Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

Yeah, I use the Date tag primarily for developing a list of top releases for a year. Reissues are indicated in the Album tag, for example:

Date = Original release date
Album = Album Name [2015 Expanded Remaster]

Admittedly this doesn't really work for box sets with tracks that span many years but I don't have that many to worry about. I also generally avoid "Best Of" albums.

god managing playlists just seems like so much work. i've tried here and there but i immediately give up and return to album-based listening. closest thing to using playlists is shuffling a given genre, but even that's a pain since itunes genre tags are garbage. somehow i managed to properly tag reggae appropriately so the only genre-based shuffling i do is reggae. maybe jazz too.

I downloaded the score for the new Cosmos series from eMusic yesterday and of course it has the genre tagged as reggae

I'm pedantic as hell about my own personal genre tagging which makes it easy for me to make nicely shuffeable smart playlists in itunes - like "genre is Hip-Hop and year is between 1980 and 1990" as criteria and it auto-fills them as things are added to the library.

I always use original release date for years because I've always liked sorting oldest first and don't care when a reissue came out.

I'd love to have a sandbox area where I can drag albums/singles etc...

― Spencer Chow, Friday, February 27, 2015

I keep the fast majority of my stax on a 1 TB hd (and another as bk-up) but keep a "sanbox" folder on my laptop for listening and digging from those stax. Also, i tend to copy these files into the sandbox instead of moving them so instead having to worry about getting them back to their proper longterm folder locations, they just be deleted when i'm done.

That's pretty snazzy xp. this is fairly crude, but with a lot of re-issues, I remove the '30th Anniversary Edition' from the album proper listing. I suppose you could tag separate years for the two of them.

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.

― Arctic Noon Auk

It's best not to save albums as playlists, but rather into the albums section. Realizing that I could create folders for my playlists was a huge eye-opener for me, too. Now I have all of my playlists nestled under a folder structure, which also kind of serves as a metadata replacement (honestly I organize my mp3s this way, too - never really got huge into tags as the project of fixing/standardizing them all was too daunting).

I wish the searchability was better: If you could just specify whether you wanted to search all of Spotify, your saved albums/songs, or do recursive searches through playlist folders, that'd be pretty cool. If they ever expand metadata it would be cool if you could do advanced searches and export the results as playlists.

i just want up-down arrows at the edge of the scroll bar

and separate albums folders, "my albums" is just too unwieldy. i bring that up like every week, though.

Spotify's finally added a filter to Albums that lets you see only full albums you have saved, not all the albums where you only have saved one song. Desktop-only for now, unfortunately.

Once that makes it to mobile that will be good. I've found the album saving functionality useless, I still make playlists.

I need to ask a dumb question. I'm going to need to get a new laptop fairly soon, so I've been checking out newer models and I noticed most don't come with a CD/DVD drive, which I knew was inevitable, but I find depressing nonetheless. So if I want to continue to buy albums as CDs, and burn them as lossless files, I would need to buy an external cd-writer, correct? Do I need to do anything different as far as burning goes than what was previously done on internal cd-writer drives?

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/ayn-rand-reviews-childrens-movies

Very glad academy award winner walton goggins will be getting a plum role this time around

thought Summer Wars looked great but was his weakest in terms of story. Girl Who Leapt Through Time & Wolf Children are really good though.
Yonebayashi directed the latest Ghibli film When Marnie Was There, who knows where he ends up if they really are closing the animation dept. wouldj be cool if all the young animators went off and formed their own studio, there's a long tradition of that in Japan after all.

Pinboard @Pinboard · Feb j11
Would have fixed the site sooner but was out herring shopping with my mom.



Do I need to do anything different as far as burning goes than what was previously done on internal cd-writer drives?

― Rod Steel (musicfanatic), Saturday, March 7, 2015 8:23 PM

The only thing you'd need to do different, as far as i can reckon, is the need to install CD authoring software (plenty of free options including Mediamonkey). If it were me, though, i'd still try to find an internal burner so you don't have to be tethered to the external unit. With the continued price drops in SD Cards, i only find myself burning media when it's specifically intended for people over a certain age.

I really want all my files in the cloud but am too damn scared to do it.

Anyone with 25k or more songs in the cloud? AWS etc?

Hi there!