Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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)

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.

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.

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)

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

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)

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

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?

my favorite remaster of The Slider

which one? I trust yr ears

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.

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

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

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.

good to know

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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...

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.

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

otm

thank u MP3 blogs

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)

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

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

I just carry my 2nd (old) laptop and a backup 3 TB hard drive to all my radio shows and DJ gigs, so easy to go back and forth w/ a turntable and a few crates of records on a 2-channel mixer if I'm live, or queue in VLC if I'm on the radio where I don't usually bring vinyl

for mobile listening I use a Cowon that can play most audio files

btw, germane to this thread:

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/05/11/527829909/the-mp3-is-officially-dead-according-to-its-creators

I don't believe that "mp3 is dead" story. The company with the patent has said that it will stop issuing licences. But that's because the patent has expired and they no longer have a right to, rather than because the format is dead. Yeah, he pointed out that aac is technically better (and he may have a vested interest there) but lots of devices just won't play aac.

Mp3 won't go away for a long time.

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), Saturday, June 10, 2017 7:17 PM (four hours ago)

I wasn't aware that this was even possible! How exciting! I feel like the iPod might have been the last useful product Apple made

AAC is better only at low bitrates so eh

here is where i point out once again that apple views music downloads as "legacy"

there is probably, though i don't know this, a set of benchmarks beyond which they will shutter the itunes store, and cannot wait to do it

koogs otm

"mp3 is dead" = patents expired this year so we can't force anyone to pay us for it any longer, try this other encumbered format instead, it's so much better, honest!

Vorbis and musepack have been around for over a decade and are also "better" than mp3 yet no one was in a rush to dump the latter for those.

at high bitrates all good lossy codecs are transparent, under 128kbps mp3 is still good but beaten by opus and aac.

what codec does spotify use?

https://support.spotify.com/uk/using_spotify/search_play/what-bitrate-does-spotify-use-for-streaming/

This (pleasantly) surprises me (ogg!)

(web player may be different, in 2013 anyway)

(BBC uses aac for radio. Sometimes flac for radio 3)

This thread convinces me to stick to CDs when they're available. All this shit sounds way too complicated.

It really isn't an either/or. I buy CDs when available and easily maintain a large digital library. I enjoy the curation aspect and putting something new into the library is a snap at this point. I'm prepared for the streaming apocalypse though there's too much money for it to really happen.