Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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...

(update. number of unripped mix cds now > 100 thanks to Knowledge cover cds numbers 5 to 60. number of empty cases found: 1 (and not just any old case, one of those Fabric tins with the artist name embossed in the metal))

For the most part I use the two-pass test/copy method and only scrutinize the audio when those CRCs don't match. Sometimes it's nothing I can discern, but other times it is audibly fucked up. AccurateRip is another layer of error checking and doesn't require any additional effort so I leave it on. About 1 in 20 CDs have problems on average, mostly brand new ones (since that's mostly what I'm buying). About half a dozen out of 3,000 have been completely hopeless and unrippable.

i had never ever thought about CRC checks for any of my rips.
if i hear a skip on a ripped cd, then i get the cd out and re-rip said track after a wipe clean, and 99% of the time, that does the job.
clearly i have a much less discerning ear to most here.

At this point when I hear a glitch in one of my rips, it's almost always on the source (latest: Waco Brothers, first track on "Freedom And Weep").

usually it's very apparent because for years now I buy a CD and rip it in order to be able to listen to it, so any problems tend to be obvious. But back in the day when I was ripping 100-200 CDs at a time, you couldn't check them all by listening so good error correction was worth the effort.

> AccurateRip is another layer of error checking and doesn't require any additional effort so I leave it on

this is underselling it, assurance that someone else out there, with a different physical copy, obtained a rip that is byte-by-byte identical to yours is as good as it gets

i seldom bother listening to suspicious rips, if there are potential problems with mine i download a replacement. plus some copy protected cds are unrippable with my drive, there's no solution other than torrenting for those

I check them out sometimes because I'm curious about if I can hear them or not, but yeah usually I just sigh and re-rip them until I get a clean copy. lately though I'm buying most physical media from Bandcamp so I don't even bother ripping... just download the FLACs.

Sometimes when I'm ripping a CD one track will come out all distorted and fucked up, and the solution I've found is to double click the CD on my desktop so it opens up like a folder, and simply drag that track to the desktop. It arrives as an AIFF file, which I can then convert to whatever I want.

Unrelated to recent discussions: substreamer for iOS just released an update after years of silence and I'm stoked. I had to change my server from libresonic to airsonic, which was kind of a pain, but the app has a dark mode and is almost gapless (this may be more about airsonic than substreamer).

I dumped Plex (for playing music) in favor of libre/airsonic years ago and never looked back. substreamer is one of the few iOS apps that work with the sub/air/libre sonic backend. I wish I could actually pay the dev.

The *sonic ecosystem seems to be pretty alive and developing well I have to say. I've tried Airsonic but settled on Navidrome, and using Play:Sub as the iOS app. I still like Plex but its bad handling of compilation album really lets it down.

Can Navidrome do smart playlists i.e. 'music added in the last two weeks'? Can it interact with scripting, i.e. as soon as a file hits folder (x) it gets added to the Library?

Smart playlists is now under development but not there yet. Navidrome does automatically pick up new files in the folder every 1h (or shorter if you set it to).

As *sonic server for 3rd party clients, Navidrome is more or less the same as the others (Airsonic/etc), what I mostly like about it is the web UI which doesn't look like it's from the 1990s. The Spotify-clone theme for it is really almost a 1:1 copy.

Thanks.

I tried it with macos but the installation was a little beyond me. I followed their instrux but got permission errors.

I'll have to take a look at substreamer - I've been using iSub for years, and play:sub has never dealt well with my (very large) library. I moved from madsonic to airsonic-advanced recently and it's much faster, except that for some reason loading an album on the web player takes 10+ seconds. On the other hand I very rarely use the web UI so it's not a big deal.

Navidrome seems seriously impressive - much easier to install than any other subsonic clone I've used, and it's using way less RAM (literally 50mb versus 4gb...)

i literally could not get it to install on macos. you have to create a directory in /opt and put a bunch of files in there, and another file in your Library folder, and i kept getting permission/ownership errors and i have no idea how to fix them.

I didn't do either of those things! I literally ran it from the downloaded folder, pointing it to a config file I'd made:

/Users/admin/Downloads/navidrome_0.42.1_macOS_x86_64/navidrome --configfile '/Users/admin/Dropbox/dotfiles/navidrome/navidrome.toml'

The config file is very basic, it looks like

LogLevel = 'DEBUG'
ScanInterval = '1h'
TranscodingCacheSize = '150MiB'
MusicFolder = '/Volumes/Music 2TB/'
DataFolder = '/Volumes/Music 2TB/navidrome/'

and tbh I think the only thing here that actually really needs to be there is the MusicFolder entry.

Okay will try! There's a page on the navidrome site that has all this other junk you're supposed to do

Navidrome is not feature complete yet (smart playlists not done yet, genre navigation etc) but it’s developing at a pretty breakneck pace at the moment, saw they’re now working on chromecast and sonos integration.

Wish one of these would have gapless playback in web player.

Apparently very hard to do in-browser…

and sonos integration.

i dug in about this, and its already possible according to several posts about it.
definitely gets around the dreaded 65k limit.
but i think i will stick with my own current system as its now bedded in and i find it very easy ..
but still, it could be a very good solution to a crap problem.

Apparently very hard to do in-browser…

I want a box on my home network that has RCA cables running out to my receiver. The box would have a web interface to browse albums and play stuff, but it's not actually playing music through the browser. Can Navidrome etc do gapless playback in this case?

That's "jukebox mode" (music playback on the server itself), the original Subsonic had this, but it's currently not implemented in Navidrome but it's one of their projects for this summer (#2).