Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

(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My (possibly out-of-date) understanding is that WAVs don't support ID tags embedded in the file itself.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 :)

so maybe being able to see past uses of genre but being able to add to the list and knowing clearly when multiple entries are permitted and how to add them (to give proper credit and to find) would be useful?

I'm aah into it yeah. Are you writing a paper or making some software? Thinking of going from streaming to collecting files? I like it all.

The tag standards themselves are pretty good, however it all depends on the implementations:

- there are no music servers/players that read/utilize *all* metadata fields, of course they all do the basics like Artist/Song Title/Album/Track#/Year but support for metadata like Composer, Record Label, Language, BPM, Key, Producer, Remixer, Original Release Date, etc is extremely hit and miss (and makes users put that info in one of the other, supported, fields instead)

- even though the tag standards allow it, only a few servers/players support multi-valued fields (like a song with multiple artists, multiple genres). Result: people use non-standard workarounds (semicolon) or flatten everything to single value.

I'm interested in Linked Data and the Semantic Web.

The constructive criticism of enthusiasts is reallly useful.

nice nice

but I don't have any explicit or well thought out motives other than curiosity about what might be possible

(most devs of player apps don't like implementing multi-valued fields because then you have to create many-to-many relationships in your db structure, joins in your queries etc. Easier to do just assume it's all 1-to-many and dunk it all in one big table)

I need to come up with a custom tag (and mod the library display code in LMS) that better sorts albums under individual artist listings... I want to first see a list of studio albums by year, then compilations, then live albums, etc. If you have 30-40 releases by a band just doing it by year or alphabetically annoys me.

godspeed! Share that up to the community if you have a crack at it!

hahaha I would characterize this project as "in the planning stages"

Really does more than I need already. Does Roon and such already group like that? I dunno what the appeal is with the pricey server things. All that bio information and automatically downloading press photos of artists is bleccch

I like how Plex does that for movies on my media server, but it annoys me for music.

otm

i replaced my Plex with Jellyfin and it's surprisingly similar and good. But it has this bug where it can't turn off the music bio/photo fetching lol. Only got the music in there at all as a lark but it's not bad as a remote access thing (LMS being home only really).

still kinda lookin for a good way to listen to all my music out and about without it being on my phone

seems like people are enjoying apple's music match /cloud locker thing but i doubt it's long for this world

i gave it up around the time i left ilx. music was social for me; with nobody to talk to about my extreme niche and fringe interests, i couldn't muster the time or the energy to keep up that part of things. i used to go on these fairly extreme deep dives in my hypomanic phases. i'd listen to and evaluate ridiculous amounts of albums. wouldn't listen to them in their entirety. didn't have _time_ to listen to that much music. wasn't fomo per se, just...

a lot of it _was_ a coping mechanism. mckenzie wark calls me out pretty directly in her review of grace lavery's _please miss_ in liber:

"Still, even among those of us who, for reasons of class, race, or abandonment by family, didn’t get to deflect our desires into formal schooling, there’s the transsexual autodidact. Learning is a popular trans kink, as is turning that into art and pedagogy, formal or informal"

sure. it was a fetish. in particular, a fetish for _emotional connection_ (still my primary kink). i spent most of my time disconnected, dissociated, and music was one of the only ways i could allow myself to _feel_.

and now it's just a hobby, one of those things i keep _meaning_ to get to but never quite seem to.

it's not just transition, it's, i mean, the hard drive in my brain got full. there's more songs in my collection than i have room for. a lot of what drove my collecting was i'd hear a song and then i'd remember it, years later, and i'd go off on a dive, and the dives were never targeted, they were _wide_, i'd wander off into side corridors and eddies and wind up with stuff i had no idea existed. that was what motivated me more than the idea of a Collection, the process of discovery itself. which is fine and beautiful but it's also hard fucking work for something that, at the end of the day, goes in one ear and out the other.

when i started with napster i felt like this was a precious brief moment that could end at any time, and it did, and then audiogalaxy, and then slsk... and slsk is still there, right? there's no _urgency_ to it. do we lose things? yes, we do, always. everything is impermanent and i've started embracing that. it bothered me, streaming, a song is on spotify today and the next it is down the memory hole and what of it? what have we lost that nobody gives a shit about the dave clark five anymore?

i was drowned in sound, and i haven't reached a shore by a long shot but i'm floating in different waters now. music hasn't hit me like it used to in a long time. it's a dream of someone i used to be, someone i can barely remember, and every day that dream grows more distant.

i think today i'm gonna listen to the third soft machine album again.

I think music, and the importance we put on it, changes over time. So perhaps right now it isn't hitting but, some time in the future, you'll be open to the magic again. Or maybe you're not listening to the music that truly moves you - lord knows there's a seemingly infinite supply of music that's good but not great, enjoyable but not meaningful to you. Usually when I feel like that I go back to old favorites and that does the trick.

The third Soft Machine album is a good place to start, though I prefer the Peel session version of "Moon In June". ;-)

still kinda lookin for a good way to listen to all my music out and about without it being on my phone

seems like people are enjoying apple's music match /cloud locker thing but i doubt it's long for this world

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 1 June 2022 15:13 (one hour ago) link

refurbished & flashmooded ipods are like readily available on ebay & i don't understand why more people aren't bothering with them still. itunes/apple music still co-operates with them flawlessly

i just am not going to keep up with two devices :(

xps Yes slsk is still there. I feel no urgency or real importance in any of this

The fun of this kind of discussion is all of the variables and programs and quirks and reading about what someone is doing, thinking "wow they've really lost the plot on this"... with full knowledge many would think the same reading my blather

it's fun here particularly because the main point by far is music.

I think music, and the importance we put on it, changes over time. So perhaps right now it isn't hitting but, some time in the future, you'll be open to the magic again. Or maybe you're not listening to the music that truly moves you - lord knows there's a seemingly infinite supply of music that's good but not great, enjoyable but not meaningful to you. Usually when I feel like that I go back to old favorites and that does the trick.

The third Soft Machine album is a good place to start, though I prefer the Peel session version of "Moon In June". ;-)

― Gerald McBoing-Boing

I actually did a custom one-record edit of the third Soft Machine record, just to see if it'd hold up. Mind you I like it in its messy glory, but it was a fun thing to try.

I'm starting to understand why so many people stop listening to new music and just listen to the music they liked growing up. I don't think it's nostalgia; I think there's something to the way music accretes layers of meaning over time. "September the Ninth" means something very different to me today than it did in 1998. Are there songs today that convey the same general meaning? Yes, but I haven't been listening to them for a quarter century.

There is a certain amount of... choice paralysis as well. I'll be honest, the first time I heard _Trout Mask Replica_ I thought it was a bunch of awful noise, but white male nerds on the Internet told me it was brilliant and if I thought it was terrible I just hadn't listened to it enough, and I only had ten records and this was before Napster, so OK, I listened to it until I liked it. Is it Stockholm Syndrome? I don't think so, but other people say it is and laugh at me for putting that much time into liking a record. Having done it once, though, it doesn't _usually_ take as much time for me to come to terms with what a record is doing, to understand it. I mean sure half of my RYM reviews back in the day were shitposts that have since been rightfully removed, but I honestly learned a lot about listening critically to music from that experience.

I still put in that much effort learning to like music. I like the Grateful Dead because I decided I wanted to like them. For decades I hated them and then the Jesse Jarnow cartel started hyping them and I spent years trying to figure out what the hell people heard in them and now I'm listening to the Dark Star Orchestra do a 20 minute version of "Shakedown Street", and it RULES. Could I have spent that time listening to music I _didn't_ hate? Probably. I have no regrets.

I just don't know how much more I can change. I mean, obviously, I've changed a fuck of a lot, but, you know, I cannot will myself to infinite mutations. Music is still important to me, but being a _collector_...

I still have a directory of music I've downloaded to sort, file, and tag. I keep putting stuff in it. Right now, I'm putting this in it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEaKRqxriPI

At this point it's a black hole. It's not collecting, it's hoarding, and thanks to digital I don't have old newspapers piled to the ceiling, I have a black box that I call the Crap Mines. I'd be better off streaming. I'll probably never hear that song again anyway.