Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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)

in a similar album art vein, i have spent the last week getting something (an unused 6" Nook ereader) to display artist name and track title for whatever's playing on my pi jukebox (because it's usually in shuffle mode and often unfamiliar). but having a nice pic of the sleeve would improve things no end.

Yeah artwork is still really important. I used to wish that digital media files could support animated gifs but nah, moving images would probably quickly become annoyingly distracting. Does anyone know why there is so little artwork included with Bandcamp downloads? Is this coincidence or rather the result of some BC policy?

Label/artist laziness, I think. Bandcamp allows you to upload a full booklet (even a whole book, if you want) as a PDF. Most people just include a JPEG of the album cover, though. Some of the metal releases I've bought, which have really elaborate cover paintings, have included sketches and/or alternate versions of the cover, which is sort of cool.

Funny, I find a lot of them go overboard on the album cover, with a really hi res version of it *embedded in every mp3*. I'll punt it out to cover.jpg when I notice. PDFs are great but rare. Weren't U2 and Apple supposed to fix that after they gifted us that album? Full digital album experiences or whatever.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/u2-working-apple-new-music-format-thats-impossible-pirate-n207491

I forgot there was some piracy aspect. Wonder what they were on about. Songs of Innocence feels like more than 7 years ago.

I find a lot of them go overboard on the album cover, with a really hi res version of it *embedded in every mp3*.

I think Bandcamp, not the label, might be the ones doing that, because when I first upload an album I have to do it as WAV files (which you can't attach an image to) and give them the art separately. They do the MP3 (and AAC, and other format) encoding on their end.

if you can listen to it, you can pirate it, this will always be the case, not surprised Bono is one of the few still tilting at this particular windmill.

can't pirate your music if it's so terrible everyone immediately deletes it

As long as you can play the file on a computer then it's simple for someone to capture the data and convert it to one of the usual formats.

I think Bono is at the forefront of making unlistenable digital music

This was some talk from 2014 that didn't go anywhere. I only remembered them talking about some more immersive experience and wondered what they were on about. Didn't mean to kick off piracy talk. I didn't remember that. Weird, after iTunes purchases went DRM-free in 2009

I guess we have Apple to thank for digital purchases being so bare-bones, usually.

sometimes a bandcamp download will have a PDF with some cool stuff in it (although never the one thing I DO want, which is a lyric sheet) but it's definitely the exception not the rule.

harvey wiliiams was using bandcamp to distribute zines recently, ie all pdf, no music. although i think he had to put up some fake track because it couldn't cope with having nothing.

yeah, here: https://harveywilliams1.bandcamp.com/album/p-is-for-pop-music

(the other one, https://harveywilliams1.bandcamp.com/album/singleminded is raising money for waterman's art centre in brentford which is famous for... being the place where 'an evening of contemporary sitar music' (dreamweapon) was recorded)

that's a cool idea, using Bandcamp for PDF zine distribution... since it's set up for purchases <$1 and pay-as-you-like!

he needs to get on the itch.io wagon, you can sell anything there

but but that BC zine thing has a certain charm to it. i'm gonna suggest it to my partner jasmine and see if she might like to start a project :)

still going through cds trying to find which ones aren't ripped. i did find the previous hard disk of flacs, which has saved a bunch of work but i've still got a long way to go.

for instance, found a shelf full of Wire Tapper cds, 10 of which haven't been ripped* and those are the worst - various artist cds (so already twice as much information to input) and largely foreign names - for every

After The Rain / Distance III

there's a

Bersarin Quartett / Perlen, Honig Oder Untergang

(*oddly they have been ripped because i have the oggs for them, but not the flacs)

and so many Mojo, Uncut, Word, Melody Maker, NME, Select, Guardian cover cds. everything up to 2012 appears to have been ripped already

and got cddb lookup working again though - the freedb server i was using got shut down but the gnudb mirror works.

about 1/3 of the way through now and have found about a handful of things that have so far escaped the ripper (pole, a selecter compilation, upsetters, boymerang) but do have an ever-growing pile of dnb mix CDs to come back to later.

also need to think of how to treat the things i bought as mp3s, how to differentiate them from the things i converted to mp3 (which are just taking up space). do i convert them to flacs and save those? that way i have one master format.

slsk the FLACs, perhaps