Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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

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.

― Siegbran, Thursday, January 11, 2024 7:50 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Cheers Siegbran!

I’m still using my homegrown Raspberry pi solution. I upgraded the audio card to a better Hifi-berry card and went through a small period of Linux configuration hell but I figure that builds character.

still using a Seagate 5TB USB drive running through a Dragonfly DAC directly into my home stereo mixer, I have hardwired speakers in the living room as well as the listening room/office, but that's all

Do you have a computer in the chain somewhere to control it?

i really should back everything up better than i do but not sure buying a 12th(!) external drive is wise and it's time to look into a proper NAS.

xp oh yes, sorry, a Mac Mini, USB-C out to Dragonfly

This sort of blurs piracy/preservation, but are there backup pools where enthusiasts back up each other's personal collections through some kind of distributed scheme (other than private bittorrent, ad hoc soulseeks, etc...)?

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

Doesn’t Airplay take care of this automatically now?

Alas, the only Apple devices involved are my iMac and (potentially) my phone ... the TVs/home theater systems I'd like to synch use Roku in one case and Chromecast in the other, so I can send different Plex streams simultaneously to each with no problem, but I don't see a way to get them on the same page.

My setup is similar (2011 Mac mini, iTunes, 4TB of lossless ALACs) but I send it locally thru optical out to a component DAC in my stereo, and across the network to old Airport Express routers as Airplay sources. Very clean lossless outputs, can be synced, etc. Controlled from apps on the phone, iPad, and remote screen from my laptop; Mini also accepts basic play and skip commands from one of those white remotes that used to come with iMacs. It's been a long process but I nailed it about 3 years ago and nothing has changed since.

AirPort Express routers still work / supported? Wow

Yep, somewhat embarrassingly I run the entire house on a wired network of Airport Extreme / Time Capsule / Express units, they work without a hitch and seamlessly hand over from area to area. They were cheap to pick up after discontinuation and the last gen Express audio out is impeccable. Might be a security concern, the last software update was maybe 2021.

These do the same thing fwiw

https://www.belkin.com/audio-adapter-with-airplay-2/P-AUZ002.html

any thoughts on maintaining a subscription based digital "collection"?

i find I'm still collecting with streaming, in a way more than ever, always exploring and filing into folders and playlists

i used to have more or less one massive playlist for my singles collection, but recently i've started branching out, so I'm doing dedicated mood/genre/period lists

every once in a while I come across something that doesn't fit any list but that I can't let go off, some kind of collector mania - and so I'll file it under "uncategorized"

this collection is of great importance to me now, some years ago my account was hacked and the person who did it deleted all my playlists, I was shocked... thankfully support was able to recreate them... sometimes i think abt converting them all to some other format but... that's a lot of work

my whole thing is curation

the main thing i lost when i had my recent hard drive crash was the last three years of my music library, everything else i'd migrated to the nas

but in truth it wasn't something i had the time or motivation to really maintain anymore

my relationship with music has changed so much in the last few years... i guess like having a collection, a library, is something that... isn't important to me? like it feels like imposing order upon chaos and it's just... not something i'm up to do, making a coherent narrative out of my life through music

to answer the question from the original revive, it sounds like Roon might be the easiest solution to what you want to do, although it costs about the same as spotify per month (there is a "lifetime" option but that costs $830). roon will also sell you the streaming box you want to stream music to your hifi.

if you're a little more DIY-inclined, you can set up your own music server with a NAS and an application like navidrome or plex. there's a small period of configuration hell but that builds character, per prior posters. sample plex instructions are here, if this makes you want to faint from terror give roon a try instead.

between plex and navidrome, plex is not really music-native (i.e. it was originally designed for movies/tv) but plenty of people use it for music and it has the advantage of being accessible outside of your network, i think you can stream from your phone when you're away from your house for example with ease. plex also has the advantage of being supported by a ton of streaming players.

you can do that too with navidrome but it's more involved and you risk opening your nas/network up to the outside if you don't know what you're doing. navidrome is based on the subsonic protocol so you'll have to look for players that support that protocol if you want to stream to a standalone player etc.

whatever you do, make sure you have 2-3 backups of your music collection, preferably following the 3-2-1 backup principle. and here's your daily reminder that RAID is not a backup, a NAS is not a backup, etc.

something like this looks like a no-fuss, not-hugely-expensive digital player (and cd and tuner...)

https://www.richersounds.com/denon-rcd-n10-black.html

but then you read the manual and it says 'Browse the music on your PC/NAS and select something to play.' but how is scrolling through 3000 lps on a 3-line display going to work?

(also, no ogg support so...)

"If the image size (pixels) of an album artwork exceeds 500 × 500 (WMA/MP3/WAV/FLAC) or 349 × 349 (MPEG-4 AAC), then music may not be played
back properly."

lol

you'll need something with a decent control app

I'm on a bluesound powernode, node will do fine if you prefer your own amp

it let's me browse the music on my nas, also whatever I put on a thumb drive

supports roon

I'm using MALP (mpd client) on my phone for the pi setup i currently have and that works fine, can scroll to the bottom in seconds. am also rolling my own web-based interface i can use with the pi connected to the TV and a wireless mouse - grid of album covers (needs more work because it struggles with 3000 images on a page)

i guess the denon could have something similar, or might expose an API that'd let other people write one

I know stems are popular with the remix crowd, but does anyone use them for personalized playback setups (e.g., panning drums to dedicated "drum" speakers, dropping vocals that are unfortunately at the resonant frequency of your coffee table)?

why is a NAS not a backup? why is a RAID not a backup?
I have a local drive on my music Mac which holds the whole collection. Regularly backed up to the NAS, which is regularly backed up to an external RAID drive. Three copies (admittedly nothing offsite but I will address that) running on independent hardware. I've had drives fail in the NAS and the RAID and they've been rebuilt successfully. What am I not getting?

with RAID i think they mean that just because you’re mirroring with RAID 1 it doesn’t count as a backup of because data corruption would affect both disks equally and there’s no rollback mechanism

I think it's supposed to mean that even though (in most configs) a disk in the array can fail without you losing data, you could still e.g. accidentally delete a directory and then you wouldn't be able to restore it.

You can absolutely use a RAID or a NAS *as* a backup (eg as a second disk that you back files up to), but if it is your *sole* storage for those files, they aren't backed up.

lol yes that’s an actually comprehensible version of what i was trying to say

with your typical 4-bay NAS that's set up in RAID 5, one drive can fail and you're still OK provided that the RAID rebuilds the replacement drive before another drive fails.

however, suppose when you bought your NAS and the drives that 2 or more of the drives left the factory with the same defect that will cause them to fail in 3 years. if both drives fail at or roughly the same time, before you have a chance to rebuild the array, you are.... hosed

therefore, even if you have a NAS, that NAS should be backed up (maybe to another NAS, and to the cloud as well)

you might also be thinking, what is the likelihood that 2 drives would fail at once. great question! suppose you have just bought your first 4-bay NAS and you're just rarin' to fill that baby up with drives. you find out that there's a good deal on WD 14TB red's so you figure aw hell, why not and buy 4 at once. greater than 0 chance that those 4 reds came from the same batch from the factory! and what if that batch did have a defect. these horror stories exist. it's a good thing that the market for hard drives isn't subject to the same consolidating monopoly forces that other markets are and we have more than 2 manufacturers to choose from, right?

also you know, a power surge can fry every drive in the NAS along with the NAS itself.