Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

at some point i decided i didn't really need to own the discography of the dave clark five on compact disc

Oh, I totally get that - a few months ago I decided the same for Dead Can Dance. Stuff moves in and moves out of my library all the time, curating as opposed to collecting.

But you said "these are only the songs I really like". I'm mostly an album listener, even if an album contains some tracks that I think are less than others. Playlists I create are mainly single artist focused as opposed to "Sunday morning songs" and it's really random (and ILM-inspired) as to what I'm going to put on at any given time.

I think it's really interesting how different people inject music into their lives. 55,000 songs is a huge amount, no wonder it's hard to pull up any individual one!

it's not really "do I really need 50,000 songs," it's "do I want to risk the chance that the one song I really want to listen to now has disappeared entirely?"

I don't know why any music lover would stop curating their own collection and trust their fate to streaming services.

― Fastnbulbous, Sunday, April 1, 2018 9:51 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

+1

I think it's really interesting how different people inject music into their lives.

― Gerald McBoing-Boing

through my eyeballs, at this point

i'm really pretty far gone at this point. i used to avoid streaming services because i had certain favorite songs and if they didn't have the ones i liked best it was pointless. today i'm not sure about that pov. if there was a service that offered all the different kinds of food imaginable, everything you've heard of and you hadn't, all you could eat for twelve bucks a month, would i turn my nose up at it because it didn't have pizza? i mean shit i could still just order pizza anytime i wanted, right?

nowadays i don't have favorite musicians, i don't have favorite songs. i just, uh, love music. not indiscriminately, but enough of it that it might as well be indiscriminate, enough of it that it's beyond organization, categorization, and most importantly memory. a library of 40,000 songs i could just about manage. at 55,000 it's all genre tags and the randomizer. today the randomizer came up with an old armenian guy, fucking incredible once-in-a-lifetime stuff. i thought to myself "wow, that's amazing", but if i hadn't remembered the word "armenian", hadn't had it in my tags, i wouldn't be able to find it again now (his name's komitas vardapet, for the record). like when you ask people "what kind of music do you listen to" and they can't remember the names of any of the musicians or the songs they like? that's what i'm like now.

the part i dread is getting a new computer. because the other thing that helps me is the aspect of time. oh, here's the new stuff from may 2017. here's from november 2016, with the two week silence in there. nothing from before march 3, 2016, because that's when i got my newest computer. all that personal archaeology hopelessly muddled. i try writing it all down, sometimes writing it all down helps, but better still is to just listen, and when i come across something i haven't written about before, or i've heard and forgotten...

elizabeth city state! "year of the v-neck"! that's the song i was talking about before. man, what a fucking great song. because of elizabeth new jersey, that's why i thought that. may 9, 2017. a good month!

at this point it's at 55,000 songs (these are only the songs i really like)

that's about 2750 hours (at 3 minutes a song), or 114 days! how many songs would you say you really REALLY like out of those?

The day before its IPO Spotify is still hugely unprofitable and the company's future prospects depend on transforming into some kind of 360-degree music service that has its hands in every part of the digital and real-life music experience.

Spotify is more likely not to exist in 5 years than it is for the user experience to improve or stay the same. Maybe the single most likely outcome is that it gets shittier and more expensive.

Come on over to Apple Music.

that's about 2750 hours (at 3 minutes a song), or 114 days! how many songs would you say you really REALLY like out of those?

― Karl Malone

175.7 days - i listen to a lot of prog rock

yeah, i get that response a lot. couple of things. first off it's not really necessary to limit myself to the music i "really REALLY" like. yeah i could probably do without, say, "tout casser" by the paris studio group, but if i don't need to, why?

second off winnowing is an extremely time consuming and painful process for me. i do occasionally try to create a subset for, say, car driving, but i like all these songs enough that when i listen to them i don't want to get rid of it and immediately regret it whenever i do. the last time i updated my phone was when i was driving cross country a year ago. obviously i do have a critical mindset towards listening, but listening for enjoyment and listening critically are two different things for me, and i prefer not to mix them up too much.

I listen to Spotify at work, which is fine for the office environment. At home it's a much different story. Even ignoring the absences in the Spotify catalog, the drop in sound quality when moving from foobar flacs to Spotify is enough to keep this service as an ancillary one. While a big time sink to maintain my own digital collection, I've come to accept that particular cost. Maybe it's a generational thing?

Perhaps it is, as I accept the same thing and am over 45.

But different than Rushomancy, I'm (usually) an album listener. It makes music selection easier when I have to think about who I want to listen to, as opposed to which songs I want to listen to. Sometimes I just punt and shuffle all my best-of's or genre compilations, but I almost never make playlists dedicated to moods, activities or events.

Because of this thing I have sorted every digital file I own into folders for each year and am winnowing each as I get to it, glad that I'm doing this or there would be mp3s sitting there unlistened-to forever, don't know how I could deal with them without turning it into a project, can't imagine myself just deleting them. I have basically given up listening to whole albums for the next decade, am only coming back to real favourites from time to time, and don't really miss the album experience that much. My physical CDs & LPs are mostly gone already.

Most of the time I listen to a playlist of my favorite 2,346 songs shuffled. Every couple of weeks I’ll seek out new albums and put them all on a recently added playlist, which I will listen to on shuffle as well. I identify new songs that move over to the big best songs playlists to keep it fresh. So I’m rarely listening to anything in album format anymore.

i'm ... mixed on albums. i still listen to a lot of albums - rock, jazz, metal, these are still predominantly album oriented genres, something like the new iceage record is definitely worth hearing in its entirety. but lately i've started listening to more house and disco music, where the album isn't the primary format, and like mfktz says the album format simply isn't applicable at all for music before 1950. and even when the music does lend itself to albums, there are lots of records with one or two good songs on otherwise bad or marginal records - i have no regrets about cherry picking.

Hmm. I'm on the cusp of Boomer and Gen X and always approach my listening through the album format, even on Spotify. I have only a handful of playlists in my collection and every one is a just reordering of an album to try to improve the sequencing. I've a lot of Various Artist albums but whenever I play one, I generally tend to switch over to the full album by one of the first few artists on the comp.

In contrast, my teenage kids are all about album streaming and never play albums.

you'll have to pry my hard drives from my cold dead hands

that being said, I recently changed a major factor in how I listen to music - by moving all the vinyl that has been ripped to digital (around 2,000 LPs) to a different part of the house (I recognize that as a homeowner this is a luxury), leaving everything else on the shelves (another 2,000 or so). now, I can look at my records and actually see things I want to play (as opposed to seeing a lot of stuff that is already on the hard drive), I don't "care" enough about these records to digitize them but I enjoy listening to e.g. the first half dozen Little Feat records, and now it's a lot easier to find them.

all the digitized stuff lives on a 3 TB hard drive, as I think I've mentioned before ITT I just use a simple alphabetical folder structure and play files in VLC. I do make and enjoy playlists, but they are strictly for home listening.

the result here is that I'm playing a lot more vinyl for fun instead of constantly being on the "must rip everything" treadmill, which tbh is never gonna happen

I listen to Spotify at work, which is fine for the office environment. At home it's a much different story. Even ignoring the absences in the Spotify catalog, the drop in sound quality when moving from foobar flacs to Spotify is enough to keep this service as an ancillary one. While a big time sink to maintain my own digital collection, I've come to accept that particular cost. Maybe it's a generational thing?

― doug watson, Tuesday, April 3, 2018 2:15 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thank you! yall streamers have terrible ears, streaming music sounds like garbage. it's like flavored instant oatmeal in a little packet vs cooking the real thing. ever since i stopped listening to streaming and only playing things on media in my purview, my listening experience is so much better. very happy to sacrifice "every song ever" lifelessly rendered for "a few new albums a month" fully realized and i'll never go back.

That's wonderful for you and everything but now I'm just hearing in my head runnin' around robbin' banks all wack on the foobar flacs

all the foobar flacs with the pumped-up kicks

Do Spotify songs come from a different master? Otherwise I’d be extremely surprised if this FLAC superiority isn’t just the usual placebo effect. You can indeed with considerable effort train yourself to pick out some of the artifacts of AAC/MP3 encoding like pre-echo or smearing (you don’t need awesome equipment for that either), but the difference is really not in things like ‘warmth’, ‘liveliness’ or ‘crispness’ - that’s just not how lossy compression works.

Anyway I have way more music in iTunes than I can fully revisit (well over 150.000 songs now), but the value isn’t necessarily in that, it’s just that if I randomize (across everything, or more specifically within genres or decades) I’m pretty much guaranteed to get a hugely more satisfying playlist than the bland average of everything that Spotify serves me. This will be different for everyone tho, I’m sure there are many people where the algorithms have a better hit rate. The real value for me is in the social aspect of it, collaborative playlists, curated playlists, people sharing links (although Youtube does that better) etc.

It’s also annoying that immense chunks of musical history that are really worth investigating are all but totally absent on streaming services, and I don’t just mean 1990s Malaysian death metal demo tapes - the vast majority of canonical orchestral music recordings are not on it, nor is >95% of electronic dance music. Non-Western art music is another gigantic digital wasteland. It’s just not a musical world I want to live in. Ymmv etc.