Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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...

Also nervous about my iPod classic giving up one me since that's why I use in the car where I need the physical pointers to skip songs while driving.

256GB microSD card

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

Hmm maybe not, the ones listed as such on Amazon look fake/dodgy tbh

not all players will be compatible with cards over 32GB though - different technology for higher capacities - SDXC rather than SDHC.

With my sansa clips, for the higher capacity cards I have to put them in my mac slot and reformat them to fat32. Then they work great. I have not been able to do this fat32 reformat successfully on a pc, only in Mac disk utility. Dunno why.

if your iPod Classic conks out you can always get an iPod Touch. It's over-engineered to be an mp3 player but it will do the job.

and hopefully they will increase the largest HD size from 64 to 128 in their next model refresh.

There are tons of fake microSD cards. I've seen some pretty good pages on how to suss out if you have a mislabelled one (basically, copy data on there to fill it up, then copy the data back off and test to see that it's still valid). This kind of thing has gone on for decades... I still remember getting a hole puncher to get 720 KB floppy disks to hold 1.44 mb, and then using a special formatting tool to up the available space to 1.68 mb... surprisingly those disks had a fairly high failure rate...

The cloud doesn't work for me, because I listen to too much stuff that's unreleased and possibly unreleasable. Camille's cover of "Wanna Be Starting Something", Daniel Humair's soundtrack to the sixties version of Haxan... I mean, this stuff is all readily available on Youtube, but it doesn't get interpreted as "music" for commercial consumption.

iPod touches won't work because Apple doesn't put SD card slots in their devices! (Right?)

that too but I figured I was wrong

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

finger? hold it between your fingers and palm and do literally 100% of the interacting with your thumb, which is already positioned in front of the wheel. it's insane how simple that thing is.

also, once it's in your pocket, all you have to do to pause and talk to someone, or skip to the next track, is tap your leg. try that on an ipod touch and stay fashionable.

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.

I just bought the FiiO X1 and it does support playlists. I haven't tried it yet, but the manual says you can create playlists on the computer an import them on the X1. (And obviously you can create playlists on the player itself, plus there's also a "favourite tracks" option, which I find really useful.) Apparently this feature wasn't in the original firmware, but the later version (1.1) included it, that's why some older reviews say it doesn't support playlists.

However, with the current firmware, the player can only index a maximum of 5400 tracks... For any tracks beyond that, you have to play the albums via the folder view, they won't show in the alvums view, I have a 64GB MicroSD card and almost all of my tracks are FLACs or WAVs, the total track number on the card is around 2000, so it's not a problem for me, but I would imagine it'd be problem if you had mostly MP3s and/or a 128GB card. Fiio has promised to fix this in a later firmware update, though.

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.

― you've got no fans you've got no ground (anagram), Tuesday, January 27, 2015 3:12 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Smart move. I had no idea until a few weeks ago that Apple discontinued the classic or I would have bought an extra one.

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.

― Your Favorite Album in the Cutout Bin, Tuesday, January 27, 2015 11:10 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for the info. Sounds better than what I was expecting. I'm at around 10k songs, and I believe at add around 300-400 or so a year, so hitting the 20k ceiling is not an immediate concern of mine.

Thanks all for your comments. I may just get the 64gb ipod touch down the road if my classic dies. I just can't believe, with storage space being as cheap as it is, that Apple can't just up the Touch to 160 gb. Maybe they will now.

I worry they will not do that. Instead they could just stick with current HD sizes and make the devices slimmer. Hope you're right though.

Just for perspective, even the largest iPad is only 128 GB... and the first page of google results about it is filled with bad press like "Why you might not need Apple's 128GB iPad - CNN.com" and "Don't be confused by the 128GB iPad. It's not for you. | ZDNet" and "Why You Shouldn't Buy the 128GB iPad Air 2 - GottaBeMobile".

Based on the discussion I've read about the Fiio X1 (see my post on its current indexing limit of 5400 tracks), the problem might not be the storage space itself, but the amount of processing power needed to deal with the metadata of the 10 000+ tracks you might have, if the player has more than 100GB of memory. It's solvable, but it seems that at least at the moment you'll have to get one of the higher-end players to do that.

Sorry, I remembered it wrong, the limit is 5800 songs, not 5400. But obviously it's still a problem if you use MP3s and not FLACs/WAVs, or if you listen to genres with shorter tunes. (I mainly listen to jazz and electronic music and classical, which tend to have longer tracks and fewer tracks per album, so I wouldn't reach the limit even with a 128GB card.)

There are tons of fake microSD cards. I've seen some pretty good pages on how to suss out if you have a mislabelled one (basically, copy data on there to fill it up, then copy the data back off and test to see that it's still valid).

― rushomancy, Tuesday, January 27, 2015 5:35 PM

Windows users. Flash Drive Tester from vconsole is what i've been using for years; i test all new media before writing anything to them; being thumb drives SD or micrSD cards. Also Windows formatting tool is crap -- i use HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool to format in fat32 or NTFS.

Does anyone know if there's a limit to the number of external hard drives you can back up with CrashPlan? Or does it not matter as long as you're backing all of them up through the same computer? They offer 'limitless' backup space but I want to know if it's truly limitless (or if the limit is at least enough to suit my needs) before I pull the trigger.

someone let me know when there's anything comprable to the Classic out there; I don't like much that is Apple but those iPods were phenominal

So glad I bought a backup when I heard they were done. My current one is starting to sputter a bit more than I'd like.

You'd think that someone would surely be rushing in to fill the void, particularly given the prices the Classic is fetching now.

Toshiba apparently ended production of these special tiny harddrives altogether so everyone's shitouttaluck.

These days (and going forward I imagine), dedicated music players are a very niche item. My Classic has been gathering dust since I set up a streaming server for my library and microSD cards went to 64gb for local storage. One device, many uses. If you want to argue that a phone can't possibly sound as good as a dedicated player with a good DAC/AMP built-in, you're right. But convenience rules the day.

umm .. forgive the non-apple noob here,
but there are a ton of external hard drives on the market for apple users.
can you not just connect your old classic ipod up to a mac machine with an external drive connected and copy over from the ipod to the external ?
sorry if this sounds simplistic, but hey, thats what i am used to.

You can do that with third party software, yes. Not by apples terms though.

ahh .. hence why i remain someone who lives outside the walled garden.

Best thing to do with a classic is replace the firmware with rockbox, then you can just drag and drop as without iTunes.

every time i read re these hacks that are required to do the basics my head spins ..
you should not need to have special hacked extras to do such basic stuff on something you have paid a sodding fortune for.
but hey, i suspect that's a whole different discussion.

The main reason I still use a Classic (and in the way that Apple prescribes) is that I've meticulously maintained playlists and ratings in iTunes for a decade now and can easily sync my iPod with those iTunes playlists, and the thought of my fragile little system falling apart at this point makes me break out in hives. And just to underscore the extent to which I cling tenaciously to my system, I'm also running a version of iTunes that's, like, five years old at this point.

^^^^^^ bingo

one day someone will make an amazing digital music collection solution, but until then i will continue to use spotify's app to organize all my trax

ok, i will concede to a degree as i care not re playlists/ratings.
i play albums.
very rarely i may put a few genre specific albums together in a random playlist, but that's nothing i can't live without should i lose them.

Yeah, me too Mark. But Apple's system is brilliant in the way it gets hooks into users. He'll, I'm tied to J River Media Center because it's got almost 8 years of my play stats and I like knowing that stuff.

ok .. if you say so.

(still prefer living outside the walled garden .. and nothing will ever convince me to jump over)

As someone who's lived under the yoke of Apple for the past ten years, allow me to congratulate you on your good sense.

No, I'm not an Apple user anymore but I've seen the upside for less techy people - it just works and serves their needs. My example was a different media server that I'm tied to after years of use as well.

I've actually saved the more elaborate/lengthy playlists I've devised as excel sheets so that if I ever do get a hankering I can at least reconstruct them from that. But I'm not super playlisty. I tend to instead make 'concept folders' into which I drag and drop a bunch of relevant album folders regardless of artist

don't get me wrong ..
i jumped into the garden for a certain high profile freebie a few months ago as a trial experiment, and the whole experience was weird.
under the covers the whole file structure of one single album download was a f*cking mess.
so i blogged about it.
after which a well versed nerd work colleague explained the reasoning.
he said that people who use the branded niceties cared not re what happens under the covers, and so, it's supposedly not an issue, as the users do not care what happens under the covers so long as things work, i.e. let the OS application do all the work.
in other words, the corp have solved all the normal demands of the music listener, and so, there is no need for certain functionality/flexibility.
well, that is, until you decide to step outside the walled garden (or standard demands), at which point life becomes a lot more tricky.
note : nerd bloke is full on apple fanboy, but loves techno toys that are non-apple as well.

apologies for too much under the cover work in previous post.

Been using Jaikoz and Songkong for a while (I just wanted to fix some Album Years and artwork filesà but it just seems to screw up my library - wrong album covers, sometimes it "corrects" existing tags with wrong artists, titles, etc.
Now a big part of my Tunes library is messed up and don't know how to fix it :/

can you mess with the xml file?

I just moved my iTunes library to a new hard drive over the last few days and had to deal with a few messed up things but nothing deep

I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but I just realized something I dislike about digital music. When I used to have records and CDs, I would take from my collection and leave some out that I was listening to. Now when I listen to something new, it feels like I'm forced to file the other record away. I'd love to have a sandbox area where I can drag albums/singles etc. I know I can make a temporary playlist or sort by last 10 records or something but it's a little different.

Exactly!! The closest I've come to replicating this is a "smart" playlist in iTunes that shows me everything I've been listening to in the last month.

i keep like four "now playing" playlists in spotify of varying importance

i keep 99% of my digital music on an external HD, and just move a few albums (maybe one or two dozen) onto my laptop at a time, so i end up listening pretty intently to those for a few days or a week before i drag out the HD and shuffle them around. i found it kind of overwhelming (not to mention a drain on disc space) to have 1,000s of songs available at the brush of my fingertips.

Yeah, for me that sandbox area is basically my iPhone. Even though I have quite a bit of empty space on it, I prefer to only have a handful of albums on there at any given time. Laziness keeps me from rotating it quickly, so when I put stuff on there I tend to listen to it. My phone is basically for podcasts, a few Spotify offline playlists, and a place to keep albums I want to listen closely to.

I have a similar approach. For stuff I've bought, my phone is my sandbox and I rotate things off each month after one year. For things I'm checking out, I make a Spotify playlist for each album. It works well and helps me balance listening to new stuff, old stuff and r&d.