Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

I'm up to 907 GB in iTunes now and it runs fine on a late 2013 iMac.

How many days of listening does 903 GB of music equate to?

Sorry 907

jesus that's a lot of music, even if it's all FLAC

skip's real name is "kevin spotify"

xp don't think iTunes does FLAC even at this late date, are there plugins?

I have >3TB, long past using any "library" software, just alphabetized folders that get dumped into VLC to play

I've been doing more pruning of my digital collection, something I really haven't done for 20 years of accumulating it. If I have heard music and feel ambivalent towards it, it's being deleted, forever. Promising debuts by artists with disappointing sophomore slumps have been hit hardest. Life is too short to listen to everything, and I'm not preparing a time capsule for future cultural historians.

nevermind, i figured out the artist issue, it was sorting by the "album artist" and a lot of my "album artist" tags were junk.

i should probably stop adding music to my library at some point but i keep hearing more great music. do you know i'd never heard "chase" by giorgio moroder until this week? what a great tune! anyway i can't possibly keep track of all the stuff that's in my library right now, even as heavily curated as it is.

I've been doing more pruning of my digital collection, something I really haven't done for 20 years of accumulating it. If I have heard music and feel ambivalent towards it, it's being deleted, forever. Promising debuts by artists with disappointing sophomore slumps have been hit hardest. Life is too short to listen to everything, and I'm not preparing a time capsule for future cultural historians.

― Acanthonus armatus (Sanpaku)

i can't make it past the regret. anytime i delete something i want to listen to it again the next day. (if i get that far. "do i really need abu lahab's 'as chastened angels descend into the thoracic tombs'?" i ask myself. i can't even remember what it sounds like. and so i put it on to remind myself and HOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME.) plus i'm now manually syncing the libraries on my desktop and my laptop, which is just a mess. even if i did delete, say, the fourth "uncle acid" album (which i don't think i would regret), not only would i have to do it twice, but it would wind up being a drop in an extremely large bucket.

you could always just download it again? unless it's very rare/niche

yeah rare/niche is kind of what i do :( i got stuff in my library i'm pretty sure i'd never be able to find again if i lost it.

xp

343 days

What! That’s way less time than I expected.

Ideally you should have enough to last beyond your life expectancy.

^ that's still kind of insane, though. That's still going 1,029 days - assuming you listen 8 hours a day - without repeating songs, lol.