Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

I sometimes run MP3Tag within Wine on my macbook because I came to love it on my work PC

Cloud storage has gotten pretty cheap. Google Drive is like 24 dollars a year to store up to 100GB. That would suit my needs for quite a few more years. I only have about 70GB or so of music right now, adding 3 to 4 GB a year.

I would love to get to the point where having multiple hard drives for backup purposes becomes pointless.

I only have about 70GB or so of music right now, adding 3 to 4 GB a year.

How do you even live? I have a 1.5 TB hard drive for music and it's got about 500GB of space left. I probably add 5-10GB a month.

is the cloud storage for like "backup in case your house burns down or your place gets robbed and they take everything" or am I missing something? I guess I'm just showing my age in that I generally avoid paying rent on storage when I can just buy a physical drive and I own it.

Like everything 'cloud' it's a lot to do with letting someone else worry about your files.

Can someone with a maths degree work out how much putting 2tb of files into glacier would cost me?

xp

yeah it's for that kind of backup, also on-the-go convenience (and less hassle as koogs notes), also for naive suckers who think the cloud represents a long term solution for magic "look no hands" storage of "their" music

guess I'm also showing my age since my version of offsite backup is "copy a drive, give it to a friend"

Price point's getting close to worth it for cloud storage I think. Not quite there yet, but I just got through moving all our servers to Azure at work and I might go for it next year? I've got a 2TB NAS drive that's got about 100GB left on it. Although in context of thread only 1TB of that is music.

guess I'm also showing my age since my version of offsite backup is "copy a drive, give it to a friend"

― sleeve, Thursday, June 8, 2017 3:30 PM (seven minutes ago)

haha, my version would be "make a copy, store at parents' house" so I feel you on that

I'm doing that "decluttering" thing, and getting rid of a lot of cds and records, but of course have to go through item by item and decide if it's worth digitizing before getting rid of it. A lot of this stuff I haven't listened to in many years -- some not at all.

haha, my version would be "make a copy, store at parents' house" so I feel you on that

I currently do this (as well as cloud coverage via Amazon).

I only have about 70GB or so of music right now, adding 3 to 4 GB a year.

How do you even live? I have a 1.5 TB hard drive for music and it's got about 500GB of space left. I probably add 5-10GB a month.

― grawlix (unperson), Thursday, June 8, 2017 6:15 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, I could be underestimating the gigs per year. I add about 350 to 400 songs a year, don't know what that adds up to, figured about 4 gigs. And I only add my favorite albums/singles. Not sure what everyone else here does, but I'll stream about 400 albums year and will only buy my favorites, which always ends up being about 10% of what I check out. Streaming services have saved me a fortune the past seven or so years.

Cloud storage is very slow on DSL (upspeeds are a major hurdle).

4TB external drives cost $100; seems like a no-brainer. Cheap, reliable, portable, and USB 3.0 is pretty fast.

guessing that the majority of people posting on this thread are musical packrats/hoarders, whereas you seem to have the "life changing magic of tidying up" lady's approach.

Yeah I'm definitely a hoarder. In fact the only way I've managed to allow myself to start selling off stuff was ripping it to FLAC and scanning all the covers. Now I don't need to hang on to those shit Britpop CD singles any more! I can sell them for 99p on discogs! It's a start...

There's just.. SO MUCH good music

Over £100 here, which makes it less obvious.

I have 6 external drives here and a couple of portables. Bought a 3tb just for music but I'm still sorting it all out after 6 months.

(Masters and walking about copies in separate directory trees. Masters are mainly cd rips in flac, walking around versions are all oggs. But some masters are mp3, some are oggs. Confusing)