Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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!

I essentially maintain my Amazon Cloud Player as an offsite backup for cheap that I can also play songs from.

With Google Play Music now offering to store and stream up to 50,000 songs for free I've been giving it serious consideration. Anyone using it? How's the streaming quality?

glumdaclitch making me question the future of ilx

Fucks sake ipod post malfunction sorry

Hi Ned!

But irrationally (?), I do not want to downgrade the quality of my audio...does Amazon allow lossless files? Does any other service?

i'd guess (based on the way apple upgrades your files) that these places would replace any common files with its own copy - no need for it to store a million identical copies of madonna's greatest hits, say, when it can store only one.

that said, this replacing is a non-trivial problem what with remixes, deluxe editions and per-region releases.

I've been using Google Play Music for about 3 years to stream my own music, but not using the paid service where I can stream anything a la Spotify. I've uploaded about 16k songs and the quality is great as long as the "mobile networks stream quality" is set to High in whichever app I'm using to play it. For playing via a browser, I think it defaults to high quality. I use android and have a chromecast and GPM integrates well through those, plus they recently released a dedicated iPad app (before only iPhone). I was concerned long term about the 20k limit, in so much as I'd have to start pruning a bit over time but with the new 50k limit I don't think I'd ever hit that. Uploading is easy as you can set Google's music manager application on your pc to point to a folder or to iTunes and it will automatically upload anything added, or you can manually upload. A nice part is that I can on the fly download tracks to my phone or iPad if I'm going to be on a plane or somewhere without connectivity, or download tracks to a PC and then share them with someone (via email, dropdox, etc.) All free!!

here's an answer to 'does [Google] allow lossless files?' question above (it's basically "No", they get resampled to 320 mp3s):

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1100462?hl=en

booo

xpost I assume Google's "track limit" must have a file size equivalent; I ask as someone who listens to tons of classical music where 5 tracks often equals 150 MB of MP3 320...

i wonder whether google storage is enough? 15GB for free. their prices for 10TB are a ripoff though - 10x1TB is 9c cheaper...

https://www.google.com/settings/storage

I need 2TB, I want to stream lossless. The iTunes experience gets worse and worse every year. Feeling like I have to keep on waiting.

after far too long I upgraded to a new computer and now iTunes actually works. On my 2008 MacBook it was technically functional but sometimes you'd have to wait 30 seconds or more between each action (switching tracks, adding to playlists, etc.). I don't know whether it's because of the increased processor speed or the solid state HD but now there is zero lag on a 600 GB library. I'm still using a traditional Lacie external drive to host all the music.

I basically spent 2000 dollars on a jukebox but what an amazing jukebox.

So here's a good read:

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/03/411666224/digital-underground

nice, thanks

it's so good

it's like the actually competent version of my hobbyhorses

well written and thorough; ann powers is a good writer.
This covers my thinking neatly:

"As a teacher of music history, it has been downright incredible to be able to assemble playlists on YouTube or Spotify, of pretty much anything that's been recorded," Marshall wrote in a recent email. "But I don't take this for granted or imagine that it will always continue like this. On one hand, there is definitely a pressure to monetize and hence to wall off some of this culture from people who can't pay for it or refuse to surrender their privacy in exchange. If Facebook owned YouTube, I might not be able to use it anymore. On the other hand, there's a 'genie out of the bottle' phenomenon here, and people are assembling their own media archives, off the cloud, which will serve us when we inevitably need to reconstitute them after the next round of corporate failures. Enthusiasts and artists have different motivations than corporations. That gives me hope."

after the next round of corporate failures

yeah I hate how people act like Spotify or iTunes are just going to be around forever

it's too much time + effort to be a FLAC collecting completionist tho. i used to feel like i needed a copy of everything i liked just in case spotify disappeared or whatever but at this point i find it much more enjoyable/healthier to get things as i need them (ie bc spotify doesn't have them) and if spotify ever disappears i'll reconstitute the new stuff i'm missing elsewhere. i'm not trashing all my music bc i now have spotify, but i can't buy/store everything.

people are assembling their own media archives, off the cloud, which will serve us when we inevitably need to reconstitute them after the next round of corporate failures.

translation plz

external hard drives filled w/ lossless music

the underground tends to flourish when there's not a corporate option; i believe public libraries both online and brick and mortar are doing the same
the presumption is that the infrastructure is in place so that when spotify is bought out and spiked, we have the ability to rebuild... stronger... faster...

when Spotify and iTunes cease to exist or transform into something new, we'll be really glad for all those people who continued accumulating music. This is important at a societal level for making sure that music doesn't simply disappear in the future.

Most people I know have stopped buying music completely because of Spotify, and many of them also sold off all their CDs. What happens if Spotify raises the price to $20/month? $50/month? They won't have access to anything. My CDs and hard drives are not exactly heirlooms but they are a great insurance policy.

I think it's more likely that Spotify gets bought out and killed (as forks suggests), rather than pricing themselves out of the market in an attempt to turn an actual profit