Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

I would want an offsite backup of at the very least the most precious of my albums, which would cost $5/mo at the cheapest.

A cheap external hard drive kept in a drawer in an office desk (or at a friend/relative's home) makes for effective no-cost offsite storage even for a few terabytes of data. Not always practical for daily backups, but it can be supplemented with local or cloud storage of anything added or changed since you brought the drive home. Having two such drives that you swap back and forth ascertains you'll always have one of them offsite.

I don't keep much real-life stuff, but I'm a digital hoarder. Pruning out stuff i don't need anymore takes more time than it's worth, and given a 2GB external HDD costs about $99 deleting unwanted music won't save any money.

Re: digital clutter, I agree with Beard Papa - less is often more. Over the years I've found an easy compromise is to separate the critical stuff from the interesting-but-not-required stuff. I keep the latter in a separate archive folder and only occasionally reference it. It's hard enough scrolling through the stuff I love, moving the rest somewhere else helps a lot. As some ILXor once excellently said, "I am not a curator of music I MIGHT want to listen to."

I feel like we're soon approaching an event horizon where in a few years 4TB laptop drives are the standard and then The Horde just becomes part of everything else you carry around. The One True Hard Drive that is geographically redundant in pure transcendent harmony.

Horde or Hoard? (Both work.)

BTW updating my post a few months back there on Amazon Cloud Player -- continuing to put stuff on there without a hitch, similarly with playback. I continue to be interested in how this is all eventually going to play out.

Horde or Hoard? (Both work.)

Most definitely Horde. Do you how much $$$ I had to deficit spend to fund the Sacking of Mutant Sounds and Bodega Pop?!

My QNAP NAS is over 5 yrs old and still doing okay, but my online backup got screwed. I paid $60 for unlimited space on Bitcasa last year, and they went and upped the price to $99 a MONTH for unlimited! WTF! $49 for 5TB. It looks like Crashplan is just $5/mo for unlimited. Is that the best option these days?

I guess I'm outing myself as an asshole, but my desktop is hooked up to 10.5 TB of FLAC, CBZ, and ISO, and I spend much of my spare time randomly accessing these files to save myself a few minutes of walking across the room or re-ordering or googling a thing.

Fastnbulbous, Crashplan and Backblaze are probably the most popular ones these days.

Ned - a question about Amazon Cloud Player. It says they will "upgrade" your music to 256kbps audio when you upload it. But what if you have files that are encoded at 320kbps, for example? If your hard drive crashes and you want to download the stored music from Amazon, does it come back to you in the original format or as their 256kbps files?

As I understand it, the 256 upgrade is only if you have matching files, IE, your original 320 files themselves are never uploaded, just 256s matched in their place, meaning that yes, a loss on your end means your online copies are less fancy. The flipside of course being if you have 128 files, they're never uploaded either but etc. and you end up with better copies if the need arises, though possibly from differently mastered sources depending on what you had versus what Amazon does. If the files *don't* match at all, your 320s are uploaded straight up and are sitting there. (As most of what I'm interested in falls under that category, that's why I'm still happily going this route.)

I feel like i have far too many digital files to upload to any cloud service; so i store everything on hard drives.

CD-R burning is most quickly done with freeburner, but you can have a bit of fun using DJ Twist & Burn (better for pitch-adjusted cross-fades) or MixMeister (better for beat-adjusted cross-fades). Burning CD-Rs with MP3s, however, i think the only thing i've used is Roxio Creator, but works great to get a solid 6-7 hours of music on each disc.

I'm super into micro SD cards now (not as primary backup of my library, obv, but as a way of carrying around different themed subsections of my library in my wallet). I have a Sansa Disk Zip player now (with the firmware replaced with RockBox) and if I feel like switching from my 32 GB of fin de siecle classical music to my 16 GB of kosmische records I just swap out the micro SD card in the sansa's slot.

i started this thread, and i'm not into music as a lot of the people on this board, so i've been able to just do with spotify, mostly. but if i were still in this game today, i wonder what i'd do. as someone who's interested in digital media, i'll keep popping my head in, even though i'm not sure how much i have to contribute in the way of lived experience. i don't have any .mp3s anymore, as far as i know, except a couple from itunes, and i have zero physical music

where do those few MP3s live? in your phone?

well, the only ones i have that i'm aware of are from itunes, so i can download them through the itunes app on my mac or the itunes store app on my ipad. there's no "maintaining" to do there

they're permanently in apple's cloud (unless someone pulls them), and i can always just redownload them

that's kinda going away as a thing though. i think i have less than twenty songs associated with my account

Over the years I've found an easy compromise is to separate the critical stuff from the interesting-but-not-required stuff. I keep the latter in a separate archive folder and only occasionally reference it. It's hard enough scrolling through the stuff I love, moving the rest somewhere else helps a lot.

I started doing something like this a while back, too. I felt buried under the weight of too much new music. I have a feeling I am going to shovel a lot - maybe the majority - of my collection into a big separate archive and offsite the rest of it. Maybe the archive is what I'll put on some random hard drives. I've also been thinking if I can get my collection down to a pretty sleek elite, I may go for lossless versions of that music. But then, the data may once again become super precious to me because of all the work hours it represents.

I really wish I started burning my albums as FLAC instead of 256kbps back in 2005. I still have all of my CDs but I doubt I'll ever get around to re-burning them. That would take 3 or 4 months of steady work at this point.

but do you hear a difference between 256 kbps and flac? i don't but i am pretty sure i hear a difference between digital and analog.

The advantage of FLAC (or ALAC or any lossless format) is that they serve as reference files that allow you to convert from lossless to any (presumably lossy) format you need at a given time. If your reference files are 256kbps mp3s, and you convert those to some other format, then you will start to hear a very obvious decrease in sound quality. A lot of music management programs these days can take a reference library and convert to a given format on the fly as they load files into a portable music player. That's very useful, as I want to put high-quality mp3s (or even lossless formats) on, say, the hard drive that lives in my car but my low-capacity iPod Shuffle that I use when running can use low-quality mp3s, allowing me to cram more music onto it.

How much of y'all's digital collection do you guess is composed of things that if you were to lose them, that's probably the last human culture will see of that recording, percentage-wise?

Pretty small despite owning lots of super obscure stuff. It seems I could find a replacement on slsk for almost anything I own.

pretty small, mostly as a function of having so much shit

Any reason not to download this:

http://www.jriver.com/mj/

or to purchase the not-free version?

That's what I use and have for years, highly recommended.

There's so much stuff on spotify that I don't really miss what I can't get there because there's always something else.

but do you hear a difference between 256 kbps and flac? i don't but i am pretty sure i hear a difference between digital and analog.

― it's the distortion, stupid! (alex in mainhattan), Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:50 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I can sometimes. I have a high end set up in my living room where anyone with ears could tell a difference between the two. I have a middling system in my bedroom where I can not tell the difference. I think you can tell with good headphones as well, but not the cheap in-ear ones that come with mp3 devices.

I still obsessively organize my folders like it's 2002. With itunes, this seems to be going out of style but I don't give a fuck. It bothers me knowing it's somewhere on my computer unorganized.

Is this normal?

I'm more concerned with having a decent file system that can handle all that and a metafile indexer/cataloger that won't collapse when I hit it with that size of data.

― Elvis Telecom, Sunday, 23 August 2009 22:56 (4 years ago)

prescient - will j-river work on an older Mac with 3 TB of files?

xp musicfanatic, that is my experience as well w/r/t the difference between MP3 and FLAC/WAV

I still obsessively organize my folders like it's 2002. With itunes, this seems to be going out of style but I don't give a fuck. It bothers me knowing it's somewhere on my computer unorganized.

Is this normal?

I seriously doubt it's normal, but I do the same - and my tags as well, proper covers and uniform standards.

sup

Grrr... I'm using the otherwise excellent N7 Player on Android but lately it's been really playing up on how it organises the library. Compilation tracks are all being put in their own individual folders, and no matter how hard I try, it refuses to remember any tag edits I enter. IT used to be fairly good at this but since I upgraded to a 64gb card it's been kind of crap.

Strongly recommend Poweramp. Works flawlessly with my 128gb card. The only thing I wish it had was DLNA connectivity.

Fir a long time, I used the USB formatting option in Windows Media Player (12, I think) to burn onto DVD-Rs. They hold a lot if you do it that way. Recently, my laptop tray started having physical problems (like a nightmare whine that went on forever, til I turned everything off, then the door would get stuck). I may try it a little bit more at lower burning speeds (I always selected Fastest) and not not not using auto-eject.
But mainly, I've started using the storage of Microsoft Office Online (which also offers free Word, Excel, etc). Their OneDrive has 15 GB free storage, 100 GB for $1.99 per month, 200 for etc---all in all, they're mirroring Google Drive (which I'll prob use for music now too). So far so good with free OneDrive, though uploading seems much faster if you do it via Chrome (ironically, ho-ho), don't run other apps while uploading, and do it around 11 PM or so, when not so much uploading traffic maybe.

OneDrive and GDrive (or whatever it's called now) both warn against storing bootlegs. What's a good jump drive, if there is one? (Currently too cheap to get external hard drive, though I know I should.)

still rocking a 3 TB drive with offsite backup

newer version of VLC can handle the entire 50,000 song library that is the main collection, and I can make playlists & save them although it is cumbersome. right now I'm giving basic tags to the thousands of bootleg flac folders that are in another part of the hard drive.

looks like flac will remain the format of choice for a while anyway.

Sorry for being a n00b but I just noticed that the songs I've bought in iTunes and which come up as 256kbps in the library suddenly turn to 128kbps when listed on my iphone and it's driving me nuts. Is there any way to fix this?

On the main iTunes page for your iPod, where there are check boxes for manage library manually, enable disk use, etc, there is a check box for 'convert larger files to 128'. Uncheck that shit!

It's not checked!!!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2014/10/02/353314790/the-good-listener-how-do-i-avoid-the-itunes-pit-of-despair

omg

My friend posted this on FB today and I told him it was a stupid article. There's no reason to delete music from your iTunes ever, other than RAM/processing issues. Use smart playlists properly to create interesting slices of your library and you will discover things that were 'lost' in the morass. It's really dumb to delete music you think you don't want to listen to. There are often albums / songs I put in my library and don't like initially but hit me just right other times. Use metadata & smart playlists, get your finger off the delete key.

'Dumb' was probably a bit strong but I actually did delete music from my iTunes a few years ago because my HD was filling up and I regret it still. Even though I copied the music over to a different external drive before I deleted, that backup drive died before I could re-add the music to a larger music library HD. Ultimately, If I had just bought a larger music drive, I would have been happier than deleting the files from my library.

first song i downloaded on napster. it took a few days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfLVVHxk4IM

good choice

A couple years back I chucked my MP3 collection onto a shared drive and started over ripping my CDs. My new digital collection is all uncompressed files. I don't like Itunes or Win Media Player at all. Most of those types of apps seem to be either neutered in their setup or memory hogs. I've been using Foobar 2000 for a few years as my player and use the dB Poweramp ripper and CD writer. I've got my current collection just organized in files and in an Excel spreadsheet. I have it backed up on a second PC and an external hard drive.

Completely agree with you, brotherlovesdub, on keeping your music and not deleting. Especially with the cheapness of modern storage.

I pick up most of my music for a reason, save for the random dips in the 3 for £1 bins, so even if I don't get into it I immediately I take solace in the fact it's there for a rainy day for a listen or when another person talks about it and I can go back and see if maybe I've overlooked it.

That said even on my year-old fairly great laptop there's no way I can load everything up anymore for sheer processing matters (the collection is well over a terabyte now). Which is sad for browsing's sake but I can see little workaround. Now it's just navigate the individual folders by letter and keep my go-to-favourites in Itunes.

Anyone know of any alternative applications to Itunes that can handle massive libraries?

I also worry loading up massive libraries puts a big strain on my hard-drives of (which I try to minimise use of due to failures in the past).

iTunes is so f*cking slow that it's honestly easier for me 90% of the time to just find it on Spotify/YouTube and play it that way