Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

Lol, good advice. I would but I've spent bloody years cultivating multiple playlists. I'm married to Itunes, unfortunately.

It might be too late for this, but one option is not to use automatic library management. i.e. it doesn't put music in the iTunes folder, it just links to where the music is on your hard drive.

So our new house is not, for some time (years probably) going to have storage for more than a few hudnred CDs. Which means 1500+ in storage boxes in the loft or garage. Which probably means going digital, streaming, multi-room.

So recommend me hardware. Let's say we're starting from scratch with a hi-fi and a shitload of CDs. It'd be nice to be able to have digital radio too, and maybe stream from another source (such as vinyl) as well as files. What hardware do we need? What's simple and sounds good?

there's a separate thread for that but a fun solution (depending on your budget among other things) could be hooking up a Bluesound Vault to ethernet and the best amp/speakers you can afford and then placing stand alone Bluesound speakers in the other rooms where you want sound

http://www.bluesound.com/en-eu/products/vault-2/?cl

There's a thread here and a good overview of current options at The Wirecutter. As mentioned in the other thread I'm a big fan of Sonos. Not cheap but so easy to set up and use and seamlessly play music from multiple services/sources. You'd need a Sonos Connect to get your existing hi-fi/speakers/turntable on the network, and then Sonos speakers for whichever other rooms you want music in.

Bluesound we'd seen in our local Sevenoaks, and it looks good, but expensive. Popped in a local independent hi-fi shop and they've recommended Yamaha Musiccast + a NAS drive + a Yamaha Musiccast-enabled speakers, which works out several hundred quid cheaper than a Bluesound Vault + speaker.

Lol, good advice. I would but I've spent bloody years cultivating multiple playlists. I'm married to Itunes, unfortunately.

― Rod Steel (musicfanatic)

i'm in the same boat, and my solution is to never allow it to update. i've found that nothing good ever comes from new versions of itunes.

Can you still make purchases in the itunes store if you don't update, rush? Every year I have about two dozen albums where I only buy a few singles on each. I find it easier to buy off itunes than amazon, but I can change, I guess.

Can you still make purchases in the itunes store if you don't update, rush? Every year I have about two dozen albums where I only buy a few singles on each. I find it easier to buy off itunes than amazon, but I can change, I guess.

― Rod Steel (musicfanatic)

no clue, have never been inclined to make purchases from the itunes store or to link my account to itunes. i signed up for an itunes account when those doctor who episodes were released on itunes because i wanted to support them but then immediately deleted my account.

So we now have a Musiccast pre-amp hooked up to the livingroom hifi, a NAS drive with maybe 300 hundred albums ripped to FLAC, and a Musiccast speaker in the kitchen. It's good! But I could really do with some software to be able to edit the metadata of the FLACs once they're on the NAS drive. We use DBpoweramp to rip, and that's pretty good, but we've got some obscure stuff that I'd like to add covers to.

I use Sonos but that sort of setup, with an NAS and really good separates system is pretty much ideal (plus smaller speakers for rooms where sound quality doesn't matter as much, like the kitchen).

Yeah, really impressed with the sound in the proper hi-fi in the livingroom. We'll get a speaker for the bedroom too at some point. The kitchen speaker has replaced a B&W Zeppelin with an iPod Classic on it, so the sound's not as good, but not having to manually update an iPod via an ancient cable is a boon. The Musiccast also does Spotify etc and internet radio which is good; digital radio in rooms other than the livingroom, and not out of the TV is lovely.

i use Mp3tag (puddletag on Linux) for tagging things. It's quite a manual process, but useful for bulk tagging and lets you define macros.

And often you can just add a jpg to the directory and it'll use that.

I use Sonos but that sort of setup, with an NAS and really good separates system is pretty much ideal (plus smaller speakers for rooms where sound quality doesn't matter as much, like the kitchen).

That's possible with Sonos, isn't it?

yup - sonos connect.

nas drive > sonos connect > hi-fi amp.

its bloody wonderful.

What???? This is what potato salad looks like:

http://www.itsyummi.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/mustard-potato-salad-feat.jpg

And the Sonos Connect integrates Spotify etc as well as local files?

Why is the potato salad here?

Wrong thread. But I do eat potato salad while tagging MP3s.

i use Mp3tag (puddletag on Linux) for tagging things. It's quite a manual process, but useful for bulk tagging and lets you define macros.

― koogs, Friday, February 17, 2017 5:01 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I love MP3tag and use it a lot for an album at a time, but I have a question about it -- is there a way to have it bulk process a bunch of folders, simply tagging 'Album Name' for each one to match its folder title?

Basically I've gotten really sloppy in the last couple of years since I've been using folder-based media players and I have a ton of music that's untagged where I just want the tag to match the folder name. Can MP3tag do this?

Will MP3tag edit FLACs though?

Yes

Goodo.

Tag&Rename is my editor of choice - http://www.softpointer.com/index.htm - I find it more flexible than MP3Tag.

does that work on newer Macbooks? I used to use Tag, but it's not compatible with the newer OS.

can tag & rename do the thing I was asking about?

And the Sonos Connect integrates Spotify etc as well as local files?

Yep.

i've given up control of my tagging and left it to http://beets.io/

i'd recommend it if you're comfortable with the commandline. with a bit of configuration, it now fills in the tags based upon musicbrainz, downloads the album art, moves them into my music folder structure, and alerts plex to rescan my music dir.. all with a single command: "beet im ./folder_to_import/"

also i've been bitten by the FLAC bug and have been ripping all my cds all over again.

i perversely kind of want to go through that process even though 320 bit is good enough for my aging ears

I'm honestly kind of glad I can't tell the difference between v0/320/FLAC

so glad I went with FLAC from the get-go

yeah i can't really tell the difference either, it's more of an archival ocd thing for me

as someone who likes to carry around a ton of music as a digital library (not streaming), I can't fathom needing 300mb or whatever per 40 minute album

can tag & rename do the thing I was asking about?

I don't think so, though it can fetch tags from the filename, I don't see where it can grab the folder name.

I stick with 320 as well, suits me fine.

that beets thing sounds like my type of shiz

We only really went with flax because we could, and why not? The NAS drive we bought can take our whole collection twice over, and we'd definitely want to upgrade from what we had ripped anyway, which wasn't the whole collection.

In the living room the plan is that this will become the main way we listen to anything we haven't bought in any given calendar year, so we want tit to be as good as possible.

And much as ripping everything might potentially be an arsehole, it's actually quite refreshing to relearn what we have, and listen to it in chunks as more and more becomes available.

You'll find crate-digging in your own library becomes very rewarding and revealing as well. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad.

I've already ripped all 2600+ CDs I've got to FLAC, and pretty much all my records too, that was a chore and a half, but I kinda like ripping vinyl, gives me something to focus on and take my mind off things.

Unfortunately the DVD drive on my laptop has packed up now and barely recognises CDs, I usually have to insert and eject them 5-10 times before it'll recognise them, so I'm looking to buy an external USB DVDRW drive, but I want one that will rip HTOA (i.e. hidden tracks before track 1) and it seems like it's pretty impossible to actually find a drive that does this. There is a database of drives that can do HTOA here but it doesn't specify whether the drive is external or internal and it also doesn't say anywhere how old this database is so for all I know these could be years out of date now.

You'll find crate-digging in your own library becomes very rewarding and revealing as well. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad.

this this this ..

xp man, that sounds like a hassle. I don;t think I actually have any discs with that kind of "pre-disc" audio, but if you can rip vinyl couldn't you just play the CD track into the same input and record it in analog? crude workaround, but I've done it for some things like Soundcloud tracks that don't have download.

I stick with 320 as well, suits me fine.

― Ned Raggett

ditto.

I had a drive in my ancient PC that would rip HTOA so everything I own at the moment is done, but yeah before I had that one I did the CD player->audio input way. And the ancient PC won't start up any more. I do have one of those hard drive -> USB connectors I wonder if that works on internal CD drives, it might well do.

I often don't even KNOW about track zero's until years later when someone mentions it in a thread here. Then I check on slsk and there it is.

By and large I am unable to tell the diff between 320 and lossless, but I listen to a lot of "edge case" music in which the frequency mix, proportion of noise to signal, transients etc. are quite unlike the music used to derive and test the codecs. In that case I prefer that what I hear out of the speakers reflects the decisions made by the artist and mastering engineer, not a general-purpose algorithm. Purely psychological, probably, but lossless has no penalty these days (3000+ album collection on a 1TB external drive, no sweat) and why remove future possibilities?

Tagging: I use MP3tag for FLACs and MP3 Tag Tools for MP3s -- and play everything via Mediamonkey.

Bitrate: I use 800+ kbps FLACs on my audiophile gear (low-bit FLACs, while still lossless, are a waste of time), and 320kbps (or whatever) MP3s on remote/vehicle/garage set-ups. I just bought a 5TB WD Caviar Black for $275 so that should be able to handle my centralized needs for the duration of its 5 year warranty.

Best value in headphones come NOT from a big box store.
A quality DAC in a cellphone can really make a big difference on MP3s.
Current bluetooth tech is "lossy" as well, making FLACs a superfluous source.

some quality autovisualization from Musicbee

https://scontent-lht6-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t31.0-8/16904604_10154363357942671_6814444450014916029_o.jpg?oh=12223a9463034031515264904079b15c&oe=5924CFCC

does nobody like foobar these days or what?