Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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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.

Cyborg Kickboxer (rushomancy), Wednesday, 7 June 2017 01:24 (six years ago) link

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

mookieproof, Wednesday, 7 June 2017 01:39 (six years ago) link

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.

Gerald McBoing-Boing, Wednesday, 7 June 2017 02:55 (six years ago) link

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!

The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski), Wednesday, 7 June 2017 15:00 (six years ago) link

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

or at night (Jon not Jon), Wednesday, 7 June 2017 15:04 (six years ago) link

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.

sleeve, Wednesday, 7 June 2017 15:18 (six years ago) link

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

or at night (Jon not Jon), Wednesday, 7 June 2017 15:19 (six years ago) link

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.

Rod Steel (musicfanatic), Thursday, 8 June 2017 21:51 (six years ago) link

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, 8 June 2017 22:15 (six years ago) link

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.

sarahell, Thursday, 8 June 2017 22:23 (six years ago) link

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?

koogs, Thursday, 8 June 2017 22:28 (six years ago) link

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"

sleeve, Thursday, 8 June 2017 22:30 (six years ago) link

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.

Colonel Poo, Thursday, 8 June 2017 22:34 (six years ago) link

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

sarahell, Thursday, 8 June 2017 22:39 (six years ago) link

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.

sarahell, Thursday, 8 June 2017 22:44 (six years ago) link

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).

Ned Raggett, Thursday, 8 June 2017 23:16 (six years ago) link

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.

Rod Steel (musicfanatic), Thursday, 8 June 2017 23:51 (six years ago) link

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.

bodacious ignoramus, Thursday, 8 June 2017 23:56 (six years ago) link

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.

sarahell, Thursday, 8 June 2017 23:57 (six years ago) link

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...

Colonel Poo, Friday, 9 June 2017 00:00 (six years ago) link

There's just.. SO MUCH good music

brimstead, Friday, 9 June 2017 00:01 (six years ago) link

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)

koogs, Friday, 9 June 2017 00:07 (six years ago) link

xp: Give up on knowing it all, or finding time to love but a small fraction. Our lives aren't long enough. Delve into microgenres to satisfy a completist bent, and permit the world to introduce you to the stuff that will soundtrack your grandchildren's weddings.

it's just locker room treason (Sanpaku), Friday, 9 June 2017 00:08 (six years ago) link

even if the drives are more than $100, that's like the same money as 10 lps/cds -- my 5TB drive cost $190 and i didn't bat an eyelash buying it when my 1TB drive got full -- now, got space-o-plenty, even for flacs.

bodacious ignoramus, Friday, 9 June 2017 00:34 (six years ago) link

It was more that at UK prices cloud storage looks more affordable, more attractive. (And ideally you'd have two hds)

(But sod trying to work out exactly how much glacier storage would be because it's per GB and there's a extra charge for accessing and this and that)

koogs, Friday, 9 June 2017 00:42 (six years ago) link

why would a cloud storage product call itself "glacier" -- which is synonomous with being "slow" -- i mean, yeah, global warming but still ...

sarahell, Friday, 9 June 2017 05:06 (six years ago) link

It's designed for cheap, bulk storage, an archive, not something you access frequently. So, yes, slow.

(There are levels within that and you pay more the more dynamic you want things. One of the options says it may take up to 12 hours before you can access the data, which is an interesting programming challenge)

koogs, Friday, 9 June 2017 05:13 (six years ago) link

sarahell, there are two main problems in software development
1. Cache invalidation
2. Naming things
2. Off by one errors

naming things is really hard -- imo "glacier" is close to something I came up with once, "deepfreeze" because archiving things is like cold storage, you have to wait for it to thaw to use it

which is also why glacier would be a bad idea for music you want to regularly stream or listen to, it's not an instant access thing

mh, Friday, 9 June 2017 14:38 (six years ago) link

This is what I'd like--

To be able to upload folder structures of about 1TB of music

To be able to access them on my phone through a simple player for streaming. Important: they must be my files I'm hearing, not matched files from the service's library (e.g. if I want to hear my favorite remaster of The Slider I don't want to be streamed the shitty current remaster)

To be able to quickly cache certain folders locally if I'm about to go on the subway etc

To be able to easily delete locally cached material in order to conserve local storage

Does google play or the Amazon thing do this?

or at night (Jon not Jon), Friday, 9 June 2017 14:44 (six years ago) link

my favorite remaster of The Slider

which one? I trust yr ears

sleeve, Friday, 9 June 2017 14:50 (six years ago) link

I've got the 2002 remaster on Edsel with the extra disc of demos, which I think sounds pretty good but I haven't heard any others to compare it to.

Colonel Poo, Friday, 9 June 2017 15:00 (six years ago) link

there are probably other options but the closest to that I've seen is Plex Cloud:
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/226645727-Getting-Started-with-Plex-Cloud

It has limited provider support, but it does what you're saying -- you have your own library uploaded to one of a few providers, their site logs into your Dropbox or w/e and uses your own files to stream via the web or one of their apps

Amazon Music lets you upload but does do matching, but for the small set of things I did it was smart enough not to send the wrong one. I haven't had any problems with iTunes match recently since they do fingerprinting based on the audio and not song/artist title anymore. As far as I know, all the options to stream your own music are going to be pricey.

The other option with Plex is hosting your media at your own home, and then when you access the app, it streams from your home server. Works very well in my experience, but again, you're using up your home bandwidth allotment

mh, Friday, 9 June 2017 15:00 (six years ago) link

oh yeah, Plex also lets you save to device like you're asking

mh, Friday, 9 June 2017 15:00 (six years ago) link

Plex is great in general but music is still suffering from some library bugs - it doesn't distinguish between 'artist' and 'album artist' and its handling of compilations is pretty shoddy.

Siegbran, Friday, 9 June 2017 16:40 (six years ago) link

good to know

mh, Friday, 9 June 2017 16:51 (six years ago) link

A lot of my stuff is not really tagged but is organized by folder-- would that be a shitshow in plex?

or at night (Jon not Jon), Friday, 9 June 2017 20:26 (six years ago) link

Google Music (the free version) does what you are describing, in a way that the ease of use/accessibility outweighs some of the drawbacks or limitations (for me).
-You can upload 50k tracks from your local files. I think this is probably closer to 350Gb or so of files.
-The desktop client which does the uploading can just be pointed at a folder or at iTunes and will upload anything added to either, so super-easy to passively keep new stuff synced.
-Stored in GM by ID3 tags/metadata, not folder structures unfortunately.
-The app is great, on both Android and iOS, and the browser-based client on pcs/macs is great too. Easy to access the library from work, for daily commuting, on long road trips.
-You can easily locally cache songs/albums before trips on subway/airplane/anywhere out of range. Just as easy to remove specific locally cached stuff, or clear the local cache entirely.
-Google Music does try to match automatically when you upload, but in most cases I didn't notice or didn't care. If I did want to use the original files, I can just tell it that (per song) through the desktop app. The amount of times I've had to do that was limited but necessary (it synced a "clean" version of an album for some reason, or used a stereo master for mono tracks I'd uploaded). On the other hand, some of the tracks in my library are upwards of 15 years old and the quality of the original file suffers, but it gets matched to a higher-quality version in GM when uploaded!

I use and love Plex for home-based streaming (mostly video/FLAC to Chromecast/tablets) but can't imagine using it as my primary music app.

city worker, Friday, 9 June 2017 21:09 (six years ago) link

I have a home server and recently ran my whole collection through beets to get the meta-data right, and have been using Libresonic to stream from browsers, which I usually then stream to my Chromecast Audio. When I want to cast from my iPhone, I use Plex - but I am not a huge fan of the way Plex handles music. I'm pretty happy with the setup. I realized I wasn't listening to my own collection at all - just searching Youtube and Spotify for individual tracks. Doing that for years changed the way I listen to music, so it made sense to start managing the meta-data instead of doing everything by folder hierarchy. After organizing my own collection this way, I am listening to it a lot more - searching through a lot of stuff and clicking a lot of "related artists" links is making me appreciate a lot of crap in my collection that I'd forgotten about or have been on the fence about keeping.

beard papa, Saturday, 10 June 2017 21:01 (six years ago) link

I follow this thread out of curiosity and I gotta say I'm impressed with the effort put into maintaining a digital music collection in the streaming era

I had a very large digital collection once, then my external hd broke down, then I had years without a digital collection (without a computer, really) and now I have less than 50 gigs of mp3s and flacs and a Spotify account, and I'm much more interested in maintaining my Spotify collection and playlists than those mp3s

niels, Saturday, 10 June 2017 22:22 (six years ago) link

I'm still plugging away with iTunes mp3's and a separate folder of FLACs as backup (1.4 TB). iTunes library is 857 GB, updated as new songs are added with full tags and album art. I have playlists set up to populate two iPod Classics, one for singles and another for albums. The singles playlists are divided up into 25-30 genres and add up to 122 GB, so eventually I'll need to look into iPod replacements as those top out at 160 GB. I keep about 15-20 GB of my newest stuff on playlists for my phone. Once one of those hits 5 GB or so I start a new one and sync the most recent 2-4 of them to the phone.

Of course, all this has to be hosted on an external HD. In the future it would be great to have a solid state drive but 2 TB SSD's cost about $700.

A few weeks ago I bought a Dragonfly DAC and it substantially improved the sound quality from my headphone jack to the receiver/speakers. Highly recommended.

skip, Saturday, 10 June 2017 22:47 (six years ago) link

I'd love to switch to Spotify but it's like Netflix - yes there's a lot of stuff on it, more than I can ever listen to, but there's a hell of a lot more not on it.

Siegbran, Saturday, 10 June 2017 23:49 (six years ago) link

Yeah I'm definitely a hoarder.

― Colonel Poo

i'm paranoid, a hoarder, and a product of my generation. i started digital music with napster and have a mentality to match. i'm still prepping for the digital apocalypse... coming any day now, yep, any day now... they'll get my gianni safred mp3s when they pry them from my cold dead fingers.

the plus side is that man being a digital hoarder is so much easier and less damaging than being one of the people they put on tv who fill their house with yellowed old newspapers.

sent out my ipod classic to be refurbed with a 512 gb ssd. hopefully i get it back!

Cyborg Kickboxer (rushomancy), Sunday, 11 June 2017 00:30 (six years ago) link

A few weeks ago I bought a Dragonfly DAC and it substantially improved the sound quality from my headphone jack to the receiver/speakers. Highly recommended.

― skip

i'm kind of looking for audio quality improvement if/when my ipod refurb finishes... since you use two of them, do you know if there's any dac stuff for them? the stuff on the dragonfly site looked to be usb...

Cyborg Kickboxer (rushomancy), Sunday, 11 June 2017 00:32 (six years ago) link

the plus side is that man being a digital hoarder is so much easier and less damaging than being one of the people they put on tv who fill their house with yellowed old newspapers.

This, so much!

i'm kind of looking for audio quality improvement if/when my ipod refurb finishes... since you use two of them, do you know if there's any dac stuff for them? the stuff on the dragonfly site looked to be usb...

Sorry, I haven't used the Dragonfly for the iPod, just my computer.

skip, Sunday, 11 June 2017 00:46 (six years ago) link

Being a digital hoarder is a lovely thing, and I have no regrets.

Ned Raggett, Sunday, 11 June 2017 00:59 (six years ago) link

otm

sleeve, Sunday, 11 June 2017 02:04 (six years ago) link

thank u MP3 blogs

sleeve, Sunday, 11 June 2017 02:04 (six years ago) link

sent out my ipod classic to be refurbed with a 512 gb ssd. hopefully i get it back!

Totally report back how this goes. I think about doing it constantly

(I want the 1TB option though lol)

or at night (Jon not Jon), Sunday, 11 June 2017 02:17 (six years ago) link

Yes, let us know if it works out, where you got it, how much, etc.

skip, Sunday, 11 June 2017 03:09 (six years ago) link

I'm also hoarding a sealed, boxed 160 GB Classic. I could probably get $$ for that on eBay.

skip, Sunday, 11 June 2017 03:10 (six years ago) link


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