Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

I always unclick "part of a compilation album" and always blank out the "album artist" field

As for how to maintain a digital collection I'm not really sure yet,

Main storage drive + 2 backups... one kept in the same place, and another offsite, like at a friend's or your office. I update the local backup every time I add a couple dozen new albums, and the offsite backup every couple of months. Eventually cloud backups will be feasible even for large collections, but if you have 2-3TB of FLACs, it's not really an option at the moment.

Getting to the point now where the idea of jettisoning the physical CDs is very tempting. They take up a ton of space and my apartment is very small. Vinyl too.

wait so are you doing your backup policy now, because if so good for you (seriously)

xpost The fact that I can barely sell them for peanuts lends weight to their perceived worthlessness. It just clicked that eventually not only will they be antiquated and pointless - they're just a different form of digital, one that is heavy and takes up a lot of space - but in the very near future I literally won't have any place for them to go. If I can't sell them, where do they go? The trash?

deep thoughts about cds

Also, it occurred to me how many CDs I was holding onto just to one day read liner notes I knew I would never read.

On the Mac, the Organize Library feature will not put all Various Artist groups in their artist folder if you go in and set the metadata to 'Compilation'.

at this point the CDs I can't part with are the ones with great liner notes. all those Beach Boys twofers. Digital Underground comics. etc.

yeah good liner notes are the bomb

Josh I hope that doesn't mean you're gonna be homeless! In Chicago, Reckless still offers pretty good money for used CDs if they're not shitty.

I use 1 & 2 TB Fantom Green Drives to keep a backup of my collection at work. At home I have a QNAP NAS with 5 x 1.5TB Seagate drives. And I am finishing up uploading all 4+TB to the cloud as backup via BitCasa.

I usually just keep it local with the store down the street, who are good peeps. How much does Reckless generally pay for CDs?

(Haven't sold there in years because it's no longer convenient for me to haul in 200 CDs.)

Few years ago I paid someone to haul all my records to reckless and sell them for me.

Wow, Bitcasa has pretty reasonable pricing... I probably average more than $100/year in backup drives over time, and it would be much more convenient. Maybe the cloud is feasible now!

I think I average about $3 to 3.50 a CD these days. A few years ago I sold off 80% of my collection and I did it in a few trips over a couple months. I sold jazz and soul to Dusty Groove because I felt they gave a competitive price and they had stuff I wanted to get in trade. I found grocery bags hold a lot of CDs quite well, but double bag 'em!

This is going back a ways upthread, but why the fear of external drives vs. internal? All drives can fail. If you've got the funds, go for a better external like a Glyph or a Caldigit. (I'm sure there are others.) I use a Caldigit VR2 RAID, with the two drives set to mirror each other for constant backup. A 3TB drive, but the way it's set up it acts as two 1.5TB drives. Cool thing is that you can swap out the drives and get larger ones, all the way up to 8 TB in two 4TB modules.

wait so are you doing your backup policy now, because if so good for you (seriously)

hahaha, I am! there's no way I'm re-ripping 2500 CDs. I've got utilities that make it easier... they compare the main drive to the backup and only update what changes on the backups. and the backup drives are 2.5" laptop-size in external enclosures... small, don't require power supplies, and USB3 makes the transfers pretty speedy. So it isn't that hard. I do my photos and other stuff as well.

I spent too many years in tech support listening to adults burst into tears when I told them their data was gone for good to not have a backup plan in place for my own.

...why the fear of external drives vs. internal? ― Michael Train

Bodacious got it.

I do have a really good internal HDD docking station, but I kind of want my cake and eat it, too, as I want portability and reliability--two terms which apparently do not go together. E.g., that Caldigit VR2 RAID looks huge, Michael.

I just buy internal HDDs and put them in external enclosures which cost $15-25 each... never had any problems and it's not expensive? We must be talking about disparate amounts of data here... I'm under 3TB.

I've got utilities that make it easier... they compare the main drive to the backup and only update what changes on the backups.

Ah good. This is all that I want to do. I don't want to synch drives or add redundancies. I just want to change the files on my backup as they're modified on the principal. I've been searching for awhile for Windows freeware that can do this but haven't been successful. I tried Cobian but can seem to configure it this way. Any suggestions?

if the external hd was an ipod itunes could do the job. that incremental update thing is bascally a syncing process in one direction. but i'd be interested in reliable incremental backup software too.

i'd be interested in reliable incremental backup software too. ― (alex in mainhattan)

I use Windows freeware (Karen's Replicator) to do my backups. It's pretty basic, but does what I want.

re: external vs internal drives - I bought a cheap DLink 2-bay NAS for £50 and whacked a couple of 2TB drives in with one backing up the other via RAID. Secure, cheap, easy to set up, and the backups happen without me having to think about it.

re: iTunes compilations - make sure the album artist is identical for everything in a compilation. iTunes should then group the compilation correctly.

Album Artist can be "Various" or whatever obv.

Relevant:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2013/04/18/177756358/we-get-mail-do-cd-hoarders-need-an-intervention

Also relevant (try this with a CD collection!)
Taking iTunes Smart Playlists To The Next Level of Music Nerdery

I miss smart playlists so much. Spotify needs them.

i bought double vinyl record store day release. went to put in download code only to find there's a cd version available that nobody's mentioned before. it's £6 cheaper and lossless and would take up less space. 8(

Yeah, there's something wrong with offering up a lossy download code to someone who's purchased a format presumably out of preference for higher fidelity. Seems it'd be far more appreciated if flacs in 24bit/96kHz were made available.

Really wish vinyl editions of albums would be a 7" of their two best songs on pretty colored wax and a CD or FLAC download of the entire album. Who has room for all these 12" records?

(i only bought the vinyl because i didn't know the cd existed until redeeming the download. i don't generally buy vinyl, just seems too mechanical, scraping a needle down a groove, it's 2013! still, the cover's nice)

is this, btw
http://boomkat.com/vinyl/706887-isan-beautronics-limited-vinyl-edition

I've been trying to get my collection under control lately, and ready to digitize all of my CDs before selling them. I'm curious about what utilities you are all using. That Karen's Backup program looks interesting. Is it Windows 7 compatible? I've been using some freeware thing called SyncBackFree that does scheduled backups to my external, but the UI is complicated and I keep missing the backups because I forget and put my computer to sleep before bed. I think I will like this better once I know both main and backup versions of my mp3 collection are perfectly in order.

Right now one of the most annoying things about managing my collection is duplicates. I tried a backup to external a few months ago and now I have these two immense out-of-sync folders that are almost the same. I've found tons of sub-folders containing albums that have their own dedicated folders, as well as differing ID3 info, where I'd fixed one version and not the other. I've been messing around with a tool called WinMerge to weed out duplicates. This is a program that I've noticed a dev team at work using from time to time and is worth checking out if you have the same issue as me. The interface does take a little getting used to.

I also like Treesize (I just use free at home, but we use the pro version at work) for looking at directory structure and folder sizes.

FreeFileSync does about the same thing as SyncBack, but the UI is better imo.

Thanks I'll check that out.

i bought double vinyl record store day release. went to put in download code only to find there's a cd version available that nobody's mentioned before. it's £6 cheaper and lossless and would take up less space. 8(

Really wish vinyl editions of albums would be a 7" of their two best songs on pretty colored wax and a CD or FLAC download of the entire album. Who has room for all these 12" records?

does a CD really take up less space than a record? I don't know, cds seem to take up a lot of space to me. most record jacket spines are only 1/8th of an inch thick while CD jewel cases are about 3/8ths. That means the total surface area of the spine of a CD is 1.875" compared to 1.5" for a record. The depth doesn't really matter to me because it's still taking up wall space either way. The record shelf just eats into your floor space an extra 7" but that seems negligible to me. Wall space is more critical imo.

then if you factor in shelving it gets even worse for CDs. Say your shelves are at least 1/2" thick. You can fit 300 records in the same horizontal space that you can fit 100 CDs so the records plus shelving would be 12.5" while the three rows of CDs plus shelving would take up 16.5"!

If you have a 5x5 foot space on a wall and you have shelving that's 1/2" thick you can either fit 1760 CDs (11 rows of 160 CDs) or 2400 records (5 rows of 480 records).

and the wall of records looks 1000x better

So what are the best options for playing digital music through a proper stereo? I don't really want a "dock" system because I want to also be able to play off of my laptop.

Sonos or AirPlay. I use both. Sonos is incredible and I'd recommend it to anyone.

I have no problems with my airport express - 1/8" plug to RCA plugs into the back of my receiver. I can send iTunes, my iphone, or the audio from my macbook to it so spotify or the occasional YouTube video goes through my main speakers. You can find them for like $75 on ebay, no idea how any of this works with windows or android though.

audiophile types claim the audio output from typical mac products is not that good. I don't know if the airport or airplay are better.

Audiophile types can eat shit. I want convenience and flexibility. I don't have 20K to spend on speakers.

i do

(not)

Although I'm obviously a touch jealous of the disposable income that allows a person to become an audiophile.

I have the basic old Squeezebox and it's great. The newer ones may be more feature overkill w/ touchscreens and whatnot, but when I got mine, it was way cheaper than Sonos. It was actually pre-Logitech and had a vibrant open source community. In any case I have two. One sits on my stereo, has a little 2 line readout and a remote control and I can stream anything on my computer or internet radio. The other one is the radio one with the little speaker and that's in my kitchen. I actually have them sync'd so they're playing the same thing, which sounds pretty fancy.

Logitech killed the Squeezebox line in 2012, which is a shame because they were fantastic.

yeah i have always just used the cable at radio shack with 1/8 inch on one side (for computer) and rca on the other (for stereo). Works fine.

oh n'/m you said you need wireless. i don't know anything about that. audiophile-wise, i would imagine most wireless stuff is not up to snuff.