Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

i bought a refurbished ipod classic (128gb flash mod) and gave up smartphone this week. no more will my android tell me to turn down my music, or interrupt me. i am the one who presses pause now, fuckers.

I genuinely don't understand this. I have an android phone with a 256GB SD card just for my music. It never interrupts me or tells me to lower the volume. I can listen to music at uncomfortably loud volumes if I want. Surely this is a settings issue. I just don't get the logic of the separate iPod advocates - maybe someone can explain.

I get annoyed with texts and notifications and the like when listening to music on my iPhone during walks, so I usually put it in airplane mode.

xp I had a Sony phone that would occasionally turn down your volume if it was over 60% volume with some kind of reminder about protecting your ears. No matter what app you were using. Some European initiative in that area. Annoying. You don't even know what impedance are my listening implements oi!

Notifications and stuff, i get the appeal of a device clean of them.

xp my phone is in Do Not Disturb mode 100% of the time, unless I'm expecting a call

I used to get that warning / turning down when I was listening on an underpowered Bluetooth speaker, might have shouted at the phone a bit.

this thread has put me on to Plex. i'm setting it up now, very hopeful it will end the suck.

― davey

i'm just now trying the software out. immediate impression is that this Plex thing is much, much more agreeable than ASUSTOR's native apps.

i do have tons and tons of comps/singles/EPs... at least Plex seems to *gasp* find all the songs from compilations and group them to play together (at least it did for the first couple i tried). Siegbran, could u elaborate a li'l on the shortcomings you alluded to? i'm wondering what difficulties to expect.

- Plex only indexes Album Artist, not Track Artist. So when you navigate to the Artist, you only see their albums, not their songs on compilations.
- search doesn't always return tracks from compilation albums
- Plex stores the Year only on the album level, so if the individual songs are from different years (say, in the range 1995-2015), too bad, Plex will store them all as 2015
- Plex stores Genres only on the album level, so if you have an album with nine "Rock" songs and one "Reggae" song, Plex will store for all ten tracks "Rock, Reggae". It will then put the rock songs in the automated reggae playlists, etc.

I genuinely don't understand this. I have an android phone with a 256GB SD card just for my music. It never interrupts me or tells me to lower the volume. I can listen to music at uncomfortably loud volumes if I want. Surely this is a settings issue. I just don't get the logic of the separate iPod advocates - maybe someone can explain.

― Duke, Sunday, 28 February 2021 23:05 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

as cal noted, listening to your music on a device engineered to do nothing but play music allows you to give the music your full attention - i'm not interrupted by phone calls, notifications, occasionally faulty touch screens, auto-updating apps that change everything i had configured... i had a decent sony smartphone with a reasonable sounding headphone port, but it pales in comparison to the ipod. volume varies upon the sensitivity and impedance of your headphones. personally, i genuinely don't understand why anybody who listens to music so frequently wouldn't carry a dedicated DAP.

I just don't want to be that guy at the airport taking up two wall sockets charging my four different devices

I've thought of DAPs before but I'd miss CarPlay and AirPlay.

i dl'd an old version of itunes (10.1) for windows earlier and it runs smooth as butter, what gives? they really ruined/bloated it with cloud features and all that fluff...

as cal noted, listening to your music on a device engineered to do nothing but play music allows you to give the music your full attention - i'm not interrupted by phone calls, notifications, occasionally faulty touch screens, auto-updating apps that change everything i had configured... i had a decent sony smartphone with a reasonable sounding headphone port, but it pales in comparison to the ipod. volume varies upon the sensitivity and impedance of your headphones. personally, i genuinely don't understand why anybody who listens to music so frequently wouldn't carry a dedicated DAP.

― maelin, Monday, 1 March 2021 14:29 (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

You can mute notifications with a swipe. My touch screens have never been faulty. I've never experienced auto-updating apps impacting my listening experience - and again you can set the updates so that they don't happen when you're out and about. The only thing you mention that seems a reasonable interruption is a phone call. Thankfully I hardly ever get those, and I could mute them in a second before leaving the house, if I wanted to be uninterrupted. Fair enough if you get a better sound from your iPod, but I only listen on the go in an urban environment, where I'll always have a certain level of background noise and don't strive for perfect sound.

I only listen on the go in an urban environment
I only listen on the go in an urban environment
I only listen on the go in an urban environment

“ You can mute notifications with a swipe.”
No shit?

Well yes. All of the objections raised by maelin can literally be turned off in a second in the settings.

If I mute notifications I still get a brief, annoying dip in the music when they pop up, this has been true of all of the many android phones I've owned, no I am not buying an iPhone.

Well yes. All of the objections raised by maelin can literally be turned off in a second in the settings.

Yes. For real. Everything can be completely muted in a second.

Like while music is playing?

tbh for me a big part of it is that if i have to turn it up or down or do something with my music it means i'm reaching for something other than my phone, and the less i'm reaching for my phone means that much less temptation to thoughtlessly scroll through websites and apps

Like while music is playing?

― calstars, Tuesday, 2 March 2021 00:39

Are you 90 years old? If you choose to listen to music on your phone, you can mute everything in a second. No sound, no vibration. No calls. No notifications.

And let's face it, you would not hear those anyway if you were listening to music on a separate device.

Not sure how this would be done, though, if say you’re listening to something you really love, or are having a transcendent experience with, and then mommy calls, wouldn’t your experience be interrupted. You’re saying I would just swipe but

an automatic pause when the children in the bar become too shrill imo

Not sure how this would be done, though, if say you’re listening to something you really love, or are having a transcendent experience with, and then mommy calls, wouldn’t your experience be interrupted. You’re saying I would just swipe but

I think Duke's point is that you can turn on "Do not disturb" before you start listening. On my Android phone this is simply done by swiping down from the top (like you would do to turn on/off wifi, airplane mode, screen rotation, etc etc) and tapping the "Do not disturb" icon.

There are a bunch of options that can be set for "Do not disturb", such as duration and exceptions. See here. Of course, the exact configuration of possibilities may depend on version of OS and hardware.

my point was that smartphones are not conducive to paying full attention to anything, at all

when i had a smartphone, i spent considerable time locking it down. i installed a minimal launcher, deleted unnecessary apps, turned off all notifications... yet still found myself interrupted, frustrated and disturbed. it's all too easy to habitually check email, youtube, text or whatever while 'listening' to stuff... smartphones are engineered to be compulsive, a habit, a responsibility. keeping all your digital music on one means it can just become noise in your ears. idk, ymmv.

The appeal of dedicated devices is that they sound better and don't even offer the opportunity for distractions / staring at yet another screen. Yes, you can mute notifications on your phone, I get that. It's not the same.

My ideal would be to downgrade to a flip phone and then get a dedicated player, but unfortunately my current job requires me to have a smartphone so I'll settle for the SD card approach for now.

this is why I use a Kindle, I definitely get it. I'd quite like a standalone DAP that supported streaming though – from a local server or a Spotify. All the ones I've seen are like the iPod Touch and include all kinds of apps and notifications, which misses the point

many xps to Siegbran, shit, it sucks having e.g. a bunch of missing remixes when i run an artist search with Plex. i've been reading the Plex forums and kind of scratching my head. why the hell do they afford filters by field but no full-text search? and god knows why they insist on indexing by Album Artist only but it seems senseless. meticulously re-structuring my collection in the filesystem as they prescribe is way, way too much to ask. my directory tree is not a complete mess and i wish it could fill in the blanks.

i guess the answer would be to use a tag editor to write the Track Artist over to the Album Artist field if (and only if) the Album Artist is not already populated? i don't know how to do that on whatever flavor of linux my NAS uses, and running that operation over my entire collection could be destructive if i make any mistakes, so i dread to try it, but idk what else i could do.

i guess until i sort this out i'll just access the files directly on my home network. i need to work with the files a lot anyway to populate the much smaller Rekordbox library on my laptop.

If you look in the internal Plex database structure, the reason why it’s so crappy with metadata becomes pretty clear. Basically, “track artists” were hacked in as an afterthought, 13 years ago when they added some music functionality to a primarily movie/tv oriented server, the developers didn’t really think things through. At this point so much other stuff (tons of apps, the web UI) is built on it that they’d almost have to start from scratch to do it properly.

daaaaaang

well maybe now's my chance to learn a fun new linux tag manager!

I ditched Apple Music a few months back - I’d like to claim this was an ideologically-driven stance against the poverty wages streaming pays (and this def has a feel-good factor), but tbh I buy a lot from Bandcamp (including a few subscriptions) and between that, a few Patreons, radio and podcasts, I was probably only listening to a couple of albums I didn’t *own* a month that didn’t really make it worth a regular tenner. So at the minute I’m just listening to stuff in my collection, not anything from streaming catalogues.

On iOS, the Bandcamp app is good enough for streaming my collection there, and for everything I’ve bought/ripped/acquired elsewhere the Doppler 2 app is a great (and easy to use) audio player that you can just drop files into over WiFi (including FLACs). At home, everything’s in a file/folder structure on a cheap NAS that’s hooked up to my Sonos.

In a moment of insanity on Friday, I suddenly thought “I should just sign up for iTunes Match” - £22 per year to have all my music in the cloud, all in one app/place. So I set my computer up to transcode all my FLACs to ALAC, build a new iTunes/Music.app library and get it all uploading. But after 48 hours of solid chugging away, it had managed to match and upload about 10% of my library before stalling; restarting Music.app put me back to the “Gathering information about your library” stage for at least an hour before I realised this would probably be at least a week of solid work, gave up and requested a refund.

This isn’t really apropos of anything discussed in this thread recently, just marvelling at how digital, far from the promise of effortlessness, is actually sometimes the most labour-intensive way to enjoy music.

i've spent years attempting to carefully archive & maintain my digital collection for the past ten years, and i agree with you, bamboo... it's been quite time consuming to keep up with metadata, album art, deciding on formats, occasionally transcoding, hard drive failures, migration from one machine to the other... if you invest in digital as a paradigm, you've to be prepared with its nature. it's hard to say whether it is volatile by nature, but the lack of universality and standards is frustrating. i too just had to convert all my lossless to ALAC just so i could fill my new ipod. that also meant refreshing & moving my library in software, which fucked with all my album art and stuff. it's all too easy to delete stuff, too, and cloud storage can be problematic. still, i'd rather this than play the vinyl game.

i use puddletag has a linux metadata editor fwiw. you can point out at, say, an artist level directory and see all the tracks under that and edit each one individually, useful for spotting inconsistencies.

I'm looking at you siouxsie / Siouxsie and / & / And the / The banshees / Banshees

Roon is pricey af but worth it for automating the attribution and consistency of my music collection's metadata. I fix the errors manually but that is infrequent. Love my Sony DAP too. Convenience or sound quality ... pick one. I'll pick sound quality and music focus almost every time.

Tagging is only one part of it - it’s mostly the server/players support for what’s in the tags that’s lacking. You can put almost every piece of useful information in tags, but it’s doesn’t matter if it isn’t used.

- Multiple value fields support (multiple artists per song or album, multiple genres, etc) is rare.
- Release type (album/single/ep/live/compilation) also rarely supported.
- Composer/Conductor/Remixer/Producer roles, can all be stored in tags, few players use it.
- different date fields: original release year (for covers, live versions, classical compositions), recording year, release year can all be tagged, but rarely are all three supported.

Spotify and Apple Music are pretty bad in that respect too, though.

I set my computer up to transcode all my FLACs to ALAC

gave up and requested a refund

alac is the worst lossless codec, unless you use a checksumming filesystem or some other integrity checking method, i'd recommend switching those back to flac

i've spent years attempting to carefully archive & maintain my digital collection for the past ten years, and i agree with you, bamboo... it's been quite time consuming to keep up with metadata, album art, deciding on formats, occasionally transcoding, hard drive failures, migration from one machine to the other... if you invest in digital as a paradigm, you've to be prepared with its nature. it's hard to say whether it is volatile by nature, but the lack of universality and standards is frustrating. i too just had to convert all my lossless to ALAC just so i could fill my new ipod. that also meant refreshing & moving my library in software, which fucked with all my album art and stuff. it's all too easy to delete stuff, too, and cloud storage can be problematic. still, i'd rather this than play the vinyl game.

― maelin, Sunday, March 14, 2021 5:43 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

there is a third option

alac is the worst lossless codec, unless you use a checksumming filesystem or some other integrity checking method, i'd recommend switching those back to flac

― chihuahuau, Sunday, 14 March 2021 12:08

Ta - I kept all the original FLACs, and having admitted defeat on trying things Apple's way, I binned all the ALACs.

everything should be ripped but someone mentioned pole the other day and i knew i have the cd but it's not on the drive. so, now going through all my cds and checking them against the 4.6k in the list. starting on the cds in the bedroom, got as far as kraftwerk and found 1 other so far, Boymerang.

Somehow I've misplaced an LP or cassette here and there but only when my kids were little did CDs wind up in the wrong place.

I've just spent half an hour wondering about the reissue of beautronics only to eventually remember i bought the vinyl. which means i'm probably missing 4 tracks.

the autechre eps in the box were different from the originals as well, so they need doing even though they are 90% the same.

I have been maintaining a digital music collection for almost 20 years. Unfortunately my philosophy changes from time to time - some albums I've removed the bonus tracks to a separate folder, others I've added even more to the rip. Some single edits have been kept, others jettisoned. Some covers are of the source CD, others are of the original 7" or 12". Every now and the I come across something and fix it but for the most part I can't be bothered. At least it's all there.

Likewise it's been over 20 years since I stopped buying vinyl and started collecting digital albums. Well over a decade since I'd stopped buying CDs as a practice. I'd never go back to physical media. The "authenticity" argument increasingly seems like bullshit to me. Do I consider digital purchases to be tangible? Sure, although it did require a slow shift in perspective. But the benefits of a digital collection are indisputable for those who don't cultivate the packaging fetishism: the small physical size of storage boxes, the immediate access based on artist or album or genre or year or label, the ability to easily share to other platforms, the ability to locate ROIOs or fan creations and legit albums in the same place, and the ability to resequence albums at will. I could never return to the limitations of vinyl, CD, or streaming.

Counterpoint: can’t roll a joint on a FLAC.

You can charge your vape in the USB though.

I’ve been thinking about starting to collect vinyl- at least a small collection and a record player. I gladly sold the *last of my CDs about 12 years ago, but since having a kid I can’t help thinking about how I used to go through my dad’s records looking at the covers and eventually playing them myself. She didn’t even know what a vinyl record is until recently, yet from the earliest age has wanted to look at the album art when listening to music on one of my apps. It also has a desert island kind of appeal: What would make the cut? Not just for me, but for her?

* (not really... I still have about 20 I couldn’t part with)