Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

My biggest concern re: flac is for iTunes' awful support of it.

I'm considering buying a huge hard drive soon and either replacing my MP3 collection or just starting with lossless from now on.

Thing is, how do FLAC users play in iTunes? I'm on a Mac so foobar/etc won't work. What about FLAC on your iPhone/iPod. I'm not using FLAC just to keep the original copies I want to play from it. Is there a plugin or something that solves all these issues?

I use Fluke

http://code.google.com/p/flukeformac/

another option would be to switch to Apple Lossless (however that locks you in to their proprietary format).

all that said, are you sure you can accurately pick apart the differences between high quality mp3s and lossless?

I'll give Fluke a look. As for picking the differences apart its in part a future preservation thing, part a - I'm using my hifi over laptop speakers now and do convince myself I can hear the difference then, and also I make a lot of mix CDs for people, I'd rather make a mix from lossless files so when they rip it at 128 at least its not a transcode from V0 to 128, which at that difference I would notice.

Plus storage is so cheap now I don't see the point not using the best.

using a piece of software named Fluke is just asking for your computer to blow up

I am now using a Cowon portable player, so I finally had an excuse to convert the remaining 700 or so albums in my hard drive that weren't in flac yet. typical format issues, the Cowon won't play AIFF or Apple Lossless, but it will play flacs. fwiw I can definitely tell, when something is on shuffle, whether it is MP3 or lossless. my opinion at this point is basically "fuck iTunes, fuck Apple and fuck their proprietary bs".

I might give Fluke a look, but I have so much damn music there's no way I can put it all into iTunes anyway. I might as well leave it in well organized folders, I can throw them into VLC to play or onto the portable to take to work.

Josh L - Since you own a Mac, you're likely comfortable with being stuck with Apple apps (I don't mean that in a snarky way). Nothing wrong with Apple Lossless. An old friend visited last weekend who's a Mac person. He brought an old 80G hard drive and a wantlist, and I simply set my dbpoweramp batch converter to convert from flac to Apple Lossless straight to his drive. Overnight he had a drive stuffed with music without a kb to spare.

PMP players - I still use my 6 year-old 1GB Samsung, which works fine as I only use it for a 40-50 min commute to work, mostly newly downloaded MP3 albums that I screen before deciding to buy or not. I've been waiting for a non-iPod player that both plays flac files and has more than 64GB capacity, and am still waiting. A digital out would be nice too so I can use a portable DAC/amp with good headphones for trips when I want some good sound quality.

Apple Lossless - it's not technically lossless. While a CDs can go up to 22000 Hz, Apple lossless actually compresses it to a high quality VBR that cuts off at 20000.

Not that it's really important at all, most people can't hear past that anyway... But it's still not lossless.

any references for that claim?

When I download flac files I convert them to wavs using MacFlac prior to importing them into iTunes. I then convert them again to AAC within iTunes for listening – unless sound quality is such an issue that I really need the wavs, which is rare

Well technically no audio reproduction is lossless I guess, if that's what he means - but I imagine it's a bit of disinformation.

Isn't it though? Not sure about audio, but with images, there are mathematical formulas that make the files smaller without removing anything. There's no reason why lossless audio compression can't be completely lossless. Like with images, lossless compression relies on redundancy. The way I imagine it, and this may be wrong but I think it's the gist of it, if an image has a big area that's all white, instead of saying "white pixel here, white pixel here," thousands of times, it just says "all of those pixels over there are white". Lossless audio probably works similarly.

yeah I tried googling to see if apple lossless is really actually lossy. I can't imagine why they would compress the highs, the amount of data saved would be extremely negligible.

Might as well revive this one -- later today I'll be appearing on a friend and coworker's KUCI show, Our Digital Future, talking about music, music libraries etc. Much more on the casual side of things than deep and professional I suspect. You can tune in via http://www.kuci.org/ -- it'll start at 5 pm Pacific Daylight Time and will be archived later at http://ziba.kuci.org

I probably can't be bothered to tune in during dinnertime hour w/ family, but please do post a link to the archived show!

woah, this threads anniversary is this sunday

definitely want to listen to this

Hey Ned, does anybody at kuci pronounce it "coochie"? I know I would.

I'm sure it's been done...but not on the air. Necessarily.

Anyway, show starts in just under an hour, etc.

And about on. Post questions/thoughts as you like -- the talk may be a bit of a ramble!

just tuned in

That was fun -- didn't really touch on the issues of this thread per se but I liked being able to talk about New Order Recycle a bit!

got to listen to a chunk of this. good job Ned!

Too kind. The conversation as archived:

http://ziba.kuci.org/post/974943436/ned-raggett-on-our-digital-future-more-info

I finally got an Android phone and installed Subsonic media server & app. Now I can securely access my entire collection almost anywhere and it downloads the tracks locally for when I don't have coverage. Woohoo!

Thinking about Sonos vs Squeezebox. Sounds like Squeezebox has better sound quality and cheaper, but Sonos doesn't need a computer running all the time, and is easier to set up. What to do what to do.

I love my squeezebox.

I love mine too.

I'm not very familiar with Sonos, but judging from their web site, it's quite similar to Squeezebox. If you want to listen to your own digital music collection, you'll still need to have a computer running somewhere.

actually: "Computer-free access to your Music Library
- even if your computer is turned off, your Sonos will still be able to play your favorite music. Never worry about your music stopping because a computer shut off or went to sleep."

https://sonos.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/sonos.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=79

that is a big plus for me, taking notes here.

nice feature but you need an NAS for that.

nasty NAS

Jeez, "genre" tags are such a headache. Has anyone found a way to master these?

Broad genres, limit the amount of them.

hate the "genre" tag. put record labels there instead.

Really wish iTunes would allow multiple genres.

hate the "genre" tag. put record labels there instead.

this

wish there was something akin to delicious tags that did not involve filling up the comment area e.g. belle and sebastian - glasgow/scotland/uk/jeepster/matador/stuffed animals on cover/etc

i put record labels in the copyright field

Actually labels would be a v good idea! I'm in the process of going through dozens of gigs of music on four or six separate hard drives and consolidating them all onto one. Going to rename/tag-update all of them with either mp3tag or TagScanner (do either of these programs have options to delete multiple instances? I have so much overlap here), not sure what to do about genres. Only one I really use is "Ambient"

i can see labels being useful if it's 'Creation' or 'Sarah' or something. but less useful when it's 'EMI'.

you can search amazon by genre. their POP list is 3M tracks long... 50 per page...

ogg and flac will let you add any tags you like, including multiples, but i doubt anything will bother reading them other than metaflac or ogginfo command line tools.

foobar2000 allows for multiple genre tags. That and its ability to automatically update the file library closed the deal for me. Just separate each genre tag using semi-colons. The autofill function is also much loved for when the genre naming gets a bit convoluted ("dream rock / noise pop"; progressive rock grouped by country, etc.)

Really if you're on a PC, Mediamonkey can take care of all your sorting, tagging, moving, deleting needs.

I've been using Instinctiv as an alternative to iTunes (on a fairly limited basis). Doesn't seem to handle podcasts which is a bit of a pain but the simple user interface looks great. Initially uses a lot of cpu when it's grabbing artwork off've the net but seems pretty light otherwise (mac only).

http://www.instinctiv.com/

Does the free version of Mediamonkey auto-update the library? It didn't when I tried it about six months ago. Otherwise, I remember liking the UI well enough.

no that's 'file monitor' feature i think. for 20 bucks for life (so far) it's been very good to me

Is there anything that can plug into a USB drive and scan the file directory, show the results on a screen and then output at decent quality on Phono?

This way I can keep my files on their drives and not have to boot up a PC every time I want to play something on my stereo.

I'd buy an Ipod, but my collection is FLAC and I like having drives that I can swap across different systems.

just something hard wired to my stereo that has good D>A converters and isn't a dick about formats.

seems a load of high end CD players can take a digital signal and convert it, but still need to computer to browse the files.

There are programs that will downsample your library as needed, so you could retain the FLAC source and have an iPod filled with high-quality MP3 or AAC.

FLAC isnt a problem with current media players, 'WD TV live!' f.e.
but since you want to show the results on a screen, you will need either a turned on tv
or a media player that has his own display. output at decent quality on Phono should not
be the problem since some players have optical out.

crossposting this from the Apple thread

http://apple.com

I finally found something called a squeezebox touch that seems to do the job. but I wasnt too sure about how stable it is. so I bought a squeezebox radio and am testing that...

so far I can stream FLACS to the kitchen, which suits my washing up duteis down tot he ground.

now thinking about setting up a music server on a plug computer for the flat.