Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

yeah I use VLC to play my flac files, works like a charm.

The point isn't that fire, flood, and theft couldn't happen at the offsite location, it's that'd it be very unlikely to happen in both spots simultaneously.

Easiest way to do this is to just swap drives with a friend, thereby also getting access to all of each other's music.

But I already have all your music.

Alternative backup plan: send all your files to the Acute server.

pictured here:

http://jscustom.theoldcomputer.com/images/manufacturers_systems/DEC/PDP-10/99804DEC-PDP-10_1090.jpg

NOT AN
EXIT

WOPR got a new color scheme, I see.

I use only Western Digital HDs. Full-sized Caviar Black in USB 3.0 Docking Station. Had 2 Greens fail; upgraded one to a Black and the other to a Blue (to save some $$$, and because i use it as my second archive). The WD Warranty on the Black is two years longer than the Green and Blue.

Oh, and the SATA 6.0Gb/s version of the Black is nearly as fast as a WD Raptor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Issues

I've been to Acute headquarters; that's just the Italo-disco section.

I'm a fan of Fantom drives. I like their look, they're quiet, and good service. Of the five I've had, one failed, but they fixed it under warranty no problem. Prices are going up - a 2TB green drive I got last year for under $150 is now $200. However, Amazon has a 1.5TB for $99.

When I ripped my 7,000+ CDs a couple years ago, it was an immense relief to have them all backed up in another location. In my case, my workplace. Now I have access to my entire collection at work, and if there is a fire/burglary, 30 years of music collecting won't disappear in a poof. Certainly worth the money.

Someone mentioned affordable portable 1TB drives?

Check this out. Price went up from $1,300 to $1,540, ouch. Iomega 12TB Network Storage, Cloud Edition

now that i have more or less sorted out my ID3 tags (!) i'm once again considering an attempt to rationalize the actual filename and folder structure of my music. i don't particularly care what it is as long as it's consistent. i'm sick of tracks having all their metadata 100% correct and then you look at the filename and it's "08 hotreleases2009---01-DK7668"

any advice here? just flipping the "let itunes organize my music for me" switch would surely be madness...

Lex had a "maintaining a digital music collection" fail the other day. Reminded me why I buy everything on CD.

i assume you're backing those CDs up

right?

iirc you don't have children who scratch your CDs into unplayability but you do have cats?

The cats back up the CDs.

xp

I let iTunes do it. I usually have to edit some tags by hand when I import tracks, but filenames and folder names are based on the song and album titles, which is convenient if I'm poking around the directory structure.

I just have four big folders called A-D, E-K, L-R and S-Z and all the album subfolders go in those by artist name. I don't have any "orphaned" tracks which aren't in an album subfolder. I suppose I could rationalize it further by making artist-specific subfolders within the four main folders, but I don't have enough album subfolders to make that necessary really.

so you mean in each of those four big folders the subfolders are called things like "Joan Jett & the Blackhearts - Up Your Alley"?

also curious if anyone here has used TuneUp or MusicBrainz Picard

yes, except I don't have any Joan Jett & the Blackhearts files

xp

did you do that organization yourself or did you use some kind of batch renaming thing?

Be careful if you automate your file renaming based on ID3 tags... chasing down missing tracks resulting from duplicate song titles on the same album can be really annoying.

Anyway, I go with this:

ARTIST/ALBUM TITLE/ARTIST - TRACK NUMBER - SONG TITLE.mp3

This sidesteps the problem of duplicate filenames I mentioned by including the track number. Some people omit the artist from the filename, but I share a lot of individual files with people and hate not knowing what I have from glancing at the filename.

You'll have to make a call on compilations. If you're using file structure to manage your collection, I'd group them under a "Various Artists" folder by compilation title (and consider putting track order first in your filename, otherwise compilation folders will display out of order), but if you're using iTunes or whatever, it can group those based on metadata. I use iTunes, so compilation tracks are sorted into folders by artist for me.

And yeah, you're mad if you don't use an ID3 tag -> filename automatic renamer.

I created the four main folders myself and drag'n'dropped the album subfolders into them. I didn't rename the album subfolders myself, they came out that way in iTunes (I think)

xxp

i have separate folders for jazz, metal, classical, v/a, bootlegs, and everythingelse. (solitary songs are in another folder.)

in each of those main folders, album folders are named 'artist - year - title' (slightly different for classical and v/a). if an artist has like five albums then i'll make a subfolder called 'artist'. songs are usually 'artist - track - title'.

if the album is something i have on cd, i'll add a ° after the title (depending on the size of my backup drive, i may not have room to back everything up, so those might get filtered out).

i did the organization myself. it's pretty ocd.

Lex had a "maintaining a digital music collection" fail the other day. Reminded me why I buy everything on CD.

i've decided to let my old music collection go and rebuild it from scratch rather than pay silly money for data recovery (the attempt at cheap data recovery failed, it'd need a "clean room").

i actually still have a lot of it on CD! never got confident enough to sell off the CD albums i actually love.

and i figure the rest of it must be ~out there~ right? it feels a bit liberating, there was so much shit on that hard drive i surely never needed and would resent paying money to retrieve

a question though: is it possible to transfer music from an ipod to a hard drive?