Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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...

I guess all my music could be replaced, but 25 years of personal data really couldn't. I back up once a week to an external drive that stays on my desktop, another drive that lives in my car, and a third that lives in my wife's car.

my feeling has been that if my apartment burns down I have bigger things to worry about than my hard disks, but maybe you have a point.

I have 3 internal hard disks -- one with my system, including music files; one with 220 GB of work archives; and one that backs up the other two using Time Machine. But Time Machine backups aren't bootable iirc, so I've been meaning to get a 1TB external, back everything up once a month using Carbon Copy Cloner and keep it at my parents' house. (/paranoid)

But I've been meaning to do that for over a year. (/not paranoid enough)

I've been thinking about trimming my digital collection, then ripping all of my CDs, selling them, and integrating everything together, then uploading it all to a cloud. This way I can just grab albums while at work with the added bonus of not have to worry about hard drive crashes or natural disasters wiping out my collection. Google's seems like the cheapest and safest (since it isn't likely Google is going out of business any time soon), but it's pretty no frills right now. Anybody else using any of these services?

haven't tried it myself yet but a co-worker spoke highly of crashplan.

because my itunes was -- once again -- creating problems for my work computer, i moved it to my external hard-drive, where i also keep my digital music library. i'm now re-syncing my ipod, and i see that i have only 13GB of space left on the hard-drive. i'll use that up soon, just from continuing to download songs from emusic.

is the solution as easy as, "get a second external hard-drive, install itunes on it, and get a new ipod to sync to it"?

Once you get to around only 10% of hard drive capacity, it's definitely advisable (both for safety and speed) to get something bigger and newer.

You'll only need a new ipod if you want the entire (and growing ever larger) library on the device. If you're ok just syncing to parts of your collection (playlists that you set up), then I don't know why you'd need to be getting a new ipod.

perfect; that's what i needed to know. i assume the thing to do -- once i get the bigger X Drive -- is insert the old one, copy the files, then remove it, insert the new X Drive and paste the files in it.

Don't transfer your iTunes library just by copying, you'll end up losing a lot of the links to the graphics. Follow Apple's guidelines for setting up a new library. Basically, it will migrate the library to the new drive and keep the links intact.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1449

This is helpful too:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive

thanks. what a pain this is.

I just renamed my new hard drive the same thing as my old hard drive (500 GB - even though it's 1 TB) and all the links still worked.

You may need to fiddle around in Disk Utility (on a Mac) to get it working - having two drives of the same name results in a behind-the-scenes automatic name change (in my case, to 500 GB 2) that needed to be undone after unplugging the original 500 GB disk. You can avoid this problem by propagating your files onto the new drive from the old drive's backup.

I was wondering when it would come to this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/business/media/reselling-of-music-files-is-contested.html?_r=1&hp

Really wish I'd read this thread before blowing my birthday money on a fancy 2TB LaCie. If it fails on me, I'll be inconsolable.

Anyway, I did have a question:

Every couple of years I upgrade to a bigger HD. I transfer all my folders from one to the other and then save the old HD as a kind of time capsule. My first drive had an "Artists A-Z" directory, which was fine. When I got my second drive I created a new folder "Artists A-Z 2" and anything that wasn't on the old drive went in there. Now I have a third drive and another "Artists A-Z" folder, but now certain artists have their catalogues spread through all three folders and that's a bit of a shame because it takes me a while if I want to drop everything by them into a playlist. Any ideas on how to mitigate this?

Let iTunes manage your music?

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.

― he carried yellow flowers (DJP), lunes 31 de octubre de 2011 15:56 (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

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.

fire/flood/theft whatever could happen anywhere even at the offsite spot - sure underground server bunker tactics are an option but plain old copies to other drives in-house still qualify as being backups, just less diversified than um. sending it out of state.

also, no compassion for itunes + it's apologists, love foobar2000 for being able to read from your music setup on the filesystem as you intend. i setup folders of:
genre-or-something/artist - album (year)/track - title.XXX
and it lets me browse the tree as i please. combined with not-an-iAnything mobile player that also lets me play my music directly from the filesystem without having to do any syncing, i'm set.