Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

apple do a nice CD/DVD writer for 80 bucks

Another recommendation for the Apple drive. I have one too; it's great.

I need a recommendation for a better external CD ripper. I've got one that connects via USB-C and it's maybe 2x ripping via Exact Audio Copy.

Can Navidrome do smart playlists i.e. 'music added in the last two weeks'?

― One Of The Bad Guys (Tracer Hand)

Smart Playlists have been added, although not in the web GUI yet.

lol the last time i tried to install it i got nowhere. it was maddening. usually i’m not too bad with this stuff but i was having to like… create stub files in non-visible directories on my mac? stuff like that. i ran into permissions problems that i couldn’t fix iirc

On my Mac I just download it, drop the navidrome binary in a random folder set up the little config file pointing it to the right music folder, and run it with “./navidrome”. It then asks for permission to accept incoming connections, and it works.

I've got one that connects via USB-C and it's maybe 2x ripping via Exact Audio Copy.

Those are normal speeds for EAC in secure mode.

While we're all here:

I'm upgrading to my newest standalone music hard drive, am a Mac user, still stick with iTunes (yes, I know -- force of habit, it works for me) and have a question: I've always been able to transfer over both files and library from an old hard drive to a new one, but for these last couple of times I can't seem to get any WAV files with tags in my iTunes library to transfer over that info, where all other formats, mp3, lossless, AIFF etc have never been an issue. This results in an undifferentiated mass of 'unknown artist' etc WAVs that I mostly shrug at since the only time I have anything in that format is a promo, but am I missing something about how to prevent that from happening?

My (possibly out-of-date) understanding is that WAVs don't support ID tags embedded in the file itself. iTunes can put wav file info into it's own library db, but that doesn't travel with the files.

would the metadata for a wav file be the kind of thing stored in those shadow files that you always get on a Mac, the dsstore files? but otherwise, yeah, usually no tags in wavs

No, nothing stored in .dsstore files unfortunately. WAV metadata is indeed only stored in the internal iTunes/Music database, and orphaned when you move them to another library.

You can store metadata in WAV files (in INFO chunks) but there is no standard defined way of doing this, so presumably Apple just doesn't do it.

Pity but I figured as much. Can't have it all!

siegbran i’m going to give it another go.

i assume you need to invoke it again after a restart?

ideally you would convert the wavs to flac to save space and support metadata but unfortunately itunes doesn't support flac. the itunes metadata db might just be an sqlite file so if you know what you're doing you could probably go in and update the paths to point to the new drive

iTunes supports ALAC though, right? it's lossless and presumably iTunes could read the metadata

So it turns out...there is a solution to the WAV conundrum, easier than I thought. Basically the steps outlined here tell the tale:

https://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive

But in essence:

* already had the actual iTunes library database sitting on my computer separate from the hard drive with the music

* reset the Music Media folder location in Preferences to the new hard drive, went through the appropriate steps

* in iTunes did File - Library - Organize Library - Consolidate

* waited for about fourteen hours

And not only did everything copy over but all the tagged WAV files remain tagged. Simplicity!

Simplicity!

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Unsimplicity!

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-obsessive-world-of-digital-music-collectors/

and

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/everything-you-need-to-build-your-own-digital-music-collection/

being able to add metadata tags to audio or visual files, in addition to location data with gps and geotagging, strikes me as one of the most successful implementations of structured data, with digital cameras and iTunes and streaming media. has this been a common experience? has the structured format of the data been useful? are the tags right in terms of search, etc?

Seemingly no standard for reading the tags across players hurts, but it's all a lot better than it used to be. I used to keep my files untagged but wouldn't think to do that now.

Which players are there? How did any existing standards evolve from what you can tell? Are the tags useful to you in terms of how you want to find or to classify your music or other collections or questions that occur when you think about your collections?

I'm not terribly fastidious with this but i do enjoy a good "mp3tag" session. I like that the Genre tag in id3v2 (and whatever else these days?) is wide open. i tag a lot of different stuff as genre "wavy" so i can tell Logitech Media Server to hit me with a shuffle of that stuff. Probably most any player will do that for you.

Recently discovered I can tag multiple artists if I separate with a semicolon, the release will show up under all the artists if I'm browsing by artist! (practically never but ok :)