Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

how do all you lot deal with classical music?
i guess people who put the composer into the artist field instead of the performer are not really into classical music. i have started that way but i have changed as a. it is wrong and most important b. if you get the metadata from a music database website the composer goes into the composer field and the performer into the artist field. too much of a hassle changing that. the same goes for the order first name, surname which i used in the beginning in the artist field. everywhere it is first name and then surname.

^ I do that (composer in artist field), but will also put the conductor in the title somewhere (e.g., Pierre Boulez for some of Ligeti's works).

In many instances, the composer/performer are the same (Xenakis, Pierre Henry, Francois Bayle, Mimaroglu, etc.)

ID3 spec says the artist field should contain "Lead artist/Lead performer/Soloist/Performing group"

http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames

though you're still left with the question of what to do with something like this..... http://www.amazon.com/Johannes-Brahms-Sextet-Piano-Trio/dp/B0000029LE

i spent about 4 months off and on going through the genres on my itunes library, what a waste of time. I did feel some sad sense of accomplishment when I was done though.

i would actually be psyched to move to a music player on my computer that allowed me to use more fields than itunes does

My #1 request is to have some sort of aliasing for tracks that both appear on an album and a compilation.

Couple years ago, I did email sj✧✧✧@ap✧✧✧.c✧✧ with an outline for something I called "iTunes Pro" that would address features that would help librarians, radio stations, and just anyone with more than 10,000 tracks in their iTunes library. Never got an answer, but I still hope for this someday. I would even pay for it!

Never got an answer, but I still hope for this someday

Sorry to break it to you but I don't think Steve Jobs is going write you back.

Seriously though, I agree with this 10000% It's my number one issue. I have lots of compilations that are essential to me, and those same songs show up on other albums. I don't want to remove one or the other.

The only reason this does make sense is in the strange scenarios where you're dealing with different mixes or mastering jobs where maybe it does make sense to have two different copies of the same song. But mostly no, I'd rather just have the best copy and have it once but have it show up both ways.

Thirded. Anyone got invites for iTunes pro?

i usually put in the record label instead

for record labels with a specific style this is what i do.

Sorry to break it to you but I don't think Steve Jobs is going write you back.

I did say it was several years ago (and when Jobs would occasionally email back people)

I remember that. You also said "but I still hope for this someday" which could as easily apply to the waiting for a response, if you have my sense of humor.

i guess people who put the composer into the artist field instead of the performer are not really into classical music.

Not true, for the record. It probably gets truer if modified to "don't really follow the classical music world" or similar, granted.

i have started that way but i have changed as a. it is wrong and most important b. if you get the metadata from a music database website the composer goes into the composer field and the performer into the artist field

It varies, though -- as I mentioned, musicbrainz uses composer as artist.

It's really just a pragmatic thing for me, as most players and apps don't support the Composer tag well, if at all -- and going by the composer *feels* like the right route for me to look up a work.

the other thing about classical music is that it more or less covers common ground, there is hardly any new classical music composed these days. therefore the importance of a performer of a classical piece is much more pivotal. the classical world is all about different interpretations of a set canon. the innovation is minimal, it consists of a new way to approach an old work. in pop/rock music innovation is key (or maybe was key until a couple of years ago). these days we live in a world where almost everything has been tried already. that's another reason why everybody turns to rearranging the old stuff.

Yeah that is kind of what I was talking about with "into classical music" vs following its scene. Again, pragmatically the composer-as-artist thing works for me: I have quite a lot of classical works, and do care about getting a good recording of a given work, but rarely do I obtain different recordings of the same work. If I purchased every Beethoven symphony cycle that arrived or something, I agree that it might be better to index by performer.

no matter how many settings i change i can't get winamp to play properly gaplessly from my new external drive. itunes, however, is fine. i don't want to break ten years of stubborn tradition!!

So is maintaining a digital library going the way of the 8 track? I've been thinking about the idea of less-is-more and paring down my unwieldy digital library that I carry around (as opposed to stream, where I can access everything so long as I have cell coverage). Like listening to a best-of or anthology serves my time and the artist better than going through albums. (That is, if album listening still happens too.) But paring things down, especially for artists who have either a spotty track record or who have really large catalogues, can get to the heart of the matter. But then there's the idea that deep tracks can become favorites over time even if (or because) they're not the singles.

What say you lot?

Applying the "less-is-more" approach to a digital music collection seems analogous to the regular culls that I used to make to the vinyl collection. While trading away records will free up both cash and physical space, there's also a psychological benefit in not having the clutter. Interestingly, cleansing the hard drive of the recordings that are merely nice to have (as opposed to those that I'll feel inclined to listen to) has the same effect despite there being no change in the physical footprint. Apparently accumulation of both the physical and the virtual brings its own burden.

I disagree re: the cleansing aspects of culling a digital collection. As long as something fits on my hard drive and is not totally execrable I want to keep it.

But it's increasingly difficult to sift through growing data banks and consider whether each track has retained its value, and not become execrable to you since you first stored it.

At least, that's my current time sink.

Get rid of it. seriously.

The time spent with, and emotional attachment to that which remains will be far more rewarding.

I have to regularly remind myself I am a music fan, not the worlds designated archivist for music that i might be interested in..

so maybe admitting that I used to have it, never listened to it, so junked it, isn't the crime I might think it is..

Hamildan OTM

the problem i have is consistency. file naming and organization conventions i don't care that much about, and i've got them pretty well sorted anyway. what i do want is for everything be tagged and, ideally, leveled consistently. but when you've got more than 20,000 files, it's a little late to go back and square the corners.

anyway, i am thinking it's getting to be time to clean house a little. i understand what gerald means about deep tracks slowly becoming favorites, but i've got entire albums that i haven't enjoyed (in some cases haven't even listened to) in years. what's the point of keeping them around? they don't wind up on my ipod or in any of the playlists i regularly listen to, so it's not like i'm gonna change my mind about them anytime soon. and new stuff comes in all the time. why in god's name am i keeping all those horrible fucking residents albums?

Storage is cheap enough that there doesn't seem to be much of a point in deleting stuff. This isn't like physical media which takes up space. Actually going through my hard drive finding stuff to delete is more trouble than it's worth.

This isn't like physical media which takes up space. Actually going through my hard drive finding stuff to delete is more trouble than it's worth.

Exactly... it's just showing up in your media folder, not taking up room in your house.

there's an applescript which will delete whatever the currently playing track is and my plan is to set my entire library on random for like a month and just zap everything i don't likr

"likr" = a stronger version of "like" obv

I have to regularly remind myself I am a music fan, not the worlds designated archivist for music that i might be interested in..

Massive cosign.

Word. I wonder if it's an age thing - I went through years of angst after seeing things in a shop and not picking it up, only to have it takes years to find it again. That is simply not a factor anymore.

But my original question, which I suppose is broader than just maintaining a digital collection, is whether it's ultimately preferable for most artists to go with a smaller compilation rather than a large catalogue of albums. I suppose that depends on the relationship one has with each artist, but from a broad too-much-music-too-little-time perspective, I think it is a more practical approach.

I have to regularly remind myself I am a music fan, not the worlds designated archivist for music that i might be interested in..

OTMFM. This should be a motivational poster.

Perhaps related:

http://jonathanbogart.tumblr.com/post/29027261044/this-is-a-link-to-hundred-song-album-on-spotify

Interesting...

http://www.grammy365.com/news/recording-academy-launches-give-fans-credit

interesting and hilariously misguided. they should petition record companies, not digital music services, if that's what they really want. tell the labels to figure out a way to actually collect, catalog and deliver all that information, and i guarantee you the big digital services would be glad to sit down with them and figure out a way to disseminate it to the public. but first things first. first, you will have to explain to warner bros that neil young's first two albums did not come out in 2009, as their metadata currently claims, and that bruce springsteen's first two didn't come out in 1984. not you, ned. you, the recording academy. once they get that part right, maybe than can see about figuring out who did the backing vocals on each track of those albums along with every other album in their catalog.

recording academy prez/ceo neil portnow quoted in the press release:

"We can watch movies online with the credits included, and the same should be true for digitally released recordings."

maybe someone needs to explain to mr. portnow that movie credits are actually PART OF THE MOVIES.

or maybe just tell every recording artist to make the last verse of every song a recitation of all the names involved in writing/tracking/producing/mastering that song. problem solved.

I've been putting off having to dismantle hard drive cases and stick external hardrives into my main computer tower while I try to salvage data .
Do need to get more space to put things as in a 2TB external so I can extract hopefully surviving data. Kept getting hard drives failing a few months ago. I think it had to do with a kettle on the other side of the room sitting in liquid which triggered the fusebox to switch off an scuppered hard drives in the process.

I had been trying to put all of each artist together in one place on a harddrive over several hard-drives. hadn't backed everything up further.
Subsequently have lost my collections of several of my favourite artists, live stuff at least.

maybe just tell every recording artist to make the last verse of every song a recitation of all the names involved in writing/tracking/producing/mastering that song. problem solved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpM0shqoqZA

(one on the australian aphex singles collection too, 51:13, track 12, Respect List)

Bruce Willis is going to fight for the right to let your kids inherit your iTunes library.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/03/bruce-willis-apple-itunes-library

(xp I like the one on "Prazision" by Labradford, which is the thanks list read through a vocoder. Well, I liked it the first time. By the third or fourth listen it's less amusing.)

I still like that, it just feels so understated and sweet.

"we shld maybe stop making music in the context that 75% of iTunes never been dwnldd once"

- matthew herbert

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/this-is-christian-dubstep/id554202109

My Squeezebox is still running, but what to do when it finally is kaput?

There's a crazy number of streaming options now, from TV's with DLNA access to Sonos (who's much more reasonably priced now) to AV receivers that offer streaming options.

Sonos rules.

I hope Logitech goes out of business quickly so somebody competent can buy the rights to the Squeezebox product line and codebase.

I've been eyeing up this as my squeezebox radio replacement

http://www.robertsradio.co.uk/Products/Internet_radios/STREAM83i/index.htm

specifically as a kitchen radio, where I want podcasts and internet radio in a small box that lives on the microwave.

I never use the music streaming of the squeezebox radio, but i do use the spotify app.

I'm gonna miss that.

Had one of those Stream 83i's for a couple of years. Love it. Sounds great. Only complaint is it doesn't cope with displaying times when streaming FLAC's from our PC, but that could be a software issue (currently using Serviio). Recently got hold of some free software that allowed me to stream Spotify to it, need to check if that's been broken by recent Spotify changes I just read about here.

so. I had a hard drive with my MP3 library on it die. I bought a new drive, and successfully copied all of the files from my iPod onto it. However, a huge chunk of the files apparently have no artist/songtitle/albumtitle info associated with them if I view the files in Windows Explorer (some did, and I spent a good chunk of yesterday organizing them into folders etc.) Sure, if I open any of these files up in iTunes they come up with titles etc. there, but for purposes of archiving and sharing files with others, it would be ideal if I could actually see this info in fucking Windows Explorer. I was super-diligent about keeping all this info straight before I put anything on my iPod, so I know this info is in there somewhere... but if I have to open every file individually, figure out what it is, and re-enter that info I am going to go insane.

any suggestions?

basically all these files have four letter names (XXXR.mp3, etc.) and the "Artist", "Title", and "Album Title" are blank in Windows Explorer.