Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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external or internal and it also doesn't say anywhere how old this database is so for all I know these could be years out of date now.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?

still prefer Foobar, just trying something different

every few years i make a new effort to customize foobar how i'd like it and i'm never successful

I use nothing but foobar. I've given up on customizing its appearance because it's hidden 99% of the time anyway.

foobar here as well, I'm boring and a few tweaks to one of the default layouts is all the customising I need, nothing fancy. I'm also lazy and backup the config files so I don't have to do it all over again when reinstalling.

I've got fbar customiZed pretty well... Don't like having the plain ugly windows-style menu bars and such, though

All the skins I've seen on the net are either maximalist and horrible looking or 'clever' and horrible looking

so i have too much music on my hard drive and i need that space for other stuff (like installing Total War: Warhammer). why am i so loathe to back up all my music and delete a bunch of it? it's not like i use 99% of it and if i need to find something i can always check my backup. :/

I've taken to using portable external HDs (one offsite), and SyncToy.

isn't it annoying tho not having everything readily available on hand? like if you want to listen to something and it's not on spotify and you're not sure if you have it already... or maybe that's the trick i should make an index i can easily search?

It's on hand, just on the USB-attached 2 TB HD. I keep an identical drive at rental storage, and update/exchange the two when I need something from there.

yeah I use external drives as well - def. back it up, music is sacred

it's already backed up i'm more iffy on not keeping it on my laptop for always available convenience. i guess i could go through it and prune my local library down to the most necessary 10gigs or so but it's so disorganized (everything in album folders but no organization beyond that) that it would take a while to do

The file management ship has sailed. It's done in-app. Don't worry about your folder structures.

Another option: get a bigger HD?

For those outside the iTunes-verse, file hierarchies are very, very handy. It took months to get everything in order, but now its 4 clicks to get to a genre, subgenre, artist, or album and play everything within that level alphabetically, randomly, chronologically, etc. Plus when I want to load a whole subgenre/artist discography/focus year of music on the car USB drive, its click and paste.

how do you deal w/ artists who release in different genres? do you split their albums up or do u just pick the predominant genre and fit all the disco in that?

Predominant genre, usually. There aren't many who span genres I've defined like this, mostly artists that produce both song-based and instrumental albums.

As far as "always available convenience" get yourself a free Google Play account -- allows you to upload 50,000 songs. Even if that won't cover your entire library it'll probably cover the stuff you don't think you'll be able to find on Spotify.

I am in awe Sanpaku. I tried for a long time to use Finder as my music navigation app but eventually I gave up. I now use smart playlists and searches for everything.

What about tagging years for compilations? Do you use the release year for each song or just the release year of the compilation itself?

As far as "always available convenience" get yourself a free Google Play account -- allows you to upload 50,000 songs. Even if that won't cover your entire library it'll probably cover the stuff you don't think you'll be able to find on Spotify.

― early rejecter, Tuesday, June 6, 2017 4:03 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what is this in terms of GB? At least half of my stuff is classical where 'song length' can be up to 30 minutes

tagging years for compilations? To keep chronological plays reasonable I tag the release year of the last song to be released. So things like Soul Jazz, Soundway and Stern's Africa comps all get tagged to wrong/right decade.

TBH, that's motivated as much by the desire to keep the "album view" of each years releases from ballooning with wide-spanning compilations.

I am in awe Sanpaku.I tried for a long time

plz pastebin your genre/sub list

what is this in terms of GB?

300 GB limit per song.

Mordy: a directory tree of my music, not updated with 2017 stuff yet.

so i have too much music on my hard drive and i need that space for other stuff (like installing Total War: Warhammer). why am i so loathe to back up all my music and delete a bunch of it? it's not like i use 99% of it and if i need to find something i can always check my backup. :/

― Mordy

once something goes into my library it doesn't leave. i tried keeping a clean and well-curated library for years, but man, it's just a lost cause. because first off, guaranteed the week after i delete something i'll regret it. second off there are so many songs relative to the size they take on my hard drive that it's just not a good use of my time, particularly given moore's law.

i tag each song in a comp with its own year (if i can find it). year of the comp release goes in the folder name, but i can't remember ever wanting to know that

Ugh, the year tag is my last great challenge. And I'll get all OCD trying to decide if I should use the year it came out in the UK or use the following year when it came out in the US.

The hours I spent gathering, tagging and reordering my iTunes library. Christ. Then, my laptop died, my job circumstances changed, and I started streaming; I haven't, yet, gotten around to reintegrating my external HD with my new laptop - and I'm not sure I'll ever be arsed to do it. Sentences like 'i tag each song in a comp with its own year (if i can find it). year of the comp release goes in the folder name, but i can't remember ever wanting to know that' give me the willies!

I pretty much gave up on tagging once I switched to a folder-based micro sd card paradigm on sansa clips and rockboxed ipods.

my albums are individual folders within alphabetical A-Z folders, no genres but I do have sections for comps and mixes.

I still tag stuff but my beloved old Tag program doesn't work with El Capitan and XACT's native tagging suuuucks so it is more of a pain.