Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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)

I've always thought there could be loads of cool image manipulation effects a player could spice up the playback screen with, but all the visualization plugins I ever see are either the square artwork boringly bouncing/panning around the screen, or one of those super jumpy VU meter/spectrum analyser things.

I'm interested too, Elvis T, if mookie doesn't want in

I've always thought there could be loads of cool image manipulation effects a player could spice up the playback screen with, but all the visualization plugins I ever see are either the square artwork boringly bouncing/panning around the screen, or one of those super jumpy VU meter/spectrum analyser things.

pretty sure that RealPlayer or WMP used to do such things way way back.
you could play a track and have your whole screen turn into a never ending psych light show.

it's funny all that kind of topped out about then. Techmoan on YouTube has a good collection of music visualization hardware videos, including some recent inventions. For a while I was running a system passing through a tapedeck just for its cool VU meter needles.

stet, mookie had to pass - just emailed you.

i bought a 2009 imac recently for some audio engineering purposes and made the grave mistake of thinking i could use it as a media center. hoo, boy. i spent about a week looking for a program that could play FLAC with an actually usable GUI. it took forever. i ended up with Swinsian.

it really beats me why we keep .mp3 as a standard these days. what a redundant format. there's no need to compress audio now that we've enough storage space to deal with lossless. i'm just kind of surprised it didn't go out of fashion. file formats and digital storage are ever-changing, yet for the past two decades we've more or less settled on .mp3...

For the Apple ecosystem there's Apple Lossless, it's pretty easy to convert everything (it's lossless, after all).

But the popularity of mp3 isn't too difficult to understand, every device and music software made in the past 20 years plays it, the patents have all expired so it's free to use, and nobody hears the difference anyway.

once I invested in a good DAC, headphone amp, and headphones and still couldn't hear any difference at all between FLAC and 320kbps mp3, I converted all the FLAC I had to mp3. V0 probably good enough, but I have the space :)

hi res FLAC even. Via WASAPI even. lol

the bummer about having my whole collection as mp3 is when I go to turn a mix into an mp3, ie another round of lossy compression.

not exactly sure what you mean, but mp3 directcut can cut/merge/etc mp3s without re-encoding. i'm sure there's something similar for mac

does editing mp3s actually result in much degradation? I mean it depends what the algorithm actually does, but if the encoder was good presumably it wouldn't have to discard much information to make the new mp3?

I regularly transcode non-mp3s and mp3s over 192 to 192, to save space when I put music on my phone, and can't really tell the difference (on earbuds anyway)

it's definitely not like making a tape copy of a tape copy anyway

I second the mp3directcut recommendation

right now I'm doing a mix in Audacity, cutting up and applying effects to the tracks I'm mixing, so mp3directcut isn't an option. thanks for the recommendation though. CP's probably right anyway, just being neurotic about the 2x lossy encoding.

People happily stream Spotify tracks with horrible mp3 bitrates, why would they bother transitioning to lossless?

Their free version doesn't even let you ask for 320 kbps mp3s.

I would wanna go lossless for mixes, unless it's just for a friend or its something that'll be on, like, mixcloud anyways.

More power to folks who can hear extra detail, btw...I wonder if I would've in my 20s. The equipment upgrade was definitely worth doing anyways... pretty much everything sounds great.

just putting in my perennial, idiosyncratic but deeply held 'i can tell the difference' note here. not on everything, not even on 50% of stuff, not necessarily as an a/b thing but it absolutely makes listening to something more work for me and wears my ears out over time. fwiw i don't happily stream spotify tracks, i don't use spotify, spotify can lick my nuts :)

i have just finished upgrading my cd rips from 256 to 320 (only taken 3 years!), and i can confirm there is a massive difference in the sonics.

V0 and 320 are identical to me

map otm, listener fatigue is real