Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

i never got into the ipod or mp3 players as the only thing i do is convert youtube videos to mp3 and make my own cds of the music i can not collect on cd.

my guy xzan, you need soulseek in ur life.

for those missing classic itunes on mac:
https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive
i'm so happy!

What’s so desireable about the old iTunes? As far as I can see the new Music app is the same application, only with video stripped out and a couple bugs fixed.

They dumped the XML format which broke a load of DJ apps and other integrations iirc

Ah yes that - Apple deprecated the XML file back in High Sierra already and finally removed it in Catalina. Apps are supposed to use the iTunesLibrary API instead, but yeah a lot of older applications were never updated. You can still generate the XML manually btw, File > Library > Export Library.

easier to manage ipod stuffs on the old one. also cover flow. probably more things.

Music app makes my little search window go away all the time and then I have to click a dropdown menu and select "show filter field" or some shit and I hate it.

Finally broke down and got a standalone mp3 player a while back. First I had a Shanling Mofi which I liked a lot because it was so tiny, but after a little over a year it's batter crapped out and started swelling and destroyed the thing. Shanling offered no support.

Now I'm using a Hidizs AP80 which is a little bigger but seems to work well. But with both units, once a card is loaded up with a ton of music most of the features are lost and you can only use it with files.

The SD card based Walkman is hardy and sounds great and has long battery life. Only real drawback is proprietary usb cable.

On the el cheapo side I love the fiio M3K now that someone made a Rockbox port for it. Battery life pretty good too, though not as long as the Walkman.

NB I only do folder and file browsing no database stuff

The SD card based Walkman is hardy and sounds great and has long battery life. Only real drawback is proprietary usb cable.

Agree; I've had one for several years and love it. You can't really make playlists on it, though, at least I've never figured out how.

lo l I still can't figure out how to create a playlist in Plex. I kind of found one weird way of applying a filter to your entire Library and creating a smart playlist based on that but I just want to drag songs into a playlist for the gym.

it is a huge pain in the ass and not very useful!

It’s kind of wild

I think bandcamp allowing downloads may be the final straw in my attempt to actively maintain a collection or at least add new songs to it

why?

xp what happens when they get bought out in ten years and the "allowable" content changes?

personally I'm saving all my Bandcamp downloads on two local drives and one offsite hard backup

or,to use another example, what happens if the artist leaves the site?

(unlikely, but still)

been thinkin' a lot about this shit lately because I had my 1st 5TB drive die and it turned out my offsite backup had dropped his drive w/my stuff, so Ii had to back up from my personal copy which is closer than I'd prefer to get. Guess I gotta get redundant offsite data dumps, the good news is that transferring 3+TB only takes a day or so.

personally I'm saving all my Bandcamp downloads on two local drives and one offsite hard backup

Wise. (Currently I'm the reverse -- two offsite, one local.)

or,to use another example, what happens if the artist leaves the site?

― sleeve, Thursday

damn, you make a point

or the album is removed...that's happened as well.

sometimes intentionally, i kinda like the fact that some albums are ephemeral by design

spent too much of sunday trying to get digital jukebox to supply images to the playlist app. the server has a plugin that exposes them on a noddy javascript-based http server, only the url isn't documented (took about an hour to work out - needs query param ?path=/prefix/artist/album/ ). and the app lets you specify a hostname and prefix but doesn't do query parameters, just path parameters.

the server will also fetch images from the web if they aren't there (and enabled), only the jukebox has no internet access, runs on a wifi hotspot hosted by my old phone, which the app also runs on.

ended up writing my own, hardcoding the mountpoint for the drive, keeping it as simple as possible. will try and add a read-through cache tonight, somewhere other than the music drive, which is mounted read-only

only then did i notice that only about 5% of the directories have images and i need several thousand more... (might add artist images first, and/or generic fallback images)

Interesting. Link to the digital jukebox you're using?

even now only about 40% of my album archive has album cover images, life's too short

is it tho

get out of my head! hahaha

> Interesting. Link to the digital jukebox you're using?

https://volumio.com/

it's a graphical front end (browser based) on top of mpd. but the graphical front end and the mpd clients (which i prefer) don't interact well - things added by the one don't show up in the other. so it's not great. it *was* the only thing that setup my soundcard (phatdat) on my pi (zero) automatically though, and that's why i'm using it.

i have pi zero, with dac, 500GB drive, and a usb hub stuffed in a slim Ferrero Rocher box (was the right size, and i can see the lights). mains, audio and a usb connector comes out the back. usb connector runs to an old nook that i'm using as a now-paying display (another noddy script i wrote running on the pi)

there are a bunch of mpd clients for android, can't quite remember which one i use. mostly i just run my 'add 20 unheard tracks' script and let it go.

it's very ghetto. they do sell nice-looking complete systems on the site though.

and yeah, i'm sure there are more images, especially for digital downloads. maybe i didn't copy them over from the master disk to the jukebox disk, or maybe the filenames are just wrong (i am looking for 'cover.jpg' and nothing else).

http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/jukebox.jpg

(pi and dac now in a 3d printed case inside the FR box)

if i ever want to chat about Logitech Media Server again, I'll come here and not the Sonos thread..lol

How is Spotify integration on Volumio? I was thinking of setting it up as a friend's files/streaming system. LMS probably overkill when you're not looking to do multi-room.

dunno, i use it purely to play oggs from my collection (the pi has no internet access).

the forum on the site might help (seems to be full of people having spotify problems!)

started looking at images and there are more with different names. also, they are of a mixed bag - some are 3000px square, others are 75px square. some aren't even square.

Thanks I'll have a look at that. I spose I should just stick with what I use... I can't expect any system like this to go totally smoothly.

Good luck with the images. If i couldn't sort out automating that job in mp3tag or puddletag or something, I just couldn't be bothered.

ha, I'm running LMS on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 1TB SD card (piCorePlayer is fantastic for setting this up, very easy to use) to use with my aging Squeezeboxen... although you can roll your own Squeezebox now using Raspbi accessories so buying a used Squeezebox is an expensive and unnecessary option.

Yeah I like it a lot, and now with the Material Skin it's easy to recommend... maybe even for a single player setup.

about 700 images now, but i doubt that's a quarter of them. they skew to newer things where i've been doing them with new purchases but there' nothing for the bulk ripping of 10 years ago.

the forum on the site might help (seems to be full of people having spotify problems!)

I have a HiFiBerry setup and the Spotify Connect has always been really undependable. I tend to use Airplay, but I dislike that for other reasons. I suspect it's an issue with spotifyd as I keep seeing similar behavior on other product forums that utilize it.

Is that with Volumio? I imagine it's the same with LMS but I rather use it via the Spotify API rather than Connect, so it's more seamless and acts like my files would, pretty much. Does Volumio only do Connect?

Yeah, HiFiBerryOS seems to be competing with Volumio so very similar looking feature set. The only reason I use it is because I bought one of their little DACs, so I think it's optimized to work with that.

oh i didn't know about HiFiBerry OS. I'm almost positive you could just as easily run PiCorePlayer for LMS :)

I wrote a little 200 line Flask app on my Pi to provide a web page that can control playback of MP3s, which I copy over using a little FTP script on my desktop.

volumio is meant to do the same, and more, only the play queue it maintains is independent from the one the standard remote app uses, making that part imo pointless. instead i have a script that'll pick 20 unheard tracks and use the remote app if there's anything specific i want to hear.

Have been adding cover images about 20 at a time, pick an artist on discogs and go through their list middle clicking on everything i own, then going through the open tabs and saving the images, renaming and resizing. still way more tracks without an image than have one though.

(flask looks useful - templates, proper logging - i'm using js and console.log for both!)

Is it still possible to buy “separate”/connectible CDR burners new?

Asking because the days of laptops with cd drives seem to have ended

Yep. I have a really basic one I bought on Amazon and I've been using it for years. FYI it's an Apple model #A1379

Thanks. This is gonna be among my 2022 investments.