Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

yeah you can't stream OOP stuff on blogs now rite...

No to mention I suspect that this limitless streaming is going to somehow involve a lot of commercial advertisements somewhere.

Yes, the next paradigm shift is clearly streaming from centralised cloud-based storage, eliminating the need for personal collections of anything bar metadata. I'm already heading in that direction [insert Eurocentric Spotify Premium gloat here - £10 per month for ad-free high-bitrate is money well spent IMO], and I unreservedly welcome it.

I fucking hate paradigms

yeah you can't stream OOP stuff on blogs now rite..

eh, I've spent a fair chunk of this afternoon looking for old Dolly Parton and Buck Owens MP3s and let me tell you there is a LOT of out of print stuff that is just not on the internet

basically whenever one medium replaces another, a bunch of stuff gets lost and I don't find that particularly exciting or awesome

being someone who still buys CDs, can someone tell me how they handle 'liner notes'?

I've been doing this narrative podcast thing recently, introducing tracks, and people are asking me 'wow you are so well researched' and... I'm just... 50% of that stuff is straight from the booklet that comes with the CD and a surprising number of my friends respond to that by saying 'that's exactly what I mean'

Roughly two-thirds of my digital music collection is on Lala.com, which I know because once you register for the site, you can sync your iTunes library with your Lala account and then listen to anything in Lala's database that you already own at any computer.

"old Dolly Parton and Buck Owens MP3s"
these were on CDs at some point? that is kind of surprising that they're not somewhere out there...

Can someone explain Media Monkey to me?

Though most of my music collection is on CD/vinyl, I have loads of promos on my computer that just feel ... disorganised. Would Media Monkey make my life neater?

I have no idea if they were ever on CD (but I kind of doubt it) - I'm talking about stuff like Joshua, Hello My Name is Dolly, Just Because I'm a Woman, etc. Same goes for Buck's 60s LPs.

there is a LOAD of stuff that is just plain not out there

which in a way is both gratifying & frustrating

xp milton: seriously ... I have a good number of free jazz large ensemble recordings I've downloaded, and I have no clue how the current I-tunes/mp3 system would even manage listing all the musicians.

to really have access to everything ever recorded you would def have to have 1) a computer 2) a turntable 3) a CD player 4) a cassette deck and...shit a record player that plays 78s maybe proably? A wax cylinder? 8 track player?

there is a LOAD of stuff that is just plain not out there

which in a way is both gratifying & frustrating

I dunno what's gratifying about it but it annoys me that this fact is always glossed over by hyped-up digital acolytes

I mean its not like this stuff I'm looking for is obscure - these were hits! By major artists! With huge distribution networks! But a few decades later *poof* gone.

xp Was anything really released exclusively on 8-track?

The loss of cassettes is kind sad though.

shakey, you should learn about google blog search, i think everything is out there, it's just a matter of how you look for it:

http://boxofmuzik.blogspot.com/2009/04/dolly-parton-rare-album.html

those files are all gone shasta nice try

Due to a violation of our terms of use, the file has been removed from the server.

don't get me wrong I'm so glad the record company that owns those albums is being so diligent to make sure Dolly fans can only hear that music on albums purchased from used record dealers. which doesn't make them any money anyway.

fucking people. I hate them.

Hey they aren't going to undercut the 17-disc Dolly Parton Boxed Set that's coming out next year!

I dunno what's gratifying about it

perhaps I haven't gone into my big ol crush on oblivion & things that get lost to history here but I think I take as much pleasure in things I can't find as others do in like finding things

well then if there's no blogs, there are torrentz:
http://www.torrentz.com/9d3f1bd617739c27a411978313ce445e7fa1dc76

You aren't exactly proving your point, Steve.

I ain't installing now torrent client software on my machine at work, that is asking for trouble

I mean this stuff is currently scattered hither and yon in various formats and variable quality. What exactly is going to unite everything together again? Spotify?

er I AIN'T BE INSTALLIN NO TORRENT dadgummit

is what I meant to say

MediaMonkey is simply a media library jukebox like MP or iTunes that happens to be lower-bloat (loads quickly and uses fewer resources), with integral folder browser and tag macros. Ideal for those who have their own preferred file organization scheme (eg slsk sharers), or in iPod mp3 players.

@ Milton: I've taken to just keeping hi-res scans of album liners. Since I never had a turntable (ie 12" media) this was fairly easy.

@ others: burning DVD-R backup is pretty silly. After 2 annual rounds of this (losing 2 days of free-time each time), I discovered that I could back up for < $80 total investment with a discount HDD and USB enclosure. If you have an spare old drive a USB enclosure is maybe $15-20.

above should read non iPod mp3 players. Ie, a lot of more audiophile players didn't support tags well until the last 2 years, so users ended up needing hierarchical folder organization that iTunes evidently no longer uses by default.

All this talk of organizing digital files, triple back up of hard drives weekly seems a lot more complicated than having a few shelves full of CDs or LPs (even if they're more of a pain to move and take up more space). I'm not totally addicted to physical media exactly, I just think we're still in an awkward middle phase. Perhaps some type of subscription based cloud style streaming could be the possible future, where you didn't have to worry about organizing or backing up or collecting anything?

Part of having a large digital collection means accepting some responsibility for the database management if you don't want tags like "Presley, Elvis" and "Elvis Presley" as separate artists. There are easy-to-use tools built into iTunes and other apps that make it a snap to handle these tasks. The trick is understanding the benefit of making the effort - like a big one upfront and then pretty small going forward. Kinda like if you want a reasonably filed set of CD shelves you need to decide on an organizing approach.

Meanwhile, the idea that a digital collection reduces the connection with music is crazy to me. Having all this music at my fingertips lets me easily do things like compare versions, or make connections between artists I hadn't before, or simply allow me to dig deeper in my collection as I scroll my artist list and hit on someone I hadn't listened to in ages.

Also - sharing albums is a snap: zip it up, put it on a site like Divshare, email the link. Much faster than making a tape or a CDR.

And what about making mixes for yourself or a friend? Back in the cassette days I really had to think it was going to be worth it to go to the effort it took to create one: pulling out all the source CDs, playing them in real-time, listening to the results, creating the in-lay card. Now with MP3s I'm inspired to pull things from hither and yon and put them together for like-minded folks.

being someone who still buys CDs, can someone tell me how they handle 'liner notes'?

case in point re: the 'awkward middle phase', i tag my music w/ album covers, reviews, label and assorted other stuff that can be procured through mediamonkey or whatever and i figure an easy way to add more indepth info is just around the corner (in case i want to be that completist, i'm not at the moment, i haven't even looked at what comes with cds regularly for years and years) so i don't even sweat that at the moment. i like the idea of ripping everything so i can search tracks, recombine them, backup etc. but it's soooo slow i'm probably 20% done and i feel like at the end i'm not gonna wanna part w/ a sizable portion but we'll see how it goes

say, how accurate are those softwares that claim to automatically tag mp3s by listening to a small sample of it?

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