Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

About the HDs that fail, do you keep them plugged in all the time, or do you only plug them in when you do a backup? I've had a Seagate for about a year and half now, and I haven't had any problems yet. I also don't keep it plugged in -- only when I do a backup.

I have one drive that's dedicated to TimeMachine (on OS X here) and I use that daily in the evening when I'm done for the night. The other drives I use for archiving (big drives for storing things - mostly mp3s, movies, Logic projects, etc.) I use maybe once a week.

my Seagate is on all the time. it puts itself to sleep if it's not being used though. we'll see which dies first, the Seagate or its WD backup.

learned some other interesting stuff from my local repair shop about how the Mac Stores use the cheapest possible drive in their LaCie models.

Really regretting all the stuff I didn't put in Apple Lossless before storing it. I don't really understand people who claim that it's hard to hear the difference -- the sound is so much richer.

I'm listening to a CD right now

i started this thread almost two years ago, and spotify basically made it so that i no longer give a shit about any of this kind of stuff

And you still wont pay the $10 a month?

Everything I ever got from emusic sounds shitty on good speakers, pandora even at higher quality sounds inconsistent on good speakers, doubt spotify will be different. I may just get all my CDs out of storage as soon as I have my place set up.

what is spotify?

And you still wont pay the $10 a month?

― fappin' duke (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, August 5, 2011 11:46 PM

nah i think i'm eventually going to go w/ the $5 or $10 a month thing but right now this is fine

it's totally worth $10 a month

i can't tell much of a difference between 128 AAC streaming over my apple router to 5 piece speakers, vs. CD

all the same to me

naturally i still own like 3,000 something cds

Naturally. You need the liner notes and the wall-collage CD spine effect!

well right now, the 25-boxes-in-a-storage-closet effect... someday i'll get the collage going again ;_;

i can't tell much of a difference between 128 AAC streaming over my apple router to 5 piece speakers, vs. CD

all the same to me

― i genuinely thought when i first joined that he was the admin (ilxor), Sunday, August 7, 2011 9:57 PM

imo this says more about the poor quality of surround sound than the quality of your source signal

i listen to most of my music via spotify, youtube, or my car's sound system

i have it set up to mostly come out of L/R front two speakers, not really a big surround imitation thing

xp

I'm not super familiar with Spotify.

I'm not super familiar with the Awl.

― buzza, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 4:43 AM

<3 buzza

― markers, Wednesday, September 8, 2010 7:05 AM

really enjoying spotify

― buzza, Sunday, July 17, 2011

128 kbps AAC is actually not bad. Way ahead of 128 kbps MP3

I highly doubt anyone could tell the difference between the CD and a good 224 kbps -aps rip

320 mp3s running through apple tv to my stereo sound mostly fine. the different is pretty slight, to me. still torn on whether it's worth selling off most of my cds though; they've been in storage for the past year while I was in a temporary living situation and I didn't miss 99% of them. but now I have a house, and maybe some room to keep them. selling them isn't going to net me very much money.

Do what I promised to do, and finally did -- donate to a place that can use them. In this case, my old campus radio station.

i finally chucked itunes for media monkey after i had to nuke my computer and it rules. so much faster. granted, my computer is lol old but i am not made of money. the hundreds of library cds we ripped to .wav are now converted to flac. i'm scared of compression formats especially when storage is relatively cheap these days--and hey, everything plays wav, it's high quality and it isn't going away any time soon--but one reason to never rip to wav is that wav does not store metadata. if your music library database goes, your artist/album info goes with it.

As sayeth the Lord, tear down the temple and in three days I will rebuild it.

As I'm going through a ripping pretty much my entire collection of CDs, I'm realizing I'm going to run out of space on my laptop sooner rather than later. I use iTunes for everything right now (yes, I realize its not the best option but I've been using it long enough now that I don't really wanna switch) and I'm tempted to go the route of an external hard-drive to manage my collection. Any drawbacks or things I should watch out for if I choose this route? I guess the biggest thing to get around will be not having music on my laptop when I travel, unless I bring the external drive everywhere.

I use a Lacie 1TB external for a ~600GB iTunes collection and it works fine, aside from needing some time to spin up on initial play. Just buy two of them so you can make backups.

Yeah, my collection is about 400GB right now, I'd be running it off my 1TB external and using a second 500GB as a backup (which will probably be upgraded in the next few months when I buy a 1.5TB).

As has been noted elsewhere on here -- and confirmed by a friend in the industry -- hard drives prices are soon to spike due to the Thai flooding, so plan accordingly.

Also there is some discussion upthread about which brand of external hard drive to go for. Pace skip's recommendation, I have had two Lacies fail on me and would never buy another one. Since then I've been using a Western Digital My Passport with no problems. As for having your music with you when you travel, these babies are very slimline and won't add much weight to the amount you are carrying.

Yeah its not really the size or weight that bothers me, more the idea of having something else to plug in.

If you are going to be traveling a lot and want to take your HD around with you, you will probably want to get a solid state drive. Regular HDs are not the most robust devices in the world.

I've had lacies fail and moved to Western Digital. LaCies are generally just hitachi or samsung in a fancy case. All drives I think are either those two or WD or Seagate. Seems like the hardcore users debate WD and Seagate and they both have similar failure rates. You'll get a bad one now and again and they'll die now and again no matter what brand. But I've had good luck with WD internal drives.

I actually have five lacies at the moment and they have all worked without problems. failure rate of all hard drives is 100%, it's just a question of when. Find something with the right specs for what you need (fan/no fan, firewire no firewire, rpm, solid state, etc.) at the right price and get a backup - IMO that's all you can do.

Regarding "when", I had two LaCie drives die really fast. Thats when I went WD.

just had my main WD crap out but we've been using it heavily for music and photos for a few years now. working off my backup for now.

finally ripped my CD collection, so now I have 2 TB of music all in one spot (and offsite backup, and a primary backup in the basement). Loving it, now I can go back to my lifelong project of ripping the LPs, only 2000 to go.

agree with skip, assume all drives are waiting for the worst time to die, and have a backup.

one thing that the data are clear on is that bad drives tend to cluster in the same manufacturing batches. so if you're buying multiple drives, don't buy identical drives from the same manufacturer at the same time.

shit I have all my stuff on one 500gb external that also doubles as a time machine. the drives maybe three years old? how scared should I be?

your backup is on the same drive as your data? that is not a backup.

I'd be pretty scared -- xp

gbx u can buy a 500 GB external Seagate new for like $50 right now, I'd do it.

Is your drive going to crap out tomorrow? Probably not. But it would be worth $50 to me to know that all my data isn't going to disappear at some unknown time in the future.

yeah i know it's a nonsensical schema :-/

i'm probably getting a new computer this week, so i'm thinking everything is going to get reconfigured then

Two points: 1) a backup isn't a backup until it's offsite. Just having two hard drives doesn't really cut it. I've got a RAID drive for redundancy in my apartment, but the real backup is with family in another state; 2) don't backup iTunes just by dragging the library to another drive--the library will lose track of the linked graphics files if you don't follow Apple's procedures (all online, of course, by now) for migrating the library to a new drive. Found out the hard way the first time and had to re-embed tons of graphics....

1) a backup isn't a backup until it's offsite. Just having two hard drives doesn't really cut it.

This... is a strange, super hardline way of looking at things. We're not talking about sensitive business information here that needs to be protected against catastrophic building failures, we're talking about guarding against hard drive failures.

It may be enough for you, just don't make the mistake of thinking it's backup. Fire, flood, and theft are all incredibly unlikely, but given that a pocket-sized terabyte drive is $100, there's really no reason not to get everything offsite once a year. Get two such drives and rotate them. Can't imagine the work it would take to rebuild everything, if it were even possible. Thousands of hours of work. And, presumably, we're not just talking about hard drives full of music files--most people will have everything else on there, too.

This is why I have a separate hard drive backing up what's actually on my computer as opposed to the music files...