Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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

people have different audio systems, different size/shaped rooms, different volume levels... maybe physiological differences in hearing abilities too, idk

I did rip all my CDs to FLAC I just convert those to MP3 for my phone. They sound fine to me. Tbh I have MP3s that are 128 and sound fine and plenty more that sound like shit. Might depend on the style of music, the encoder used, etc

I wish everyone felt the way you all do. The people have spoken and they don't give two shits about sound quality.

that's fine, I still do

re making album artwork more prominent.
if you use Sonos desktop app, then this is possible.
double click on the album art in the app and an external mini player is displayed.
click on the cover art again, and it expands and fills half the screen.

(only just found this out by a random click !)

map otm, listener fatigue is real

― sleeve, Friday, June 19, 2020 3:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^^^^^^^

sometimes it makes me feel nauseous !

I pretty much look at streaming like radio. Getting both a tv soundbar, a new cell phone (first in like 6 years) and one of those inexpensive bluetooth little speakers has got me using it, but I use it more like a radio to listen to stuff where I usually never listened to music before.

I kinda dig the funky production on some uploads and listen to LP rips all the time on YT. It kind of puts a bit of mix tape/FM radio gunk with occasional weird EQ changes. I was kind of digging on some rip of the Doors put up by this guy in Spain and he had EQ'ed it out and the bass was real present not like the actual recording at all - but it was kinda interesting hearing it that up front. Kinda like the old radio thing where sometimes old 60s stereo recordings would come out wacky losing some of the recording because of how it was panned out.

I'm a freak though, I got a couple books of CDRs at work and one in my car with a box of CDs. I got couple USB drives in my pickup usally alternating between one with Motorheads discography and another one that has everything I got by the Melvins and the Jesus Lizard. I got that and a live Neville Brothers 2CD and a Augustus Pablo CD that have been in there and played a bunch.

map otm, listener fatigue is real

― sleeve, Friday, June 19, 2020 3:55 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^^^^^^^

sometimes it makes me feel nauseous !

― budo jeru, Saturday, June 20, 2020 1:31 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Listener fatigue with headphones can be really punishing. You may want to look into EQ presets to mitigate it. It's made a world of difference for me.

Oratory1990 tests over-ear and in-ear headphones and posts EQ settings for each tested model to attenuate resonance issues at the affected frequencies. You can use the settings with a Foobar plugin, EQ settings in your player, or a stand-alone EQ app on your computer. Oratory1990 has some EQ freeware suggestions in their FAQ.

maelin and map otm. I don't care about A/B testing, psychoacoustic models or whatever - if it's sampled at 44kHz and I have the space to hold that lossless, I would rather feed that stream to a DAC and not think twice about whether the encode was done properly, or the version of the algorithm, or the validity of a general psychoacoustic model evaluated on whether "Tom's Diner" sounded right or not. Artist makes the music, artist and/or engineer makes a digital file which captures the version they wish to release, done. Maybe I can't hear a difference, but when I play it for my kids, or at low volume or on a cheap speaker, maybe something unwanted is gonna creep in. The stereo in my car plays mp3 files and I have noticed that deep bass like kick drums creates a sort of digital aliasing which sounds like a muted wind chime. That didn't show up in headphones.

Windows Media Player has been dying on me recently. It has the simplest job, so how can it be fucking up?

all windows utilities seem to have this problem, like the photo viewer, recently it takes 30 seconds to open a photo, even when nothing else is open

I still use the Zune desktop software to play digital music on my PC. Works great!

Windows Media Player has been dying on me recently. It has the simplest job, so how can it be fucking up?

Tools > Advanced > Restore Media Library

This deletes the internal index and rebuilds it.
Obviously if your local library is large this can take quite a while, but its definitely something to try out.

The program won't even open for me. But I've been using Groove Music and might download Itunes

ahh - sounds like you need to delete the WMP library via 'under the covers' methods.
suspect once you do that, it will then open.
google re deleting your WMP library - there is a lot of advise.
this should crack it.

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.

Yeah. I was happy with mp3's for a really long time even though they gave me a headache. I'd came to associate music with that kind of ear fatigue and didn't want to even bother listening to music much anymore. But I never realized how bad it was until my ipod broke a couple of summers ago and the only portable player I had was a discman from like 1989 that my cousin loaned me, a real chunky one that skips if you so much as breathe on it a little funny and kills a pair off AA batteries about every 10 minutes. I had forgotten how much I love CD's and that changed everything. I really do need "CD quality or better".

Just got a smartphone for the first time. I haven't even had a cell phone for the past 8 or 9 months. I picked one with a headphone jack thinking it could double as my portable music player. Have discovered that touch screens and music players don't mix. Now what?

what sort of issues are you having with the touch screen + media player combo?

Inadvertently switching the track being played every single time I try to play something, and inadvertently switching the player on and off. It happens when the phone is in my hands, in my pocket, when I'm scrolling through the library.

I thought that immediately closing out of the app and putting the phone to sleep would prevent this, and it doesn't.

The other day it took several attempts just to listen to a 90 second yummy fur song all the way through!

Mobile phone plus media player (Poweramp, highly recommended btw) has been the only way I listen to music for several years now and I have literally not once had any of the problems you describe.

if I put my iPhone in my pocket while listening to music it often skips to the next track or otherwise ruins the listening experience

I've said this before in the I HATE APPLE thread but I believe that's because the touchscreen becomes active whenever you change the volume or skip a track. Or if you've got 'raise to wake' that probably does it too. It's really poor. The lock button should actually fucking lock it.

Assuming deflator has an iPhone, Turn off the tap to wake and raise to wake features and you should be sorted

wow I have never had this happen ON IPHONE

I've been using my (Android) phone for portable listening for ten years now and have never experienced these sort of problems. As calstars suggests, surely tweaking the phone settings will resolve the issue.

My phone takes a 512GB SD card, which holds more than enough music at decent quality. Use a decent player (such as poweramp, as anagram recommends) and off you go.

I'm intrigued by where this is all heading. There are smartwatches and Bluetooth earbuds with on-board storage, not a lot but enough to carry a sampling of music for a vacation. The next logical step is to hook them up to cellular and just stream to your hearts content, but that's an extra monthly charge.