Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

I tag current listening with a genre like 'evaluate', and a smart playlist for the same makes sure I don't track of anything.

I have an "Albums Unplayed" playlist on Spotify, where I throw anything that sounds potentially good. If I like something, it gets moved across to a "Current Albums" playlist, which is permanently marked as Offline on my iPhone - thus it automatically downloads to my iPhone, without my having to do anything. Albums typically get taken off the "Current Albums" playlist after between 4 and 12 months, and there are usually between 100 and 130 on there. For individual tracks, I do something similar with the "Starred" playlist, which is also set to Offline. This usually has between 100 and 200 tracks, and nothing is kept for longer than a year. And if I've got something on MP3 which isn't on Spotify, then I drag it in to the same playlists from iTunes - which means I never, ever use the iTunes Music app.

I love a system.

man, i have to admit i don't understand what phones have to do w/ any of this. you can listen to music on a phone? they can function like an iPod or something? i am so dumb.

i use my phone "as a pod" yes. replaced my mp3 player.

xp Yes, I use my iPhone pretty much just like a lower-capacity iPod ... I also use it to listen to Internet sources like Spotify, YouTube, and radio station streams ... usually I do that via wifi to save on data charges.

At home I'm still running almost everything from my music server (a Mac) to antique Squeezeboxes hooked up to a home theater system in one room and to a stereo in another ... I use the iPeng app on my phone to control the Squeezeboxes and also to play music from my server on the phone, if I'm listening with headphones.

I haven't used my iPod in at least three years. Auto-downloading iTunes/Spotify integration on the phone killed it stone dead.

how much storage space do these phones allot for stuff like MP3s?

my phone is 64gig, so plenty.

Ha ha, 64 GB is "plenty"? I have a 160GB iPod that I have to struggle to keep 5GB of "free" space on just in case I come across something new that's gotta get in there.

I'm generally using Spotify at work and at home, so for the music in my car I just use an 8gb usb thumb drive since I have a port on my stereo and I just change out the albums on it every 2 or 3 weeks. Works pretty well and forces me to not keep listening to the same things for months at a time.

The newest iPod I have is a 5th gen Nano and I can't remember the last time I used it or put new music on it. Three years ago maybe?

Am considering one of those new Microsoft phones for €79 plus a 128 GB MicroSD card for 75 which in theory should be a great iPod Classic (and Touch) replacement, esp without SIM card and WiFi off to max out battery life, but I keep hearing that all the music player apps are shit so it's back to square one.

Ha ha, 64 GB is "plenty"? I have a 160GB iPod that I have to struggle to keep 5GB of "free" space on just in case I come across something new that's gotta get in there

i've got upwards of a tb of mp3s on the home computer but i've definitely jumped completely onto the streaming train at least partially because organization is so streamlined

i have nearly 1 TB of music files, but probably have about 5 GB on my laptop at a time.

my internet connection is too erratic for quality streaming, esp. if i'm doing something else. :(

The smaller sized phone works well as a listening sandbox for me precisely because I am limited by space and it's kind of a pain to transfer files to and from. What I put on my phone is a cross between hi bitrate stuff I just purchased that I am super excited about and older stuff that I am sort of coercing myself to listen to by putting it on there. I think I have about 15 albums on my phone right now, which in combination with Spotify and streaming radio is more than enough to get me by on my commutes and sometimes lunch hour for the next few months. I guess if my job involved listening to a lot of music I would do it differently (something involving a few mini SD Cards most likely).

I just don't really like the experience of listening to music on my iphone. I know I look like a dork walking around with a music device in one pocket and a reading device and an everything-else phone but fuck it.

if it's on your pocket how do they know that it's 3 devices and not one?

i do the same. a £45 24GB mp3 player. a £45 ereader. a £170 phone. wouldn't want a dead phone battery because i've been reading. wouldn't want a dead mp3 player battery because i've been using the phone as a phone...

(i do actually read on the phone when it's dark - ereader isn't backlit...)

I have an "Albums Unplayed" playlist on Spotify, where I throw anything that sounds potentially good. If I like something, it gets moved across to a "Current Albums" playlist, which is permanently marked as Offline on my iPhone - thus it automatically downloads to my iPhone, without my having to do anything. Albums typically get taken off the "Current Albums" playlist after between 4 and 12 months, and there are usually between 100 and 130 on there. For individual tracks, I do something similar with the "Starred" playlist, which is also set to Offline. This usually has between 100 and 200 tracks, and nothing is kept for longer than a year. And if I've got something on MP3 which isn't on Spotify, then I drag it in to the same playlists from iTunes - which means I never, ever use the iTunes Music app.

― mike t-diva,

spotify is the way forward i just wish the playlisting was slightly better, as in i can't throw an album in a playlist and find it again easily as it just lines it up with everything else. it should have demaracted albums within playlists. atm playlists are only good with individual tracks.

RT sadly otm

How do you tagging obsessives tag the year for reissues? Tagging the year it was originally released let's it fall properly in, say, best-of-decade smart playlists, but I can see an argument for tagging previously unreleased tracks with the year they were actually first released, too.