Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

Haha. It's true. I still use a Zune (my third) and if I can find a refurbished one when this one finally dies, I'll probably get another.

iTunes is still chugging along well for me. I even have an iPod Classic that still syncs properly.

It's kinda funny but telling -- I've noticed over the last couple of months a weird little bug in iTunes/Music that doesn't allow me to easily collapse individual tracks from promos into one album anymore with one step. (Importing rips is simple and works just fine.) It's not the end of the world and has only affected a couple of things, it just takes way longer to do it since I have to track by track. So I've been chatting every couple of weeks with a higher level Apple support person who is as puzzled as I am, and from context I definitely know now that I am among the very VERY few users using the program that way anymore (ie, to organize things in a home library, utterly separate from Music either as resource database or center for streaming), and that the bug was so obscure that I appear to be the first one to have reported it from what I'm gathering, though I've seen a couple of comments from people on the discussion forums indicating they've had similar issues. At one point the support person, knowing I was a music writer per our chat, called me a 'professional' user and I got a sense that was distinct from just about everyone else who uses it. Odd feeling!

We are the annoying ones, the edge cases, the power users - starving hysterical naked

bought a NAS, spent the weekend backing up files. my new hobby is renaming files (movies first, then TV, then music). it'll be a while.

My life

so long as the media server i'm running on the NAS can parse all the tags and lay the library out sensibly, i could not give the slightest care about the filenames

Emby seems to primarily use filenames because it was originally video focused and embedded metadata in video is harder. i hate that it uses filenames with spaces and brackets and square brackets which makes scripting harder.

(and a lot of my video is archived from pvr and needs transcoding to a more modern format for space reasons. but it's probably approaching 1000 hours at this point)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/

I'm less worried about my music collection than my photos and creative projects, and have already lost enough precious data over the years to have come to the conclusion that outsourcing to the cloud is the best protection. That alongside some protection against "bit rot", like a hash-checking file system, or application.

double CDs, how do you number then?

i add CD1, CD2 to the album title (sometimes) and add an extra digit to the front of the track number, 101..10n, 201..20m, but merge the directories

are there better alternatives?

(just copying them all the the new nas, 800GB of it, will see how the emby media server software likes it very shortly)

actually that's not quite accurate

the filename becomes 1xx and 2xx within the combined directory but the metadata is

Title CD1, Track xx
Title CD2, Track xx

two digit, zero padded track number, suffix on the album title

I use the disc number tag, my apps can all use that.

that's what I do

never seen the disc number tag... until just now - it's in the emby metadata page

and emby seems to be doing the correct thing with Various Artists collections and using the Album Artist on the collection page, the individual artists on the individual album page (and not just using the first artist as the album artist like XBMC seemed to)

i keep each CD in its own subdir (filenames 1.01, etc), use the standard metadata fields for disc numbering, and only add a suffix to the album title tag if there's an "official" one, otherwise it's just $albumtitle

but it's added every track artist on Wire Tapper 43 as an individual artist, which is going to cause all sorts of problems - like 20,000 artists, lots of them with only 1 track, and inconsistent names...

but it's added every track artist on Wire Tapper 43 as an individual artist, which is going to cause all sorts of problems - like 20,000 artists, lots of them with only 1 track, and inconsistent names...

You don't have the option to tick a box labeled "Album is a compilation of songs by various artists"? Apple Music has that.

not that I've seen. the software is a bit new to me though.

in some ways this is useful - if the only track i have by an artist is on a compilation i wouldn't be able to find it easily - but in the other hand i have a lot of these and it's going to swamp the 'real' artists

(oh, maybe it's under 'filters')

I put zz before the name of any artist that I have less than 5 songs of. Then they're always going to be at the end and out of the way if I'm on a thingy that doesn't support the various artists thing.

What if you have less than 5 songs of ZZ Top

zz ZZ Top

That looks like they're napping.

emby didn't seem to mind my

a/aphex_twin/selected_ambient_works/01_ajodiashduhi.flac

origanisation scheme, although it did use 'aphex_twin' for the artist title rather than use the actual tag. all the other values were as per the tags. it also did let me fix its idea of the artist name in its metadata.

figure i need to put flacs, oggs and 'others' into seperate folders and only point the software at the lossless version. (oggs are for walking around, 'others' are mp3s when that was the only purchase option (which i convert to flacs for consistency and to oggs for convenience, so everything should exist as flacs and oggs).

somehow accidentally deleted the entire "G" folder (77 GB) from my main drive, thank god for backups

correction: it was gone from the backup drive, not the main, new copy is going the other way

another weekend day of moving files here too, am up to r on the music. did find out that the 4tb music drive was actually only a 3tb drive (which means nas will have plenty of room for a laptop backup)

OK so an annoying thing about Bandcamp doing all the new downloads in 24/96 is that the WAV files don't fit if you are burning a CD with them.

#firstworldproblems

Hmm... just checked my own label's page and am rather surprised to see downloads in 24/44.1 offered, as I only uploaded 16/44.1 WAVs!

You could get Goldwave and save the files as 16bit 44hz before burning a cd. Extra step, but it would work.

sorry yes I meant 24/44.1 xp

and yeah I can recode them using Amadeus, but it's a giant PITA< I don't need 24 bit versions of Australian garage punk

I discovered this recently trying to make a mix CD of recent stuff

I’ve never downloaded anything but MP3s from Bandcamp.

People are still burning CDs?

for the car, yes

not just cds though. i've had problems with playing files on my (cheap) portable device because the files were 'better' than the usual files and i had to downsample them to get them to play.

wild