Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

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 wrote this today (part of a long piece about five classical albums I bought just because I trust the label):

Lately, I absorb music in bursts. I might buy 5 early-2000s albums by Dub Syndicate, or a clutch of brutal death metal releases, or the collected works of Argentine instrumental stoner doom act Black Sky Giant or noisy Russian drum ’n’ bass act Torn, or the entire output of the Colombian techno label Business Class. (To check out all of this music and much, much more, visit my Bandcamp collection.) The point is, I fixate on one thing for a day or two, and then I keep moving. To quote Mookie in Do the Right Thing, “I got it — I’m gone.”

I need to listen to given pieces of music enough times to feel that I've internalized it - or at least understand it, if I don't enjoy it that much. There's several factors going against me hearing all the music that I want to: that I've almost certainly got less time ahead than behind, that my memory is fading, that the whole "edifice of culture" has lost whatever aura it had for me as our world decays. But I'd rather limit my range of listening to try to go deep into the music that I do hear. It may seem strange but I feel I owe it to the artists (even if sometimes they don't expect anyone to listen more than once).

I used to think I was discovering an underlying order to the world, via music, or whatever. Eventually you realize you're imposing one, and the endeavor loses its appeal and you're fine with just gazing into chaos again. Music still sounds great though! Especially the new dark ambient stuff from Cryo Chamber, which is all both easily sampled on YouTube and then purchasable on CD should I feel like scratching that itch.

yeah you've captured there how it feels to read forums dedicated to most music playback software

I suppose as the alleged king of Bandcamp I should say something. The Pitchfork pieces ring reasonably true though I have no idea or not whether people would be terrified at the amount of music I have sitting around in my hard drive (and backed up at a separate drive at my parents', etc. etc.).

If anything, I am thinking about how these kinds of digital collections can in their own way become legacies. I interviewed Chris Jacques a couple of months before he died earlier this year and in his matter of fact way he was discussing about what he wanted to leave as a legacy. Part of it was insuring his label Dub Ditch Picnic just stayed up as a digital resource for people to discover:

I want the Bandcamp site to be as similar to the record store that I walked into, or I would spend my time at when I was 12 and 13 going, ‘What’s this, what’s this? Tell me what this is.’ Because I just don’t think kids have that experience anymore. It’s like an avalanche sometimes, where I was able to get things piecemeal, as I needed it. I’ve worked with people for 10 years. They’ve put their trust in me and let me caretake their sounds. I just don’t want to shut everything down and go, ‘No, that’s it, whatever.’ I did this and I’m super happy with it, and I treated people well and I got to meet, and work with so many really cool people and people that I respected for years. Lots of people don’t get that opportunity. So I wanted to honor that and just have it as… not a memorial, but as an archival site. Because I was, in my mind, helping folks that were working really hard in their bedroom, in their basement, with whatever they were doing. And I honored it by putting together a physical release, and I want to honor it even after that with some digital presence.

But part of it was also what he literally wanted to leave for his kids, something of his own taste and sense of self, thus in a separate comment:

I just had a friend go through all my Bandcamp stuff and download everything and catalog it: this is the dub folder, this is the experimental folder. This is the PSF, all the blown-out, in-the-red Japanese type stuff,” he says. “He put that on an external hard drive for me just so I have all that stuff collected properly, so that I can give it to my son and go, ‘Here you go, here’s lots of music, if you want to do that.’

That sense of passing something on does cross my mind. In that I have no kids, eventually some later form of the drive -- and I have continually migrated the collection along without a skip for many years now as it's grown -- will be left behind, but I'm not sure who, where or what for. I hope it'll be of bemused interest, whoever gets it.

haha i have honestly considered putting a note on my external drive saying ‘send to ned in the event of my death’ even though we’ve never actually met

i’m sure it wouldn’t be useful to him (or anyone, really) but i found it a comforting idea that he might at least understand why i wasted so much time collecting and tagging and making playlists of music files

I expect that my teenage daughter will inherit my collection of digital media as she's already picked up and started to dig into my physical copies of The Wire. It's nice to know that someone else might find value in my overly curated work. But I also accept that the hard drives could also just be wiped and used for other purposes. Fair enough, that's better than how the dozen bankers boxes filled with CDs in my basement might ultimately be addressed. Not so thrilled to acknowledge that a lot of them could end up in landfill.

my big disk and its backup are fully encrypted...hmm what should i do, put the password in my will?

this thread gives me NAS drive death anxiety.
my little 4TB WD My Cloud is nearly 10 years old now.
i back it up every tuesday onto an external drive and so have a degree of fallback.
i just know that when it does 'die', the replacement device will be a bugger to set up, and cause several days of techno woes.

I've wondered in the past about who'll wind up with my music collection when I'm gone, and it's a nice thought to imagine that someone else will go through these idiosyncratic records I've thrown together and find that it... opens them to the world I live in, I guess. Stuff I've been able to discover, to understand, that isn't really represented anywhere else. I can't imagine that actually happening. I can't imagine whoever winds up with this clunky old black box, or whatever format it takes when I'm gone, will have genuine interest in this assemblage of noises.

I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it helps keep me from putting things off, from Bucket Listing things. Having something on my NAS doesn't make it any more "real" or permanent than having it streaming on Spotify does. It's not even more _accessible_ to me - more and more I'll get songs stuck in my head but not be able to remember their name or who did them or find them in any way. I don't use Spotify or streaming services, but this is more a matter of obstinacy than the belief that my way of doing things is genuinely preferable, even to me, as well as maybe a little bit of sunk cost fallacy. God, I still use iTunes. iTunes is terrible software, but migrating the whole thing to less garbage music library software is more effort than I'm willing to undertake.

Basically my digital music collection is _obsolete_.

That reminds me that I need to replace my seven year old 4TB WD My Book which died last month. It’s been my primary/daily backup drive for all that time; I have a secondary/weekly backup drive that I normally keep in another location but doing daily backup duty at the moment.

This might be better off in the Apple Music thread, but has anyone merged your local files with your Apple Music streaming account recently? I remember all the horror stories of scrambled libraries when they first introduced it so I’ve kept mine separate, but I keep finding myself wanting to remotely stream stuff that isn’t available in Apple Music. I have 35K+ properly tagged tracks that I’d hate to have messed up (though I guess could always fix with my backup) so wondering if those issues are mostly settled now.

haha i have honestly considered putting a note on my external drive saying ‘send to ned in the event of my death’ even though we’ve never actually met

This is a vision. I'd have to think about this!

Slightly more seriously, a few of us Of An Age were having a discussion elsewhere about collection maintenance in general and what might happen to it, and I'm not sure -- wearing my library worker's hat here, though I will note I'm not a professional archivist -- where that level of interest in the field stands. Certainly awareness of the necessity of digital archives has grown, but the combination of awareness about how so much 'stuff,' in whatever form or however defined, essentially ends up in estate sales or the like rather than anything permanent or cared for by someone else in combination with the fact that personal collections aren't professional archives unless you've realllllly organized them as such in advance tends to be a factor -- and of course there's the fact that people have done amazing histories with preserved written archives that have hung around for hundreds of years versus hard drives that, well, won't, there ya go.

Kate's way of looking at it is pretty sharp, honestly; it's an interesting historical moment -- which has no guarantee of lasting -- where even if the heavenly jukebox doesn't of course have 'everything' and never did, if the pleasure is there, well then.

As for me, I was talking in said discussion about how when it comes to actual physical releases, I consciously look for and hold on to three specific kinds of releases:

* archival reissues, compilations, collections etc that preferably have extensive liner notes and information -- these are research tools and I treat them as such; in the cases of bands or scenes that haven't warranted particular study in books, anthologies etc., these may be the only collected information at all about them, making it more valuable.

* notably rare and interesting things I've found along the way -- all the old Digitalis CDRs for instance, and really a ton of the 2000s CDR boom in general, but there's plenty of CDs I have that were only ever issued in very short runs

* very specific releases with sentimental value -- so I'll never give up my copy of Loveless I got back in 1991, for instance, that really is a marker point for me, but also I've been lucky enough to be named in various liner notes over time so of course I'll keep those.

Everything else I'm buying, digital only and zero regrets. I will happily trawl used CD bins for many cheap things but that's just to rip them (Apple Lossless, as I've been doing for years now) and then send them on in turn. And per early rejecter's question, I've held off on doing anything with Apple Music services for that reason -- think there's something useful in not keeping all my eggs in one company's basket, speaking as an Apple/Mac guy since 1987.

That reminds me that I need to replace my seven year old 4TB WD My Book which died last month.

i'm going to regrest asking ... but how old was the device early rejector ?
i use mine for streaming my music via my old Sonos Connect.
i.e. it's in use for many hours a day as opposed to just sat there and being accessed from time to time for a photo/file.
i think i am definitely pushing my luck with my device now.

as for when i die, then i'll leave it to my lads to decide what to do with my collection, both digital and physical.
i have set aside my FAX cd collection and have already advised them to check before binning them if there's still a demand.

perhaps this would be more appropriate for the I HATE APPLE thread, but this morning I discovered that all the playlists I made during many years of iTunes use are no longer present in the macOS Music application ... all the tracks are still on my computer, it's only the playlists that have vanished

apparently this is related to my never subscribing to Apple Music or turning on Sync Library?

a few of these playlists still exist on the iPod Classic that lives in my car, but most of them weren't kept on that device because of space limitations

thankfully this is more of a nuisance than a source of heartbreak, since I didn't have a huge number of extensively curated and treasured playlists (or did I? I don't really remember them all, so I guess I'll never know)

I suppose the moral of the story is to store playlist information in at least one non-proprietary format if you'd like to be able to recreate a playlist in some future era of different equipment and functionality

xpost It would've been 7 years old next month. If you're backing yours up every week you're probably in pretty good shape, though I always keep two backups now after having two hard drives fail in a single week many years ago. I shelled out $100 for Disk Warrior and was able to recover just about everything, but especially with photos being digital now I don't want to risk that again. I have physical copies of most of the music I really care about so wouldn't be devastated if I lost those files, but would hate to lose the last 10-15 years of family photos.

yeah, 7 years is about the average from what i have read, hence i think i need to start investigating my options (just a straighforward newer version i suspect).
i have most of my music in cd form as well, just that i have got very used to dipping and diving via my sonos thing ...
but now you mention it, i do have a large digital photo collection on it as well.
actually, i need to make sure that the directory is included in my weekly back up.
ta for the nudge.

i’ve always assumed 99 if not 100% of my digital life will be binned, lost or otherwise forgotten when i die. people are going to enter passwords, search for things in my hard drive? gtf. i’m certainly not doing that with my parents’ computers when they die.

as for when i die, then i'll leave it to my lads to decide what to do with my collection, both digital and physical.

Don't do that, speaking as someone who's had to deal with mountains of *stuff* after a loved ones' death. I know we can't time everything perfectly, but in general if you hit 75-80, start downsizing. Give away things to people who'll appreciate them. I'm prepared to ditch the thousands of CDs and comics I've got if my kids or future grandchildren aren't interested. As for my digital files, they can just toss it all, I have no expectations that my peculiar tastes will be of interest to anyone else. The family might want to keep all the digital photos and email (which serves as something of a diary at times). But that's it.

The more we prepare for the end, the easier it will be for those who have to clean up after us.

true enough GMB.
hopefully the cd revival thing properly kicks in before i kick it, so i can cash in.

The more we prepare for the end, the easier it will be for those who have to clean up after us.

Indeed. In various small ways I'm already thinking about that and I'm feeling better -- almost lighter -- because of it.

But don't be like my mother, throwing out treasured items because she didn't want us to have to "worry about them" later.

Had a conversation like this with Mom (who's 73) last night — not about a hard drive full of tunes, but an attic full of books. She's mailing me an old, unexpurgated Grimm's Fairy Tales I remember reading as a kid. If you've never read it, that shit was dark.

These days a text file with your whole collection listed on it is pretty much as good as a drive full of mp3s. Someone who really cares to can find anything online - either streaming or shadier means. Based on my own experience: For rare things if they have to work for it - they'll appreciate it more when they do eventually find it.

She's mailing me an old, unexpurgated Grimm's Fairy Tales I remember reading as a kid. If you've never read it, that shit was dark.

― but also fuck you (unperson),

not to derail the thread too much : but how do you know if unexpurgated ?
i have this version, and have no idea :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Fairy-Tales-Brothers-All-New/dp/0553382160/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=the+complete+fairy+tales+of+the+brothers+grimm

and yeah, the stories are deliciously dark.
not read it all as yet.
i read it for a few days at a time.

how do you know if unexpurgated ?

Well, it included the scenes where Cinderella's stepsisters cut off pieces of their feet to make the glass slipper fit, and it had the anti-Semitic stories.

Weird, Jaime Brooks published this today, which I'm looking forward to reading, feels relevant

https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-future-of-streaming-services-may-be-in-the-past/

Well, it included the scenes where Cinderella's stepsisters cut off pieces of their feet to make the glass slipper fit, and it had the anti-Semitic stories.

― but also fuck you (unperson),

blimey !
going to have to check re my version.

anyways, back to NAS drive chaos ..

is this why it was glass? ayeeee

A number of xposts to Brad C -- there's something else going on there; all of my iTunes playlists transferred over to the Music app with no problem, and that was well before I subscribed to Apple Music. And as noted above I've been wary about syncing my local library with Apple Music so still haven't flipped that switch.

I have a 1TB hard drive in a drawer, that represents the long long hours I spent in the 00s and 10s, buying, receiving (for reviewing purposes) and nicking stuff, then tagging, curating into playlists, sharing etc - and I access it maybe twice a year to find something? In truth, I've not found a way to successfully manage the transition to a 'one library' digital space - the infinity of that hard drive and the work it takes keep it accessible and navigable is too much; the possibilities are simply too broad and wide, and I need the anchor of physical media to help deal with the tyranny of choice.

This probably says more about my daft brain than anything else but the move to digital is indicative of something, at least: how attics and basements have shrunk or morphed into digital space, and how much easier it'll be for the next generation to simply smash extant hard drives with a hammer and be done with it.

A Frightened Rabbit lyric comes to mind: "Well, here's the evidence of human existence/A splitting binbag next to two damp boxes/And I cannot find a name for them/They hardly show that I have lived" - swap out binbag and boxes for some form of obsolete tech and there it is.

otm

is there really nothing that'll just let you dump files onto a hard disk and let you play them through a stereo?

my pi Jukebox does the job, uses phone as a remote / display, but it's very ghetto

xp thanks early rejector

it seems to me my playlists came through the initial iTunes-to-Music switch just fine, so I wonder if their recent disappearance is due to a macOS upgrade (I'm running 12.4 now)

xp I've use a relatively inexpensive (<$200) DAC for several years and it's a fanatic low-tech solution. USB from your computer to the DAC, which converts the digital signal to analog and sends it to your stereo receiver using RCA connectors. No, it doesn't play everywhere in the house but neither did the stereo.

is there really nothing that'll just let you dump files onto a hard disk and let you play them through a stereo?

this is exactly what Sonos Connect, now Port, is all about.

a NAS and a receiver that support DLNA i guess would be the simplest non-brand-ecosystem way

other than an old computer connected to a receiver aux

Years ago I put my music collection on my server (which also presents as a NAS on the network). I have Plex for movies and Airsonic for music running on the server. Last year I bought a HiFiBerry and hooked it up to my receiver. To listen to music I connect my phone to the HiFiBerry and stream either from whichever app I need to. For one person used to listening on the phone, this is pretty elegant and simple. The backend is a little complicated, but I could definitely see it being set up in an easier way with, like, a Synology NAS or something.

The frustrating thing is nobody in my house knows the system, so any time anybody wants to hear something on the stereo, they come get me. I see this is a flaw in _my setup_ - it's not on them. I've been trying to think of a way to make it more simple. Maybe I just attach a low-end iPad to the wall near the stereo and just have the Substreamer app open on it all the time. Or get a record player and be done with it.

hifiberry........ can you add buttons to this rig, to the Pi's GPIO?

i have an even less powerful little ESP32 based "Squeezeamp" that I've hooked buttons (pause/play, next/prev, couple radio station presets) and a rotary encoder (volume) up to. Logitech Media Server stuff. I realize it sounds a bit much. But any active branded systems drive me up a wall. The thing with the "Logitech" is that they've pretty much abandoned it and it's open source and community maintained and is kind of a beautiful thing. Shame about the name!

What's the best way to store a bunch of digital music files in the cloud in a manner that's easy to stream from?
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GxOds0DpFDKtiQWFSqteioB1Co8z1-jm

I'd like to be able to put all this somewhere where I can stream it to my phone and play it in my car so that the albums will actually play as albums.

Roon 2.0 now offers this feature.

Rent a VPS with lots of storage, run a music server on it like Plex, Navidrome, Jellyfin, etc.

The 2TB Lacie hard drive I bought in 2017 only has about 75GB of space left, so I just bought a 4TB and will begin slowly backing up my collection over the fall and winter.

You listen to all 2 TB of that music you already have to the point that you need more storage?