Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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

i bought a sony dream machine from the charity shop last week. happiness is an ipod classic in its dock.

slsk the FLACs, perhaps

this
i keep cd rips, purchased downloads and p2p downloads in separate directory hierarchies

don't convert mp3s to flacs unless you like wasting space

my thinking is that such a conversion would be lossless, i wouldn't lose any quality. and it would simplify all my scripts.

my dedicated 4TB MUSIC disk is one of the few places i'm not short of space. 1.5TB spare! i'm hoping to be able to back it up to a 2TB drive i have (storing just the masters, not the transcoded versions i use for my portable player)

mp3s are already lossy; you can’t recreate the missing data by converting them to flac— it will just create much larger files of no better quality

yeah, i know. converting them from mp3 to flac doesn't lose any more data, it's not double-encoding so they will be as good as the original mp3s (and no better) but more convenient to work with.

i would have thought that any kind of transcoding is bad news? i converted all my FLAC to 512 AAC for ipod and kept whatever 320 mp3 i had left around...

why would a flac be any more convenient to work with than an mp3?

it's bad news when it's between lossy codecs and even then most of the time it will be audibly harmlesss, just very bad practice

lossy to losseless works as koogs says, i personally wouldn't do it but they're aware of the consequences and have a reason for it

My Squeezeboxes are getting long in the tooth so I'm going to experimentally build a Raspberry Pi-based knockoff... just retired my Windows 10 Media Server I was serving music from and swapped it out for a Raspberry Pi 4 with and SSD drive attached, uses like one-fifth the power and is unobtrusively stuck to the wall behind my computer monitor instead of taking up valuable shelf space!

> why would a flac be any more convenient to work with than an mp3?

it's more that two master file formats are worse than one. i have a bunch of scripts to bulk tag, and keep things in sync and transcode the masters down to a format suitable for walking around with (oggs for the clip zip) and having to switch tagging / transcoding program based on source file type is a pain.

(oggenc actually knows about flac format and will accept it as input and copy across all the tags, very handy. with mp3s you'd have to use an intermediate wav file and handle the tags separately. or learn ffmpeg but life's too short)

the mp3 masters that i have are probably a dozen Amazon purchases from before bandcamp / boomkat was a thing. add the odd compilation that people have done me. and some more recent things where buying the flacs didn't make sense for one reason or another (19 or whatever autechre live sets...). i doubt it's 5% of the total. but even 5% is hundreds.

my experience has been that (ffmpeg + Google use case + batch) is usually significantly less hassle than converting everything, or manual workarounds

i have a bunch of scripts to bulk tag

fwiw i have wine installed almost exclusively for using foobar2000, that takes care of all audio related tasks except, weirdly, playback because for a few months now i don't get any sound output. multi-threaded mass conversion, tagging and replaygain scanning of all formats is a breeze though

is there a database of "canonical" flac or raw checksums people generally use to make sure their rips are the best?

yes, there are 2 even, one of them offering limited error correction capability in addition to detection:
https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=AccurateRip
http://cue.tools/wiki/CUETools_Database

strictly speaking, they're not databases of flac checksums, they're use specially made CRC algorithms that allow different CD pressings that are time-shifted during manufacturing but are effectively the exact same master to validate against each other

there was, until quite recently, an eac/xld logchecker available at h++p://eachelper.atwebpages.com/Analyzehtml.php

anyone know if it exists anywhere else publicly? (i know there are similar things on private trackers)

logcheckers are mostly snake oil, they're used to set a ripping standard in private trackers but they're way too strict about pointless things like secure mode

checking a rip for errors, in descending order of confidence:

1. a single match in accuraterip or CTDB verification if you're certain that match isn't against an older rip of the same physical disc

2. matching CRCs in 2 rips of the same disc with 2 different drives (with different chipsets, not rebrands)

3. matching CRCs in test & copy burst passes with a single drive

4. secure mode rip with no "uncorrected" errors

1 >>> 2 > 3 >> 4

This thread often makes me wish I would have done a better job of ripping my CDs before hauling them all to Amoeba.

This thread often makes me think vinyl isn't that much of a pain in the arse after all.

lol srsly

I will also say that I recently A/B'd Eno's "The True Wheel" on remastered CD and original UK vinyl with my new amp and subwoofer, the vinyl won

I have never once worried about EAC or anything of the sort when I rip

xp there's no way digitising a vinyl record can be made any easier than ripping a cd. i wouldn't bother at all, that's for sure, that's what filesharing is for

I have never once worried about EAC or anything of the sort when I rip

> This thread often makes me think vinyl isn't that much of a pain in the arse after all.

yeah, but i also look at the spotify thread and see people complaining about functional or ui changes every couple of weeks so...