-CD quality, iirc

can't wait until we can look back and laugh at the time when we had to think about file format and bitrates

it'll be rose-tinted affection. 'choosing a bitrate when ripping' will be the new 'taking the record out of its sleeve'.

can't beat the warm sound of a 192

i actually do know people who wax eloquent about the sound of ATRAC compression of a vinyl record

Lower bitrate = hard drive can store more music!

it's like free money!

opportunity cost

the day finally came, i unplugged my ipod (which has been holding it down for at least 5 years) from my computer and somehow it lost everything on it. there was a bunch of stuff from my last computer that i had been meaning to back up, and i don't think i did. oh well, time to start fresh.

"maintaining" a digital music "collection"!

you don't sync?!

i don't sync. still find transferring stuff to ipod so cumbersome that i can only be bothered to do it every 6 months or so. maybe i could make more effort and then buy a Zeppelin (Nick to thread) for non-PC home listening.

see, even when you don't use iTunes it STILL finds a way to fuck you in the end

i don't sync because i download lots of stuff just to check it out, which doesn't make it on the ipod. also my ipod has been almost filled to the brim for the last year, so every time i want to put another album on i have to find something to delete. :/

Man it takes me like 4 days to rebuild my core library when I have an ipod go catatonic like that-- I have stuff on so many different CD-Rs and ext hard drives...

xpost 128kbps sometimes sounds fine for certain kinds of recordings. Vinyl rips usually sound ok in 128. Old garagey rock n roll shit usually sounds fine. It's basically cymbals, acoustic guitars, choral voices and string ensembles that suffer the most on 128.

Yep, I'm in the same boat, but it's good to have to clear out some space! Keeps you honest and only the best survives!

But in this day of cheap external drives there's no excuse for not having at least one backup.

RIP my ipod (4th gen 60 gig clickwheel, I guess I can't expect much more).

I am obsessive about backup so nothing on it was lost for good.

also my ipod has been almost filled to the brim for the last year, so every time i want to put another album on i have to find something to delete. :/

I got sick of doing this, so I just erased the whole iPod and started fresh, only putting stuff on there as I wanted to listen to it.

yeah, this is why i felt a sense of relief even though i'm sure i lost some stuff for good (i do have a vague memory of backing some things up on my external a few months ago, i'll have to check after work).

right away this morning i threw on my brass band collection and my key rap/r&b albums, which turned out to be almost 1000 songs.

Hard drives get really chancy (and slow) when you get within ten percent of their capacity.

I see no reason to begin buying digitally when two extra bucks buys me a back-up that'll last forever, as well as house decoration. And less funds for Apple.

I thought the problem of having stuff on your ipod that isn't on your HDD would be moot now that HDDs are so big and ipods still (relatively) small