Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

I have about 45 DVDs on a spindle, each of which holds about 4.5 GB of MP3s (AACs, actually). I have a desktop iMac with a 250GB hard drive which has about 50GB or so of music on it, and I'm planning to burn all that to DVD pretty soon. I've also got a laptop (on which I'm typing this post) with a similar-sized hard drive, and that one's got about 25GB of music on it at present (because that's the one I import all my promo CDs to, and download digital promos to). I'm gonna burn that stuff to DVD soon as well. How many individual albums does all this add up to? Several thousand, easy.

my brain's had enough of the record for a lifetime.

Yeah, I feel the same about that Wilco album. Mind you, I've never heard it.

stop ripping. bind your cds its totally hot

unperson: Do you still buy/collect any physical albums or are you mostly digital?

Album art is always nice to have, in any form. To me, just collecting mp3s seems really sterile and doesn't have any connection to the process of collecting music. A lot of my best memories of music are of buying it at my favorite local store, or studying the lyrics. My thought process when I think about an album immediately begins with the album cover.

I guess there's nothing wrong with collecting music the way you are, and god knows, just about everyone your age was raised under the same circumstances. I personally never want to stop "collecting" music outside of the mp3 format, although I do realize there will come a day (in the not too distant future) that cars won't even come with CD players.

and all your meals will come in tablet form.

Do you still buy/collect any physical albums or are you mostly digital?

I don't keep many individual album CDs around anymore - one tower's worth, which is about 400 or so, plus another couple of hundred slimcase promos and things in weirdly shaped digipaks which I keep in a cabinet. Mostly what I keep is boxed sets, especially archival ones like the Anthony Braxton Mosaic box from last year, or the Miles Davis Complete Plugged Nickel Sessions set.

stop ripping. bind your cds its totally hot

Yes, great idea. This works best if you put similar genres adjacent to each other (e.g., all your M0unt41n G04ts CDs next to your Bright Eyes, Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday). That way once J0hn D. gets you feeling all emo and sad, it's only a single binder page-flip to your Chris Carrabba stuff! Woo!

god the saddoes eager to show they've heard of me are out in force tonite eh

lool

:'(

eager to show they've heard of me

Seriously though -- considering I've been on ILM three years, that was hardly the point.

dude it's all love I was just rezingin please unsad that face

How good a sound quality/how great a breadth would an on-demand music service have to be in order to consider doing away with having a digital collection at all?

I can't really hear the difference between a well encoded mp3 and a FLAC, even though I've had the opportunity to use some pretty heavy audiophile equipment in the past...tin ears, I guess. so as long as it's 200+ kbps I'm fine, which both Amazon and iTunes do now.

what are you gonna do when iTunes moves to this rumored 'Cocktail' format?

my biggest problem with a digital collection is all the metadata. do you add the lyrics? when do you feel the need to add a composer? what if you can't find a decent scan of the album art bigger than 150x150 pixels? etc.

We've got about 80gb of music on this iMac, which runs three iPods - an 80gb classic that sits on the Zeppelin, my 1gb shuffle, and Em's iPhone. It's not backed up anywhere at the moment, because we've only just migrated to this machine in the last week. We've got an external HD that'll take it all. The vast majority of it is backed up next door on a couple of thousand CDs though, and most of our listening is probably still off CDs. I've bought a few dozen songs from iTunes, mainly b-sides, odd old singles, and things that I'd not want a whole album or compilation of. I guess those are the only ones that really NEED backing up. Everything's just organised via iTunes; I'm pretty anal about covers & tags & things. I don't think we'd ever go totally digital; just yesterday I bought The XX album on CD. I love CDs too much. But then I'm 30.

for all you guys backing up to CD/DVD, be careful: Up To 10% of CD-Rs Fail Within a Few Years

I've got pretty much my entire music collection in digital form on a 500gb hard drive (with another one as backup) for iPod purposes - however I only really buy singles digitally rather than whole albums. This is partly because I like the physical object and partly 'cos the CDs I do still buy are mostly very cheap secondhand/bargain bin ones so it's cheaper just to rip from the disc. That said, I've got rid of/have boxed up to get rid of 350+ CDs this year, basically things I've gone off. I moved earlier this year and I've got slightly less room in the new house which certainly spurred me on and I'll be honest, it feels really good paring things down (I still have loads left though!).
The main reason for me buying CDs over vinyl was portability - I've always done a large portion of my listening on the move and I had a CD walkman up until a few years back. However I've started replacing some CDs with vinyl for home listening and I intend to buy more nof my new music in vinyl form (really grateful to those labels who include a download coupon with the record). I could never see myself only having a digital collection and nothing else - I'm sure I'll hang on to lots of my remaining CDs for as long as they can be played.

(really grateful to those labels who include a download coupon with the record)

Seconding this.

I think I'm at 8 or 9TB of digital files now split evenly between audio and video and I'm probably going to go to some sort of desktop RAID 5 set up once the next generation of 2+TB drives become common. I'm more concerned with having a decent file system that can handle all that and a metafile indexer/cataloger that won't collapse when I hit it with that size of data.

Even if i was goin digital, I think I would throw all my CDs in storage or somethin

I mean, amassing a bunch of files isn't really "collecting" anything anymore is it? It;s like saying you collect pokemon

For those who are on PC, Mediamonkey is the only place to go.

"I mean, amassing a bunch of files isn't really "collecting" anything anymore is it? It;s like saying you collect pokemon"

If you have a file that isn't readily replaceable/accessible (like say something dubbed off a rare public access TV performance that only you have a VHS copy of), then it takes on more of the properties of something tangible/loseable like pokemon cards, but my thinking is that music services will increasingly make obsolete any need to keep a file or file backup at all.

For example, netflix users wouldn't bother to "collect" movies they've seen on netflix, at least not with any great frequency. (though there's supposedly some pirate group that prides itself on having backed up the entire netflix catalog)

i don't really consider my digital music a "collection" per se, it's just me tunes

i could (and will) quite happily be all-digital in the future. i'll probably hang on to most of my cds, boxed up and stored away, more than anything else because it's not worth the time or effort trying to sell them.

my digital vs hard copy purchase ratio is about 9 to 1 at the moment. i think i've bought less than 50 cds this year.

well but this is what begs the really interesting generational divide question. what is your collection? a series of hard-evidence signifiers about experiences you've had & can have again at will, tangible evidence of those experiences - or is your real collection the experiences themselves, and the physical collection something of an old-fashioned proof that will no longer be necessary in the future/present? nb I am from the previous gen so for me I gotta have some physical token to feel like I "own" something. but I don't think that's the only way to conceive of "ownership," and I suspect that different conceptions - no less valid - will replace/have replaced "our" conception. it's like: I don't save ticket stubs or collect/trade shows, but I do have a collection of live music experiences - that collection is the experiences themselves. digital collections are considerably more tangible than those, right?

xpost w/philip btw

"Honestly, though, I usually listen to records I love 30-40 times and then I can barely, if ever, listen to them again."

I cannot for the life of me fathom feeling this way about "records I love".

At age 45, my big paradigm shift was when the artwork and liner notes shrank from 12" to 5", so I find myself strangely blasé (perfectly happy, actually) about the shift from 5" disc to digital file.

Pardon my grammar. I'm 45, not my paradigm shift.

w/r/t generational divide, I don't believe the next generation will be so alien as to maintain a digital collection against an endless buffet that makes that collection obsolete when making personal top-ten lists does all the signifying one needs (and is an activity well-enjoyed cross-generationally)

so maybe this kind of digital album collecting as if they were physical albums will be a weird hiccup peculiar to just this moment in time.

i can appreciate good artwork as much as the next dude but i've pretty much always listened to music the same way - compiled the best songs into whatever format i was working with at the time (tape, cdr, playlist) and listen to that, completely separate from the original artifacts. so artwork is really something i only ever looked at if i wanted to know who the producer was or something. frankly some records i appreciate more for not having the shitty artwork.

i have a car and that is mostly why i buy cds

Honestly, though, I usually listen to records I love 30-40 times and then I can barely, if ever, listen to them again. Wilco's a ghost is born is my favorite record of the decade, and I've barely listened to it since 2005. By then, my brain's had enough of the record for a lifetime.

How old are you? I found that after about 10 years, I bought a lot of albums I previously weeded out by favorite groups. Now that I'm digitizing my collection, it's not as big a deal. I'm still keeping 60% of my CDs. I'm ripping in FLAC with dbpoweramp, correct some tagging and make playlists with Mediamonkey, and listen in three rooms with Squeezebox. I will be able to fit everything on my 6TB NAS server with room to spare, and have everything backed up twice, one on extra drives at home, another at work. It's nice to be able to have access to everything at work.

I think it's crucial to use lossless files. You can easily convert them to another format with a batch converter without losing anything. Buying CDs is still the cheapest option, because you can get deals on them new and used for under $10 each. $1 to $2 a song for FLAC is just not an option. The CDs you don't want to keep, you can sell, and end up spending only $2 to $5 on the music.

I'm listening to more of my music more often now that I can play it simultaneously in multiple rooms. Living with someone else the past couple years, I had stopped listening later at night because she goes to sleep earlier. Now I can put on some closed headphones and have access to the whole collection from bed on the Duet remote.

i mean, one of the biggest obstacles for me re: digital is that iTunes keeps changing how it organizes things.

Like for a while it was just artist/song/album and then with a recent update you can put files in one pile while labeling it another with "sort by." Also my iphone used to recognize "sort by" so I'd sort all my compilations by "#" so the errant comp tracks just show up at the end. The new iPhone update no longer recognizes "sort by" and my iphone tracks are now a shitty jumble again.

Who knows what iTunes will change to? Or even if we'll be using itunes in 10 years?

where we're going, we don't need iTunes

iTunes is just a ID3 tag editor isn't it (at least for mp3 files) and it's such an 800 pound gorilla that I'm sure whatever player we'll be using in the future, Mp3-O-Matic 5000 or whatever, will definitely be "iTunes compatible"

the Album Artist field is such a life saver w/r/t rap albums...and Sort By is great for those who catalog by last name, among others

but completely useless for people that use iphones

Co-sign on Squeezeboxes. I set some up recently and love being able to listen anywhere in the house.

The ease of maintaining off-site back-ups is one of the biggest advantages of going digital.

Wow, a lot of good stuff here!

Fastnbulbous, I'm 22.

I'm actually reconsidering going all-digital after reading through some of the stuff you all have said here. The comments where people said stuff like "Someone can just steal your hard drive or your hard drive could die, and then you'll lose all your music!" struck me as all too true.

I will also admit that I feel affectively different towards .mp3s than I do CDs. My relationship with the music does change. And probably not for the better.

met a guy who owns this company today, seems like an interesting idea in terms of having your collection on hand whereever you are.

http://www.psonar.com/

-i'm at the point storage-wise where i hate having cds, just more shit i don't have room for.

-i mostly listen to music on my ipod, but that's all almost full and it's also old and acting like it might conk out. my digital music is all over the place storage-wise and organization-wise, it's a mess.

-love listening to vinyl, but i don't spend that much time listening to music at home.

so basically no media choices are super appealing at the moment. if i was really serious i would get a new ipod and another hard drive and back up/organize all my stuff, but spending the time and money on that is lower than a lot of other things on my list.

Who knows what iTunes will change to? Or even if we'll be using itunes in 10 years?

gonna go out on a limb here & say we still will be. while one of the governing tropes of thinking about the digital age is "everything moves at a very accelerated pace," I don't think the speed is nearly as dizzying as it was until about five years ago. things have slowed down; most of the "new" developments in digital communication aren't so much new developments as they are tweaks on already extant concepts. the iTunes we're using in 10 years may have gone through a bunch of reconfiguring, but it'll still be what we're using, I'd guess. I could be wrong! but I believe pretty strongly that the speed-of-technology's-growth paradigm is itself one we've outgrown; that a settling-in has taken place.

I think that's a pretty big limb considering how hard to imagine iPods it was ten years ago (the fact that Apple "came back" at all is kind of amazing in its own right.) These kind of leaps can happen totally unexpectedly and can leave everything else in the dust pretty quickly.

ha, I think you're both right, which is why I now use iTunes exclusively and why I buy as much as I can on CD and then rip it to MP3 when adding it to my library

do digital people keep upgrading the albums they like from mp3 to flac to whatever comes next? seems tiresome. or maybe most people don't care that much about how things sound. i mean, a lot of people listen to horrible internet mp3 sound and don't seem to care.

That said even if we aren't using iTunes, I think that something will exist to allow you to transfer your mp3s to whatever is replacing them. One of the main reasons people are so unattached to CDs is it's easy to convert them to mp3s. Don't think people would be quite as keen to give up mp3s if they couldn't be similarly carried over to whatever new format will exist.

xp I don't think so. But most of the people I know who maintain huge digital collections have ripped their collections @ 320s + where the differences are subtle to non-existent.

this seems like a waste of time tbh, everything will be streaming in less than 10 years, probably more like 5. i heard someone in the movie industry saying that blu-ray is already archaic.

I'll hang to my archaic CDs thankyouverymuch. I somehow doubt everything that has ever been or ever will be recorded will be available streaming, but I could be wrong.

Tracer I’m glad that your post had a duplicate for backup

lol you can’t be too careful these days

maf it's 10 bucks a month

Siegbran otm, but nothing on that external drive is time-sensitive. unless you count S03 of reservation dogs. my mac mini's internal drive gets backed up via Time Machine as well as BB

where does the mac mini get backed up to - the same external drive with your media?

i think backblaze is probably fine for your use case, it doesn't sound like you are a power user. you can google aroundfor 'backblaze restore experiences' and find plenty of horror stories natch. apparently backblaze needs to see a file at least once every 30 days or it will delete it. shouldn't be a problem if you're backing up every night but if you have an external drive you only plug in once every couple of weeks could be a problem. i'm assuming you don't have so much data that you'd want backblaze to mail you your data on a drive, which is a service they offer.

where does the mac mini get backed up to - the same external drive with your media?

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.

― stet, Monday, January 15, 2024 5:25 PM (yesterday)

i'm getting way ahead of my skis here but i *think* if you have your synology NAS set up in btrfs you can use the snapshot feature to mitigate this, which works kind of like time machine.

“not a power user” rip tracer hand, was good to know you

so your internal drive is important enough it gets its own local backup drive, but your external media drive doesn't? it's all just commercial media on that drive, yeah? no home movies, precious photographs of your kids, etc.? xp

all my photos, many precious memories yes

“apparently backblaze needs to see a file at least once every 30 days or it will delete it”

i cannot believe this is true

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze and wrote a lot of the Extended Version History functionality on your client.

...

Now, in this Version History (30 days) if you unplug an external hard drive for more than 30 days, not only can you not retrieve your files from that hard drive's backup, but if you plug the drive in again you will need to upload all of the files again. After 30 days, Backblaze treats it as if the drive will never return and purges the files from the backup in the Backblaze datacenter.

fun eh?

from reading around, i think the caveat is that if your entire system is disconnected from backblaze for more than 30 days, you'll be fine as backblaze will simply preserve the last backed up state. but if for whatever reason you connect part of your system back to backblaze without the other parts - i.e. let's say you are a laptop user and are traveling with your laptop but not with your external drives, and your laptop is backing up to backblaze every night but your external drives remain at home - then you will be thrilled to learn about the 30 day rule and even more thrilled to learn that you can pay them more money to extend the 30 days to 1 year.

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

― the absence of bikes (f. hazel), Monday, January 15, 2024 8:22 PM (yesterday)

so the apartment i've been living in for the past few years is pretty stable power wise, i can't recall ever having a loss of power. well, guess what happened over the weekend - apparently the circuit breaker that my synology lives on decided to go crazy and would power flicker if anything on that circuit were turned on/off, such as a power-hungry 10-watt led bulb. my synology lost power and when i turned it back on after replacing the breaker it sent me a strongly worded email to buy a UPS.

Morphy ran into a problem and was shut down improperly. This could be caused by power failure or other reasons and may result in severe data loss. Therefore, we highly recommend using an SNMP or USB UPS to protect your device and data if you don't already have one installed.

the synology is on day 3 of data scrubbing but hopefully i'll be ok. i'll be picking up a UPS soon.

fun eh?

ah i see. that does suck. in my case my external drive is always plugged in and mounted so i don't think i would run into this but good to know about if I ever decided to back up a portable drive that i only plug in from time to time

I've got two 4-bay NASes, once which serves as a quarterly backup device which I store at my office and then I have a set of hard drives that serves as my onsite backup. Got about 35TB of data and not much upstream bandwidth so the online backup service is just for my main system and personal files - it won't work for the giant archive of audio and video files.

to answer the question from the original revive

i had a decent surge protector on my computer, but after finding out the electricity to my place sucks (it's undervoltage, apparently, to an extent that my computers were crashing periodically) i grabbed a UPS... it's definitely given me a lot more peace of mind during the ice storms. i didn't have a full power-loss but i had lots of flickers.

i am trying to figure out how to get my NAS documents folder to backup to the cloud, like, all the stuff i've written... it's more difficult than i thought it would be. honestly at this point if i lose all my audio and video files i'm copacetic about it. i lost three years of my curated music library and playlists and ehhh i don't actually give that much of a fuck. i've gotten into the "embrace the impermanence of all things" mindset lately.

Hmmm this looks nice if my AirPort Express ever dies

https://www.wiimhome.com/wiimmini/overview

i'll buy anything with wii in the name

Those sound good. Was considering it for my father in law til he made clear enough he's really not too fussed about the whole music on computers thing.

I'm still on Logitech Media Server which isn't the easiest to recommend. But would say give it a look before shelling out for Roon!

Not sure why it took me so long to discover Prism. I LOVE IT. Finally I can stream all my music to my phone. As close to zero setup as you can get.

ooh tell me more

Prism is a 3rd party iPhone app for Plex.

Yes and it also integrates your Apple Music library as well, afaict? Like, my playlists sync to Prism, which is what I want. idk what Plex’s playlist support is like these days but the last time I checked it was terrible.

ah no my bad, Apple Music is available via Prism but only locally eg, what’s on yr phone.

Is there any way of accessing yr Apple Music library outside the local network?? (I can’t even access it INSIDE the local network actually… “Home Sharing” just literally doesn’t work. It appears on my phone but does nothing when you choose it)

it's time to deprecate apple music. apple obviously doesn't care about it

yeah. i mean Prism is actually allowing me to use my phone to control the Apple Music library that’s on my computer but eh??

i guess i can recreate my playlists on Prism but it would be nice to have a standards-based ecosystem so that i know i won’t have to do it all over again for some other app once Plex gets bought by like Tiktok or something

i'm saying apple doesn't want you to have an apple music library on your computer anymore. they want you to subscribe to the (other) apple music that's not on your computer and give them money! time to move away from the apple music (on your computer).

yeah that’s what i’m kind of in the process of. feels kind of sisyphean doing my playlists again but i guess i should just give in to impermanence

btw the 'standards-based' thing you're looking for might be satisfied by looking into airsonic/subsonic compatible servers and players. airsonic is an open source fork of subsonic and seems to have an active community. but setting these things up probably involves a lot of pain. so ymmv. as i've stated before itt i use navidrome but have been too lazy to open up my NAS to the outside world to allow streaming.

This whole fragmented thing around music libraries is really annoying, I now have four music library applications to manage, each with its own playlists, it's a total shitshow.

- I've got Apple Music (the app not the streaming service) since it's the only way to sync music to iPhone/iPad natively, but it can't stream outside the home & the integration with AppleTV is terrible, it's also really limited with things like multiple genres/multiple artists/release types/etc, so:
- I've got Plex since you can stream remotely, Plexamp is a great Phone app & Plex is the only half-decent music player on AppleTV
- I've got Navidrome since the web player is easier/better and handles things like compilations a bit better
- I've got EngineDJ since I'm forced to use it to sync with my stand-alone Denon DJ controller, unsurprisingly as a library manager it's shit

On my PC I still use the Zune software to manage my digital music library. Somehow it still works, though last update was in 2011, and of course all the support and help links are long-since broken.

Zune lifers are the new 78 collectors (and I love them both)

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