Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

the picture makes it look bigger and heavier than it is ... but yeah, totally portable and would fit in my purse.

Yeah, it's totally pocketable--much smaller than most modern phones in footprint, just thicker. I even like the little "bumpers" on the top and bottom, which I assumed I'd remove--they help make pulling it out of a pocket easier, and I use the top one to hang it on a hook at my office when I'm using Bluetooth.

so i got a computer to keep my library with me on the go. "should be fine", says i. "512 gb ought to be enough for anybody". i'm now up to 50,000 songs, 338 gb, windows keeps wanting to install massive updates whenever i connect it to the internet, and soundslike just posted a gigabyte worth of 2000s post-punk revival. itunes used to have this great thing where you could convert your files down to 128 aac to save space, and i'm seriously wondering if i can do that with my whole library for portable purposes. suggestions?

you can get a 4TB external drive for $100

i could but then i'd be lugging around even more stuff with me

oic -- a laptop rather than a computer to stream from? then yeah, downsampling seems reasonable as long as you're keeping the originals somewhere (and aren't all hydrogenaudio about the quality)

338 + 1 = 339

That's still way less than 512. I don't see a problem.

Will the laptop support a second internal drive? Some will. Or you can swap out the 512 for 1tb.

yes, i know there are a lot of ways to add more storage space. i don't particularly want to open up the laptop and mess around with the innards. i could get a usb drive and expand the space i have that way, if i wanted. i know 128 aac doesn't sound as good as 320 mp3, but it's good enough for portable listening, even with the dragonfly in. i figure mass transcoding could recover a lot of space for future growth and ought to be possible!

Are those 338gb lossless? then keep them backed up in a couple big hdds at home and mass convert them with foobar to the laptop as lossy files. aac 128 will be transparent almost every time, doubly so for portable listening.

if they're already mp3s or other lossy stuff, then transcoding might be fine as well (again, portable listening) but it's a much bigger risk. again, as long as you keep the originals backed up somewhere...

they make thumb drives that are 500gb, i don't know how reliable they are, though.

to each his own, but the only stuff i'd listen to in 128 would be like pre-war music

they make thumb drives that are 500gb

they're like $250 on amazon btw

the only stuff i'd listen to in 128 would be like pre-war music

― brimstead, Saturday, October 28, 2017 8:21 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

128 mono = 256 stereo, so pre-67 maybe?

Cannot understand why so many of these cylinder rips I'm downloading are in stereo.

i don't understand what the equals sign means there, a 128kbps mp3 will sound shitty for anything "well recorded"...

if you're just playing it on a boombox or something tho, 128 is probably fine for anything

yes, i'm keeping the originals backed up. i'm keeping the originals backed up in multiple places. this isn't my only listening source.

and for anybody concerned about the "128" thing, codec matters. i'm not talking about bloody xing 128. i'm talking about aac, which to my middle-aged ears is _acceptably lossy_ at 128.

none of which goes any direction towards answering the question of "how", mind you. i just wanted to save myself a google - if i wanted an argument i'd be on stevehoffman.tv!

as for cylinder rips in stereo, it's because people are lazy. the mono version of piper that came out a couple years back had non-identical left and right channels. fortunately _one_ of the channels was okay so easy enough to just duplicate the non-fucked-up channel using software.

sorry, piper = piper at the gates of dawn.

dbpoweramp can do the converting easily

but this one looks like it'll do it free: https://www.freac.org

I'm sure there are plenty of just as capable alternatives but foobar is what I always use, you can load all your files once and let it do the conversion overnight. those 300 gb will surely take many hours

and if you have your music collection properly tagged with artist, album, etc it can easily do fancier stuff like defining a desired output directory tree and filename template, replaygain scanning and tagging, removing long stretches of silence from CD album closing tracks, etc

I meant that you can halve the biterate for mono recordings, so 128 will effectively be 256.

I edit my mp3s in something proper, but do tagging in tagscanner and equalise the volume using mp3gain, would recommend both, have not really come across a bulk file converter that I'm completely happy with yet - the best was the software that came with my creative mp3 player but lost it long ago.

Using AIMP to actually play mp3s on my computer but hate it, looking for an alternative

none of which goes any direction towards answering the question of "how", mind you. i just wanted to save myself a google - if i wanted an argument i'd be on stevehoffman.tv!

what's your problem, i gave you a suggestion, did you even read my post

sigh. i don't have a problem, brimstead, thank you for your suggestion.

1TB hard drive is around $50; no-brainer. By the time you fill that up, it's pretty easy too imagine affordable SD cards of the same capacity.

I recommend against low bit-rates or shifting to mono unless you have very specific needs, even if you still have higher res. backups -- i have 3 HDs of my stax (original, and 2 back-ups) and have enough trouble just keeping those updated -- even without worrying which copy has my best MP3s/flacs, etc.

My problem will be when my stax grow beyond 1TB (over 800GB now) -- as i would want 1 HD for each copy -- i've been using older 3.5" HDs that connect thru docking stations of either eSATA or USB 3.0, but my oldest computer is still on Win XP and have trouble with HDs larger than 1TB.

Bulk file conversion very easy in Mediamonkey.

itunes

is probably the problem.

What a fucking ballache is my irritable response to all that.

what's all this about mono? Don't most encoders actually use "Joint Stereo" by default? That is, where left + right are the same, use the allowed bitrate to enhance overall fidelity.

That's not joint stereo.

Joint stereo is where they encode the one channel as an absolute and encode the other channel as a delta. It's more efficient than encoding both channels absolutely but it is capable of exactly reproducing the input, nothing is lost.

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Joint_stereo

Actually, I think that is what maffew is describing. And there are more things called 'joint stereo' than just the one I mentioned. (But all rely on the fact that the two channels will be nearly the same a lot of the time)

The bloke had already said he doesn't want an external drive, or an internal one. And that these aren't the masters. It's safe to transcode then down. But I'd wait until my disc was 90% full at least.

I'd definitely prefer using a cloud service for backup rather than buying more external hdds

Currently I'm on the 100gb google drive plan, I downloaded the desktop client and am placing all my non-system files in the drive folder

This works flawlessly and saved all my files when my SSD crashed for no reason 6 months ago

The 1tb plan is 8£/month, if I was maintaining a digital music collection I'd use that for backup

But I'd wait until my disc was 90% full at least.

― koogs

Windows, at least, runs like crap with anything less than 15% drive space, and <10% is unbearable.

The 1tb plan is 8£/month, if I was maintaining a digital music collection I'd use that for backup

― niels

My DSL limit 12Mbps down and .3Mbps up -- theoretically, it would take about a month to upload 100GB even if i dedicated 100% of my bandwidth to the task. Maybe cable users could boost those numbers by a factor of 10+, but it would still take a month to upload a full TB.

wow, those are low speeds?

I had .5mbps up in ~2004 and with my last ISP 50mbps up

... that's the fastest available for my location

cool, there's more to life than fiber optics

can I ask where you live?

rural michigan, usa.

Also of note, i use an android app called muzecast to stream my stax anywhere over my wifi; works okay once it grinds through all the database set-up.

Years ago, I had a Windows program that would go through my MP3s and compile a list of errors and offer to fix them. For example, it would add a release year, or it would highlight tracks that had an incorrect track name. Anyone know of something that does that these days?

What would the source database be?

musicbrainz picard

What I need is something to tag the original release date of everything, like all of the tracks on a best of compilation should have the years they were originally released, not the year the best of was put out.

I know this thing probably doesn't exist, but it would save a lot of time for me.

Yeah this is a big problem. You’d think that sometthing like this wouldn’t be that hard to code, you’d just query the database (discogs, rym, allmusic) for the track name + artist, receive a table with all matches and take the lowest value for release year. I’m not sure if the API’s of these databases allow that type of queries tho.

are those APIs even public?

Discogs is, I dunno about the others

You can also download the entire discogs database as XML, or at least you could a few years ago, cos I wrote some code to import the whole thing into SQL Server (was supposed to be for a work colleague who wanted to use it for some idea he had that didn't work out, so I never actually used it for anything).

Wonder how you’d account for different versions - international , re-issues with bonus tracks etc.

Seems like some error is bound to creep in...

it already exists, it's called musicbrainz picard and beets for the more technically inclined

Really, it can do that? OK, checking this out, thanks.

apparently iTunes can't count artists beyond 9,800? i know i should stop using itunes but the songs still _play_

I have no where near that many artists but I noticed my itunes being really choppy lately. Thinking about finally transferring over to Media Monkey - not sure if that'll help your 9.8k artist situation, though.

I don't know my artist count, but Media Monkey has been able to handle my 130k-song database. However, when i last loaded the entire stax it required many, many days to load via a USB 2.0 interface.