Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

£1.59/month for 100GB on google drive
upload ~200 carefully curated FLAC albums and a few mp3s otherwise
sync to PC
stream on phone
backup on HDD
maybe even backup to microSD since they're so big now

Hahah well HERE'S your fucking nightmare fuel...but this whole setup sounds so WTF to start with.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21019565/murfie-madison-wisconsin-store-stream-cd-vinyl-collection-closed

"the company acted like everything was fine." lol, unprecedented!

I'd come across them a couple of times and was fascinated some investor(s) saw a feasible business here...welp

The real nightmare is "imagine waking up one morning so dumb that you mail your CD collection to a company to rip and stream for you."

Yeah, I know it was ten years ago, but I can't imagine ever thinking this was a good idea

“Digital locker” services were attempted back in the dot-com era, to compete w/Napster, but even those didn’t require mailing in your CDs (a good thing, as the startups promptly failed).

A friend of mine worked at one called Musicbank; after a few years of developing their service, they had a big launch party in downtown SF, featuring a performance by James Brown... then they never launched.

didn't all those digital locker companies for media get eviscerated by record company lawsuits?

That happened with MP3.com, and they retooled their service. Other startups were trying to be legit from the jump:

Musicbank has spent much of its brief existence securing licenses from the major record labels and publishers to create its music-locker service.

1tb microsd cards finally fell from the consistent $480 they've been at since they first existed, to $220. 2tb solid-state external drives fell to $250.

A 1tb drive can fit about 8,000 albums at VBR V-0 mp3, which is good enough for my imperfect ears. So finally at the day where I can carry my whole life worth of music with me at once. (The dream started with a 100GB player that used a laptop HDD, back around 2004.)

mp3.com, insert a disc and it let you download mp3s of it. It was like seeing into the... exceedingly odd early internet present

lol mp3.com lols. Reminds me of that “Ultimate Band List” site it’s whatever it was called

This thing was a front probably for all of those used cd resellers on ebay & amazon marketplace with like 180000k reviews at 88% approval.

MP3.com also was an early electronic music bedroom producer upload hub. I had a stuff on there and got on CDR comps in the Netherlands and UK from it. It was pretty big at one point and fun.

i've heard of sites/services that'll rip music you send in to them, but they send it back to you once they're done

don't know how many are still around if any

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/5/21121594/crossies-murfie-madison-wisconsin-arkansas-1-million-abandoned-cds?

A guy bought the Murfie stock for $6,000. He wants to continue the business, basically... With no employees. Also, makerspace. Makers like CDs, right?

going to be a kickass jukebox at that makerspace

"we have over 9 millions songs, guys, why do you keep playing Under Pressure over and over?"

Does anyone host their digital collection on the cloud for handy streaming, and if so, which service?

I use Google Play Music. I can automatically upload stuff anything I rip and/or download and the limit is pretty decent (50,000 songs). You don't have control of quality but the service is decent enough and my ears fucked enough that it doesn't really matter.

i wish their janky upload software was better though, it hasn't worked altogether right in years for me

Aye, it's pretty shit. Albeit, I've changed laptops recently and it seems to be working OK.

Does anyone host their digital collection on the cloud for handy streaming, and if so, which service?

What's the cost attached to that, Tuomas (if it isn't rude to ask)?

I think Cloudplayer cost 5 euros, it's a one-time payment, no monthly fees. With Dropbox I have the standard plan, 12 euros per month for 2 terabytes. (I store other stuff there too besides music.)

Tuomas that is bad ass, I'm inspired! I could fit most of my core collection into 2 TB

Yeah, I've been pretty happy with it, I tried other solutions earlier, but this is the only one I've found where you can stream your collection losslessly without having a computer/server on all the time.

I've also been using Google Play Music for years, have about 25k songs uploaded (50k limit). It's great for streaming through web brower, phone, tablet, to Chromecast Audio, plus you can download locally to your phone when getting on flights or out of coverage area. The uploader software is pretty basic but works fine. You can basically point it at a folder and it will upload everything from that folder. You could also point it at iTunes, but i'm not sure if that functionality still works with the split in Catalina to have separate Music, Podcast, etc apps. Google will try to match your uploads to their copy, but you can always tell it to use the original upload instead. I usually rip at 320 and upload those, and then in the app you can tell it to stream at highest quality (which goes up to 320kbs). I haven't found anything else free which is as easy and flexible, the one downside being it only supports mp3s.

That sounds like a good option/solution, Tuomas

Hmm, yeah, had never considered Dropbox before. Intriguing! I may well consider it. (My collection is at...5 TB I think? Close to 6?)

May try that as well. Didn't Google kill "Play" a while back?

i use plex to stream my music collection but currently testing out jellyfin

I'm sure there are other apps that do the same thing as Cloudplayer, but I've been mostly satisfied it. It automatically updates anything you add to the relevant cloud folder without much lag, and organising things by tag works really nicely, you can browse things by song artist, album artist, song, album, genre, composer etc, plus it allows you to edit tags on the cloud files. If there's one major downside it's that it doesn't have desktop app, so if you have lots wonky tags like I do, editing them by hand on the tablet/phone can be kinda tiresome. Sometimes I'll rather just download the folders from Dropbox, edit them on the computer with a program that allows mass editing, and then upload them back. But other than mass tag editing, Cloudplayer does pretty much what any decent non-cloud player does too.

it doesn't have desktop app

dang, that's too bad, probably a dealbreaker for me, but I sure do love the FLAC compatibility

I've got my 2.5TB music library on a Mac Mini which runs 24/7 and streams using Plex. PlexAmp as a desktop player, Prism on the iPhone.

I thought about the Dropbox/CloudPlayer method but their 3TB tier is still a bit pricy and CloudPlayer is Android-only unfortunately.

I’m curious, do any/all these services provide gapless playback wrt audio files?

Sorry if already answered

Cloudplayer does, yeah.

Not sure of this is the right place for this, but anyone have experience with FIIO music players. My ipod classic is on it's last legs and I was considering moving to one of them. Any mac compatibility issues? they handle playlists ok? UI issues?

'so much dust' by hubble (from centennial) hits 317kbps on LAME 3.99 -V0

bring me your most intricate variable mp3s

Before I list it on eBay, is anyone here interested in purchasing a two year old 16TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual disk array? It's a 2x8TB hardware RAID, Thunderbolt 2, USB 3. It was my main archive drive but I just plain ran out of room.

i, a noob, presume this works fine with windows? also how much

just DM'ed you.

i pay £2/month to store 100GB of FLAC/mp3 on google drive. it syncs to any machine in a few hours, and you can stream your collection through native android music apps. after years of data loss during transfers, running out of storage space, hardware players failing... this is the most efficient and reliable solution i've found.

Not sure of this is the right place for this, but anyone have experience with FIIO music players. My ipod classic is on it's last legs and I was considering moving to one of them. Any mac compatibility issues? they handle playlists ok? UI issues?

I use a Fiio M7- with a 400GB SD card inside. (It can handle up to 512 iirc?) I like it a lot, very good sound quality, only a few irritating bugs, good battery life. Supposedly you can install select Android apps on it but I haven't tried it.

Why don't any desktop music players let you view album artwork full-screen? or at least bigger than a passport photo? I end up using the Miniplayer in iTunes for this alone.

Also, anyone have opinions on https://audirvana.com/ ?

i've never understood why you can't make the artwork big in spotify. make it fill the screen ffs if you want, why not?

lukas that page says 'a ready-to-play audio data stream using the shortest possible path.' which sends my snakeoil warning flags a-flappin

https://audirvana.com/technology/

i mean that's an impressive ... number of words strung together.

so it's like using foobar2000's WASAPI plugin... for free. I get the nice feeling from knowing nothing else on the system can mess with the audio, but hearing a difference?....nah. I'd rather play with a software equalizer anyway (Equalizer APO / Peace)