Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

OTM Siegbran, esp regarding a better hit rate on a simple shuffle across my own library. The only advantages of Spotify / Apple Music for me are playing a song/album I don't have loaded up on my iPod or sampling something new. The latter can normally be satisfied via Bandcamp or Youtube.

What I really need is an affordable 2TB iPod or equivalent..hmmm.

We're not there yet, but you can get a DAP with two card slots and load up 800Gb or so. I have a 128Gb microsd card in my phone for those times when cellular wireless isn't available (or my kids have maxed out my data plan!).

I use Spotify as you described, for sampling new things, but mostly I'm happy to be my own cloud. There's lots of easy self-streaming options for those with large libraries.

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.

I didn't meant to imply FLAC superiority. I was just giving the details on how Spotify sounded compared to my own rips and player. Spotify sounded tinnier on the few comparisons that I made. Maybe this isn't the case with all Spotify files but it was enough for me to shy away from using the service for home listening. It's the Premium version too, if that makes any difference.

spotify tracks are .ogg conversions of the same master material everyone gets, iirc. I think spotify sounds fine (except for the vast portfolio of Universal Music Group material that sounds unlistenable due to watermarking).

As for me though, it's only for evaluating my next purchases (from emusic or whatever). And I've been done with iTunes for years now, gimme 200gb micro SD cards and simple folder structures. Finder or Windows Explorer are my iTunes.

Doesn't Spotify quality vary depending on Internet speed like youtube does?

The Spotify web player streams at 128 kbps, which is terrible. On the desktop app it's 160 kbps. You don't have to be an audiophile nerd to hear the difference between CD quality and 128.

If you are Premium you can bump those up to 256 and 320 kbps which should provide a good listening experience for most situations.

I’ve always wondered how that practically works for people, folder structures only worked for me when I had a couple hundred albums, but quickly became really impractical.

I mean it’s fine to file things quickly, but how do you build your folder structure that makes it easily navigable?
- Year/Artist/Album? Great for year-end polling season, but pretty unwieldy if you’re looking for something in a given genre, or want to see all albums by an artist. Plus, how to do compilation albums with material from multiple years?
- Artist/Year/Album? This is more or less how iTunes auto-sorts if you let it but you’ll get an incredibly big root folder, and what happens with tracks on multi-artist compilations?
- Genre/Artist/Year/Album? Complete chaos with artists that span multiple genres, and multi-genre compilations.

alphabetical folders for A-Z, plus # and "va" for comps

everything within those folders is alphabetical by artist, one folder per album. sometimes if I have a lot of singles, etc. for an artist I'll make a subfolder.

in practice, this only works out to around 4500 individual folders in the regular albums section

also have separate folders for MP3 and D1mead0zen downloads, organized similarly but I had to use first name/last name for those, to my great annoyance.

I still use hierarchical structures (genre/artist/year album) but am increasingly wondering why I bother. Probably better to focus one's efforts on tagging and sort by those tags (display by artist, album, genre, country, year, label, catalog number, etc.) If you want to transfer a file to another machine, you should be able to right click on the title in the player to locate the file on your hard drive.

And yeah, there's probably some psychological condition associated with this level of obsessiveness.

Yeah, I don't really worry (much) about folder names. Artist - Album (Year) [Format]. The tags are where it's at.

I don't even file by album, just by artist

By year and that's it.

In my external HD archive I just use pretty broad genre folders on the top level (Classical, Soundtrack, Rock, Other Music) and within each of those it's just A-Z by artist.

I know this sounds crazy but if I want to make a special playlist I get a modest size micro SD card (I usually have some around) and throw the relevant material into a folder on that. Sure, the elegance of metadata is only having to have all these files live in one place and then navigate by tag, but the cheapness of micro SD cards means that I just say fuck it. So I have a 200GB micro SD with my Soundtrack library on it. Another 200GB one for classical. Another 128GB one for rock and weird shit. None of those duplicate each other at all. But I have another one with five or six themed folders in it. Each folder there has a bunch of album folders thrown in from whatever genre because they fit the theme. There's also a 128GB card which is just a single huge folder full of albums from any genre at all lwhich fulfill the qualification of being instrumental.

I seriously need to get over my fear of ditching file hierarchies. Sure, it'd mean fresh backups of everything but after that, file management would be entirely through the player. There also seems to be an increase in albums that span more than one genre, which makes organizing and searching with Explorer much more difficult.

It made sense when you were sharing more music, you could just drop the folders on a disc/drive and everything was all neat and tidy for them. Rendered moot with streaming.

Yeah, that's a good point. Folders were beneficial for file sharing. But having not done that in over a decade, it's a much lesser argument for me.

There's also a 128GB card which is just a single huge folder full of albums from any genre at all which fulfill the qualification of being instrumental.

This. I never thought I'd use the "instrumental" tag but it's become one of my largest folders. It's, uh, slightly more descriptive than Miscellany.

The way I’ve done it for the past ten years or so: to make backups a bit easier I create a new folder each year, and throughout the year dump all downloaded albums & single tracks in there, add to iTunes (used to be other players but I’ve gone back) and fix tags in there if needed.

Plex (my self-streaming/family-sharing service) is smart enough to pick up any added new music automatically. Workload is pretty minimal this way, no need to rename folder/file names.

Xpost I just find that a genre-blind directory of instrumental music sorted by album title is the scenario that actually leads to me jumping around between radically different musical cosmoi. I do have a genre-blind favorite albums folder (lots of which are vocal obv) but there, I tend to cue up my next choice from the same tradition as the thing I’m already listening to.

I haven't previewed a streaming service that i've enjoyed. Picking a couple tracks and letting the algorithm choose the next tracks usually results in something that sounds very "same-y" in they lack sufficient variability in genre/tempo/era (or whatever their secret sauce spits out). Making a mix is far more efficient when sitting at my computer with my 4TB stax. In my vehicle, i can easily carry 500GB of music on microSD that fits into a wallet no larger than a stack 3 or 4 credit cards.

Another factor i have yet to see mentioned is that even if the streaming service could produce an interesting mix of "unknown" music, when i'm out and about, the last thing i want to do is keep checking my device to see what's playing. I mean, i'm busy doing shit, man; i hate being that plugged in where i have to check the device, a watch, some holographic retinal projector every few minutes (or worse).

Getting to be an old fart, but i have a growing disdain for people continuously checking their devices. I work in a time-critical field and nothing's so important that it can't wait for a convenient pause in my main activities to check notifications.

so you want a streaming service that gives you 'different-y' songs, but not so different-y that you'd have to look at your player to see what they are

congrats, you have the first-world-est problem i've ever heard of

i mean, if you're so busy doing time-critical shit, man, those sounds are only gonna distract you

good luck

To be fair, with Spotify once you've been using it a while, it gets very good at coming up with new stuff that suits your taste: I assume it needs a decent-size sample of your listening habits to get this good, though. previewing it a bit probably wouldn't cut it.

Mookie -- I don't have a problem; i listen to music just fine -- the streaming services simply don't yet offer an option i find suitable for my listening style and tastes. I didn't say i was so busy doing time-critical shit to listen to music via streaming, i was trying to make the point (and a secondary one at that) that i don't favor the position of always being "plugged-in". My profession requires i always be available within a reasonable time-frame and that's plenty connected for me. When i'm mobile, i use the time listening to things i haven't yet, doing audio "homework" like sifting through large swath's of individual careers, or just getting down with stuff i like. I've discovered little new material on streaming services -- i do read a ton of blogs, still, i doubt my lifetime will ever see an AI superior to the experience of listening to a knowledgeable DJ dolling out their craft.

I use a product called MuvAudio that makes my entire stax available to any wi-fi device around the house (or anywhere else i'd care to pay the extra data fees for) to listen to my collection in the resolution and format i've stored it in. If it strikes me to run chronologically through the early works of Luis Bonfa, i can set that up on microSD in about 3 minutes and take that 5+ hours of discography on-the-go.

Mince -- I'm sure the services may improve song choices with a larger data set, i just don't know if i have it in me to put the time into the process -- it requires sufficient effort now keeping "new" material updated and properly tagged as it is. Maybe if a service could look at my entire stax and make some suggestions it would be more rewarding because the stuff i like most is not necessarily the stuff i listen to most; follow?

Another factor i have yet to see mentioned is that even if the streaming service could produce an interesting mix of "unknown" music, when i'm out and about, the last thing i want to do is keep checking my device to see what's playing. I mean, i'm busy doing shit, man; i hate being that plugged in where i have to check the device, a watch, some holographic retinal projector every few minutes (or worse).

― bodacious ignoramus, Thursday, April 5, 2018 9:02 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I relate to this. I don't stream music, but I do listen to the local jazz / classical station when I'm driving around running errands. I consider myself a very cautious driver (only one fender bender in 12+ years) but have narrowly avoided a disturbing number of potential accidents since I started using Shazam a year or two ago. Once upon a time if I heard a song on the radio I liked that I didn't recognize I would have to note the time on the clock, and go find the station's online playlist later in the day to find out what it was. I may go back to doing that.

Amen, brother paul

So it looks like Google are going to pull the plug on Google Play Music or at least merge it with 'YouTube Remix'.

I have 15k + of my own tracks uploaded to GPM so this is potentially a complete ball ache. It was inevitable I suppose given their track record of pulling products.

Now considering a Dropbox + Cloud Player combo. Will have to shell out £7.99 a month for DB though.

I always wondered how they’d ever make money off Google Play Music and it seems they never figured that out either. I’ll predict Amazon is going to be next to pull the plug on uploads, Apple will not be far away.

It’s going to be either self-streaming (Plex ahead of the pack there I’d say) or the Spotify model.

i remain v. pleased with subsonic

wtf i pay for google play music

i'm just going to carry a portable radio from now on

Yet another reason to keep your own shit; fuck 'em all.

^^^

Every time I think I might trust a streaming service or a third party server (like Google Play et al), mitigating factors rear their ugly heads. Apple Music's integration with uploads was a world class shitshow (and I think that they actually wanted to please those of us who don't trust a third party.) For collectors, there's virtually no reason to expect labels and lawyers to be able to find a global copyright agreement in hopes that someday EVERYTHING will be online and hosted by someone other than me.

I've tried everything in this thread (and more) and honestly if I'm streaming my own stuff, Plex is the best solution.

I’ll predict Amazon is going to be next to pull the plug on uploads

Fingers crossed that Google maintains the upload service but I'm not optimistic. I've got 30,000+ uploaded and it's been amazing having access to that wherever I am, especially with its integration with Sonos and Chromecast Audio.

Yet another reason to keep your own shit; fuck 'em all.

Why stream at all when there are inexpensive players with great soind and dual micro-SD slots and 400gb microSD are not too expensive and 512gb are around the corner? Then you don't have to rely on data service/connections, you can use Android music applications that can readily deal with large collections (I'm somewhere upwards of 80k tracks ripped from my CDs, with great results using GoneMAD player), you don't have to pay a subscription to access your own music, and it can't go "poof" (assuming you back up on other physical media). It's honestly the golden age for digitizing ones own collection, but even real music lovers are cashing it in for the illusory "cloud" scam...

That’s doable for most ppl yes, if you have a <250 GB library, mine’s around 1.5 TB (200k tracks) so the all-on-my-phone dream is still 6-7 years away.

man if i find something i like on youtube i download that shit.

streaming services to me seem mostly useful for people who don't care what they're listening to. that's not a diss. from a listener's standpoint, i'm not sure there's a huge advantage, in the long term, of having a strong attachment to particular songs or albums. streaming services are probably pretty good for discovering things you might not have heard, which is something i spend a lot of time and effort doing.

my library won't fit on my phone but i do carry a laptop around with me most places, and that will fit my library.

I guess for folks who insist on FLAC for every album, 2x 400gb (or 2x 512gb) isn't sufficient space. But 800gb holds almost 8,000 records at mp3 VBR V-0...

My entire music collection is mp3 VBR V-0 and it's still 1.5TB+ and growing. Like Siegbran I'm holding out for some sort of all-in-one-place dream solution.