Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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

still use winamp tbh

xp If you're on Windows then foobar is is answer. It's takes a bit of fiddling to set it up right but its endlessly customizable and loads massive libraries without a problem.

I use VLC on an older Macbook and it can handle having almost 3 TB in the library. Mind you, it took me a while to load it in, it chokes if you try to dump it all at once.. But now I have an 85,000 song playlist saved.

Anyone use the iTunes Match Cloud storage thingy? I'm trying to prepare for life after my ipod classic finally self destructs. I currently have the 160 GB ipod, and it still works great (about 3 years old now), but I know I probably only have year or two left before the battery is completely dead.

I know when Match was released there were many problems with iTunes replacing peoples' songs with alternate versions of those songs. Not sure if that was ever fixed with an update. I have a little over 10k songs at the moment, so if it wasn't fixed it'll be a massive pain in the ass to manually fix any issues that stem from that glitch.

What is your goal? Backup? Buy a cheap USB drive and a Crashplan account. Do you want to stream your stuff from anywhere? You can put it on a cloud service or setup a server with Sonar or some other audio server software. I never really understood the point of Match, but maybe it's because I always resisted going all in on the whole Apple ecosystem.

I'm in the same position as you, I have a 160GB iPod with about 10,000 songs on it which I figure is going to give up eventually. What I did – which you should also have done – is snap up a new one before Apple discontinued them. I've backed up all my songs to an external drive and when my current iPod dies Imma copy everything over. You can still get new or nearly new iPod classics on ebay but they've quadrupled in price since they were discontinued.

Do you have a smart phone? Why not just get a 128/256GB microSD card (from about £20 on Amazon for example) rather than paying loads of money for a used iPod that's probably going to have a duff battery in a year or so?

There are a few companies out there who specialise in more intensive IPod repair work where you cold keep your pod going, they'll also put in bigger hard drives too.

How's the UI on the FiiO players? That's what I'll probably go with next, but I've heard for instance it doesn't support playlists, which makes me a little wary. I don't really want to use my cell phone as a media player because battery life on cell phones tends not to be so good.

rather than paying loads of money for a used iPod that's probably going to have a duff battery in a year or so?

like he says, cell phones die in hours just doing normal stuff, let alone playing music. and every one I've seen has an interface that's not set up for that volume of media... especially compared to the iPod classic which has THE GREATEST UI IN THE HISTORY OF ALL TECHNOLOGY except for the scooter.

I have an iPod classic (with a fucked battery and hard drive), and that makes no sense at all, in what way is the UI so good? I switched to Winamp on Android and never looked back tbh.

yeah I love my classic but I would say the UI is a pain in the ass, all that scrolling up and down is no fun and having to do it in a rotating motion w/your finger just makes matters worse

I tried iTunes Match for a year but I didn't renew, mainly because I was frustrated I had to painstakingly whittle my collection down to fit under their 20,000 track limit.

At first, I was nervous about iTunes Match replacing tracks with alternate versions (Do we really need remasters of albums released in the 1990s?), but it only replaces tracks if you specifically ask it to. The nice thing is if you have a lousy 128k rip of a track, you can replace it with a DRM-free 256k AAC that is yours to keep even if you let your iTunes Match subscription lapse. I upgraded a few lousy rips on my computer, and left the rest as-is. I'm assuming that if you download something from the cloud onto your phone that wasn't previously synced on it, it's going to give you whatever janky mastering is currently on iTunes, but as long as I have the original on my Mac's HD, I don't care.

256GB microSD card

This doesn't exist yet does it? I have a couple of 128s and they're brilliant...