Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

Not hard for me to believe at all.

A lot of my collection — at least half, maybe more — is promos I'm sent. I only keep the ones I listen to and like enough to consider writing about, and it still adds up to at least an album or two a day. That's before the stuff I buy or download from elsewhere, which adds up to somewhere around 5-15 albums more each month.

Honestly I keep all my promos. Then again keep in mind I've got a 24 TB drive (itself backed up). I never regret the investment.

You probably don't get as many black metal albums or self-released smooth jazz projects as I do.

More of the former than you might guess but as for the latter, I concede the field.

smooth jazz self releasing is my favorite medicine album

I'm closing in on 5TB now, will probably need to bump up a size in the next couple tears

wait until you decide to store your blu-ray collection on a plex server

thankfully I only own like four blu-ray discs, and have no idea how to rip them, so those will stay in the physical realm

F Hazel - any tips for that? I only have a few blu rays but I’d like to be able to stream them on Plex

Plex actually is pretty simple to use! Some learning curve with folder and file naming conventions but the harder part was learning to rip Blu-Rays (I use MakeMKV). I leave the raw rips since video compression is too complicated to mess with for me. My collection is medium-sized... around 500 discs.

Plex app is on Roku so watching stuff from my collection is a pleasure. It handles metadata really well, all I fiddle with is the movie poster choices.

Raw rips! Handbrake isn't that tough to sort out, there's probably a preset you'd like and would save scads of space. Mind that I care about picture quality even less than audio (320kbps 4 life)

Plex got annoying and I ditched it for Jellyfin which was surprisingly easy. Sorry to any ilxors who ever used my Plex.

I need to try Jellyfin, Plex was good enough when I set up the media server so I haven't played around too much yet with Emby or the like... staying with raw Blu-ray rips because I don't want to repeat the rip to mp3 fiasco where I ended up moving to FLAC and had to re-rip a lot of CDs. Go lossless stay lossless and wait for storage sizes to catch up.

how do folks back their stuff up? Cloud services or an offsite duplicated HD?

o wait do apps like Plex etc handle that part?

i have an local external drive attached to my WD MyCloud.
there is a scheduled job that backs up MyCloud to the external every Monday evening.
not the greatest failsafe solution, and something i will revise once my finances improve.

xp They don't. It's really just spinning up a homemade Netflix based on your files.

I was using a USB hard drive to do periodic backups til recently. Had no incidents but recently switched to a 2-disk Synology NAS... one that can run Docker and handle my bit of server stuff too (Jellyfin, Logitech Media Server). So I don't have to keep an old laptop on all the time now to do that stuff. So it's smoother than what I was doing.

Anyone on Qnap NAS?

oh so now I still use the USB disk to periodically back up the Synology and store that somewhere else. It's easy, but now I'm attached to their ecosystem in that way.

€10 a month for 2TB Google Drive space works for me.

I've just remembered that I'm a PlexPass subscriber but I can't remember why.

The privelege of downloading your own files? "Plexamp"?

Right when I got into Jellyfin some guy put out a really good music app that can use it or Plex: "Symfonium".

Plexamp sucks. I don't need download ability. Maybe I should cancel.

sounds like!

Prism is a pretty good alternative music player for Plex, well worth the small price.

I'm using Serviio. Pretty easy to set up with my Yamaha MusicCast reciever, or VLC on my phone. You can pay for remote access but otherwise it's free.

I hated Plex, it was too buggy for me.

as a few of you on here know, i'm on 32tb of plex data these days

seems like every searchable, free, file-hosting service has now been shut down (RIP ulozto.net). Whither the days of yore when you could stumble across a blog hosting .zip files of MP3s of the entire discography of Waylon Jennings.

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.3498229769.9885/flat,750x,075,f-pad,750x1000,f8f8f8.jpg

zshare, mega, mediafire?

(I agree that large-scale MP3/sharity blogs are largely a thing of the past)

I treasure my stash of Roxy Music and Bowie FLACs from the last days of Megaupload almost as much as I treasure the actual LPs, yes there are always mastering differences between pressings or formats but it was a lot easier than ripping all the damn albums

in other digital maintenance news, I now have a 3rd backup drive that is also USB, and will prob give away my 1st old school motor-driven drive to be used as "offsite backup" in a friend's collection

zshare, mega, mediafire?

none of these are searchable though

ah gotcha

I finally figured out Soulseek last week and it has been frickin’ awesome.

I got a 1.5TB micro SD card when they recebtly hit $120, which I keep in my Sony phone. So now I've got room for probably 15 more years (or, more likely, till civilization collapses sooner) of music purchases in 320kbps mp3 which sounds good to my non-gilded ears. I was within about 2GB of filling up the 1TB card I've had in my phone the last few years. I keep maybe 300GB worth of all-time-faves in FLAC, that I keep on a microSD in a dedicated Fiio mp3 player. I don't pay for an unlimited data phone plan and wouldn't want to rent cloud service forever, so solid-state local storage (with several backups on- and off-site) works best for me.

For video, I still buy on blu ray/4k blu ray only, with maybe a TB of stuff that's simply not been out out on disc on a spare 2TB SSD. I just plug it into my Roku connected to a 4k UST projector and so far haven't had many files (mkv/mp4, h.264 or h.254, 5.1, usually) not play.

At this point, that 1.5TB card has about 9k albums on it, 7.75k of which are rips of my CDs, and the rest being Bandcamp digital-only purchases.

I've never stopped using Soulseek since 2002! although there's still stuff I can't find on there

Wow, I have a 256MB card in my digital Walkman and I feel like if I put a 1 or 1.5TB card in there I'd drain the battery just scrolling through it all.

Ha! I'm pretty obsessive about my file tree and metadata, so I feel like I'm usually able to find what I'm after pretty fast. An, often, I'm just putting all the albums in a "genre" (my own made-up categories, mostly) folder or in my "newly added albums" folder on and hitting random, if I'm not engaging a close listen.

Which I guess is an opportunity to recommend strongly the Android app "GoneMad Player," which I've relied on for at least a decade. It handles large digital collections with aplomb. Very much worth the few bucks its author charges for it.

Ha! I'm pretty obsessive about my file tree and metadata, so I feel like I'm usually able to find what I'm after pretty fast.

My problem would be more one of option paralysis, spending hours trying to decide what to listen to in the car before finally settling for...fuck, fine, Metallica.

When in doubt--random : )

That's honestly the beauty of keeping a digital music collection (in parallel to a physical one). I got a 100GB player back in 2003 or so, a shell into which you stuck a laptop hard drive. And being able to put a sizeable chunk of my collection on there and put the whole thing on random--I think it actually changed my listening for the better, in that it accelerated my disinterest in divisions between genres/periods and encouraged my interest in their overlaps and commonalities. It made me more eclectic and voracious a listener. Granted, I'd had a 200-CD and 300-CD changer daisy-chained together before that, which started the trend. But the possibility to have thousands of albums--ones I'd sought out, purchased, had times and places in life associated with--on random sort of tied my whole lifetime of listening together, so that nothing ever fully disappeared from my active listening, nothing just became history.

I agree. I have c. 15,000 songs on my phone (backed up, of course) and I almost always listen on random these days, hardly ever to full albums unless it's something new. It's great to hear stuff come up that I haven't heard for years, or sometimes ever.

To answer Pierre Delecto's question: torrent trackers are the way to go. rutracker has the mp3 discography of Waylon Jennings and probably many artists besides. It's all in Russian of course but google translate sorts that out for you. If you haven't use torrents before it's not hard to learn.

81,000 songs on my phone rn. I have a couple of smart playlists that break things up based on albums I haven't listened to yet: albums I haven't listened to in over a year, New albums released in the last three years, etc. Hitting shuffle on all of it is the best radio station I ever wanted.

Using soulseek rn, I found the entire Waylon Jennings discography in about 30 seconds - including the big Bear Family box sets in FLAC.

They have a 1.5TB micro sd now??? I swear the last time I checked was only a month ago.

This thread is a goldmine and I've followed for several years. I've now reached the time, on the wrong side of my mid-50s, where I finally have to take decisive action to liberate the many files accumulated on a 4tb storage drive, and be able to play them through my existing hifi set up.

I would dearly like the patience, confidence and know-how to build a player or diy system as koogs and others on here have done, but I think I will be opting for an off the shelf streaming player, after I've done the requisite weeks of working out what's the best sound and bang for my buck - so any recommendations welcome if there are people using a similar set-up.

A nagging noob question though: is the choice of hard drive important, is it better to use a NAS drive, or will a simple hard drive / SSD do the trick just as well?

Not really, any HDD will do. 3.5" HDDs are noisier, 2.5" HDDs are nice, but at current price points you might as well get a 4 TB SSD.

Make sure to do backups - HDD or SSD, they can fail at any time.

It's kind of crazy scanning through this thread and reading about my long-forgotten home streaming systems.

Just in case my current simple set-up might be useful to someone else, here's what I'm doing now:

My library of music files lives on my iMac, organized with the Music app, streamed with Plex server software to the Plex app on my phone or on a couple of smart TVs connected to home theater systems.

I don't stream outside my LAN. The music library gets backed up along with everything else on the iMac by Time Machine and monthly rsync updates to a HDD I keep off-site.

I don't have the ability to synchronize multi-room playback anymore, but I don't miss it.

I still haven't solved the issue of waking up my iMac remotely, so sometimes I have to walk all the way into my office and hit a key before listening to the Plex server. I could probably find a solution but I imagine this hardship builds character.

I don't have the ability to synchronize multi-room playback anymore