Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

It would be interesting to figure out the real-world equivalent if they were records or CDs...

How much space it would take up, I mean.

Nice:

More than any single moment with any one record, however, this illogical trip with an unwieldy Case Logic binder has reaffirmed for me the supremacy of the compact disc when it comes to deep, dedicated listening. Sure, records are prettier and bolder, individually grooved art pieces available for the mass market. And streams and downloads are the epitome of convenience, a moving at-the-fingertips library that lets you hopscotch between rabbit holes of subgenres and discover artists in less time than it takes to drive to the record store. CDs split the difference, giving you the mobility and clarity of a digital file while giving you an object to grasp, to study, to treasure. Away from home from a year or so without almost all of my belongings, seeing my initials scrawled on discs I’ve had since middle school is a surreal and welcome emotional connection.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/what-i-learned-road-tripping-across-north-america-with-one-of-those-giant-cd-binders/

Great article. Thanks for the link, AC.

I have four of those cases lol

Love to spin CDs

I just have a 14x14x14 box, with every CD I bought and kept (~800?) from Never Mind the Bullocks to Silent Shout in space saving sleeves that were ripped in 2004, and have moved from storage to storage for the past dozen years, never to be opened.

I have a slew of such cases for CDs that on the one hand I did want to keep -- ultimate backups for my digital collection -- but that I didn't want to simply have around as is due to space. And I'm quite grateful.

I have four of those cases lol

― Simon H., Tuesday, February 27, 2018 9:57 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have... 7 or 8? And some of them are the high capacity ones that are like 7" across the spine

Never thought I’d see the day when CDs are regarded with such reverence. I haven’t looked back from liquidation.

I lived through the introduction of CDs and will probably never shake the impression that they are FUTURISTIC and NIFTY

Having gone through a bunch of fairly ruthless purges of both CDs and vinyl, and spending a decade listening to music on shit MP3s through shit amplification and shit speakers (but convenience!) I have now come 360 to shiny discs again.

Being able to buy great random music for $2 a disc has been an extremely rewarding way to expand my listening.

“I lived through the introduction of CDs and will probably never shake the impression that they are FUTURISTIC and NIFTY“

Oh same here. In late 86 or 87 I had a friend who’s dad had one of the first small format CD players and copies of Sargeant Pepper and Run DMC,’s Raising Hell ... it was magic.

My teen friend's father had Graceland and Peter Gabriel's So, for their $800 sci-fi looking NAD player. At the time, the main advantage seemed to be that I didn't have to clean the discs after each play, as we would for the father's vinyl.

I'm not really nostalgic. I owned some of the World Serpent label discs that decayed in a few years, so I knew, rather early on, that CDs were ephemeral, they wouldn't last as long as I would...

I spent a decade (or more) pretending to be a curator for future generations, collecting things that represented a moment. Then worrying about CD rot and HD crashes and data redundancy. I can only imagine the anxiety real librarians feel with digital media.

I still insist on buying the content I like, so that I at least have a digital copy without the potential for future IP restrictions. Most corporations have a finite lifespan, and I don't think Apple is immune.

Life was easier when one just bought slabs of PVC, and only had to worry about them not being left in a hot car...

I still think it's fairly easy - buy CDs that are worth owning, sell the ones that don't speak to you anymore, be honest with yourself about which is which.

I rip everything when it arrives - it takes hardly any time to rip, tag and file.

My Sonos speakers are sufficient but I dream of a day when I've got a killer system, in a room that's acoustically appropriate. Maybe I'll play the shiny discs again at that point, too.

But convenience is king, and it's just so easy to point my phone to the appropriate output device. New headphones (Thinksound On2) have piqued my interest in quality but I don't think it's enough to invest in a DAC like a Dragonfly or convert to FLAC. I've spent years ripping, not going to do it again!

I still have 99% of everything; even the 8-tracks (most were my mom's, but i bought a few when they were still contemporary). Never having a lot of money to spend on music, each purchase received my full attention. By the time i had enough discretionary income, my knowledge and experience was such that i enjoyed a nearly bullet-proof success rate. I never really thought about ripping my stax; that is until recently...

A recent purchase of a 4TB portable hard drive for $100 has got me thinking i might. EAC has shown that it can accurately tag some recent test rips so maybe the prospect isn't as ominous as i once thought.

You will need to let go of any concern or anxiety about proper capitalization if you are undertaking a large auto-tagging project. The spelling mistakes are pretty minimal though!

I've fully given up on owning any more digital music than will fit on my laptop at any given time

so you just delete the weaklings?

yep

between streaming and CDs and vinyl, there's no real reason for me to have an external that you then have to back up with another external

I gotta have an external HD for my digital comics hoard anyway, so i'm already in for a penny w/r/t that

Oh, that's a trip I haven't taken yet. I've got thousands of comics (I purge them very infrequently, too) and have thoughts about digital subscriptions but, meh, only so much time in the day and I'm perpetually backlogged in reading physical copies.

Each digital sale should come with a little charm that collectors can put on their record collection charm bracelet so that they have an object to treasure

my comics files are all illegal ones, I haven't done the digital subscription thing. All I want is 60s, 70s and 80-85 marvels and weird forgotten indie stuff from the 80s, the sub services are not deep in this area. Also I want to read old comics that have not been recolored and who are printed on a ground of yellow paper

I moved my ~1200 cds across the country 12 years ago and listened to maybe 20 of them since but I did have to move them all across town twice. I moved back across the country last summer and for some reason took them all with me, after packing about half of them into think plastic sleeves. They've been sitting in boxes in a spare room since July and I finally moved all of them to the basement where I will probably never look at them ever again.

All of them are ripped to MP3 and if I remember something I forgot to rip I can almost always find it online in some way, as none of my computers has an optical drive anymore. I think I have an external one in a box somewhere. I never bothered to hook up my 1992 Sony 5-disc changer and I think there might be a CD player under a panel in my car but I've never bothered to look.

That said, I do really miss road trips with limited numbers of CDs as your only entertainment.

yeah, having limited options is v underrated post web

I think it kind of depends on the length of the road trip. I moved from Tampa to Portland, OR (and back again) years ago. That's 50+ hours and I don't use binders, so that would be a shit-ton of CDs. I could make do with only CDs for a reasonable distance, though. Then again, I usually will listen to the full album on my ipod anyway, so it doesn't matter (other than the sound quality of the CD, obv).

Got this email from Amazon tonight:

Amazon Music is retiring the Music Storage service, which allows customers to upload and store up to 250 songs in a personal cloud library. Our records indicate you have uploaded one or more songs through your Amazon account in the past.

To keep, download, and play your uploaded songs at no extra cost, simply open a web browser, go to your Music Settings and click the “Keep my songs” button to direct us to save your music to the cloud. Otherwise your uploaded songs will be removed from your library on April 30, 2018.

Your Amazon Music digital purchases will continue to remain securely stored for playback and download -- no further action is required to retain those. These changes will not impact your ability to stream Prime Music or Amazon Music Unlimited.

250 songs what a joke

rip

i can play 250 songs off my earlope

i fired up my old NAS yesterday, about 10K songs on there. files themselves disorganized beyond repair. relatively OK metadata but my god i will never listen to 90% of this music. fluxblog 2011 best-of? what in the world. not invested in iTunes playlists, it will be easy to jump ship, but to what?

iBroadcast seems interesting at first glance but I haven't actually looked into it to any extent, it may be crap

!! that's the name of the BBC'S internal media publishing cms

I don't know why any music lover would stop curating their own collection and trust their fate to streaming services. Entire artist catalogs are pulled from circulation all the time. Who wants to be subjected to those whims, let alone the fact that any and all of those services could go out of business?

Cause there is plenty of music? Take one thing away, I’ll listen to 5 other things I really like.

It's the same like with Netflix, sure you could only watch stuff that's on Netflix, but you'll miss out on most of the good movies out there.

You're seriously okay with being told you just can't listen to a particular artist indefinitely? Things have changed.

I don't know why any music lover would stop curating their own collection and trust their fate to streaming services. Entire artist catalogs are pulled from circulation all the time. Who wants to be subjected to those whims, let alone the fact that any and all of those services could go out of business?

― Fastnbulbous

because i can't fucking keep track of my collection on my own anymore! it's sunday, i want to listen to a good set of sunday morning songs, i could spend countless hours putting together the perfect ongoing playlist for that circumstance and every conceivable other or i could crowdsource that shit the same way i crowdsource what records are in my collection! often these days i'll think of a song i want to listen to. i can't remember the name of the song or the artist but they only released one song on a soundtrack, or maybe a compilation, in the '90s, or maybe the 2000s. they were a shoegaze band, or maybe they were indie. the utility of having all the music i love at my fingertips is increasingly hampered by my inability to remember it exists.

yeah, spotify will go out of business one day probably. everything is impermanent and nothing lasts. if i ever felt like i "owned" music i don't now.

In 21sr century, music owns you. < / Yakov >

Xp You really can't keep track of your own collection/library? Do you have lots of stuff you've never listened to?

Xp You really can't keep track of your own collection/library? Do you have lots of stuff you've never listened to?

― Gerald McBoing-Boing

no, i've listened to all of it, but at this point it's at 55,000 songs (these are only the songs i really like) and my recall is starting to fail me

You're seriously okay with being told you just can't listen to a particular artist indefinitely? Things have changed.

― Fastnbulbous, Sunday, 1 April 2018 14:21 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ja. I didn't expect I would end up here but *shrugs*. This evening I listened to three awesome albums I hadn't heard before (Kacey Musgraves, Gumba Fire comp, Trembling Bells), tomorrow I'll likely do the same.