Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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?

"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."

i'm all for it. i made five bucks selling a dolly parton album this week. that paid for my lunch from the hot dog vendor.

I think streaming music is gonna be a bunch of bullshit; it's the one way the content providers have of giving us less control over media, and locking us in

half-serious question: will the difficult (impossible?) challenge of figuring out a system to correctly tag classical music that would integrate it with other styles of music in your collection hasten the demise of classical music?

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.

FWIW, I found two of those albums (and ten other early Dolly albums) on USENET.

> I'll hang to my archaic CDs thankyouverymuch.

i'd rip them (losslessly) all the same - i've just done all mine and there are about a dozen that have gone to coppery bit-rot heaven.

> triple back up of hard drives weekly seems a lot more complicated than having a few shelves full of CDs

well, weekly backups should be incremental - only the changed things. which shouldn't take long.

i need to get into the habit of burning new purchases as flacs to dvdr as i buy them. i have about 600G of flacs that i only have one copy of... i have the original cds but it'd take me another 6 months to re-rip them.

"half-serious question: will the difficult (impossible?) challenge of figuring out a system to correctly tag classical music that would integrate it with other styles of music in your collection hasten the demise of classical music?"

?? wouldn't software that auto-tags classical music correctly tag the genre as 'classical' (along with conductor,album name, and other metadata)? Is there something about classical music that makes it harder for software to figure out what album it came from?

It seems that for classical music the auto filled in results are often (currently) messed up, and inconsistent. For example, you put in one CD and in the artist field you get the composer, put in the next CD and you get the conductor, or the orchestra, or the star performer, or all the results are in Japanese (this seems to happen to me a lot actually). And of course, with many classical CDs you'll get works by multiple composers and sometimes by different conductors or orchestras. It's just much less normalized than trying to classify rock music (for instance).

i'm all for it. i made five bucks selling a dolly parton album this week. that paid for my lunch from the hot dog vendor.

hey fair enough, I buy used records too!

the only thing i hate about going digital is not having performance & production credits for an album. i used to love poring over that shit, and while it's not like i'm buying many jazz albums digitally now, it was really important for figuring out who i liked and making connections between different records.

and i meant to add that even when i buy something legally and it has some kind of digital liner notes, half of the time the credits aren't even included ;_;

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.

This is one reason I hang onto CDs after ripping them. If someday I decide my 256kbps AAC files don't sound very good, I can go back and make FLACs. I doubt that will ever happen, I'm too lazy. I like keeping the CD liner notes and artwork too.

I think the poor sound quality of MP3s is less of an issue than it used to be, mainly because people rip at higher bit rates now. With my non-audiophile ears and gear, I rarely notice differences between computer files and tracks played off CDs.

For me, a much bigger difference than the recording format is the combination of room acoustics, speaker positions, and my location in the room. It was a big "Duh" moment, but a valuable one, when I realized I could drastically improve what I was hearing by moving my speakers closer to ear level, getting furniture out of the way, etc.

i didn't read all the thread but there is one little thing i'd like to add. i have downloaded and ripped quite a lot of stuff in the last years (around 160 gb). but i didn't listen to most of it. i still listened to my old cds. i had an archos 20 gb jukebox with some of the digitized music. in may i bought an ipod classic, the biggest one available at 120 gb. first i was a little disappointed as there used to be a 160 gb ipod which apple does not produce anymore and which would have been more or less to store all my mp3s. as i could not transfer all mp3s from the computer to the ipod i started alphabetically. i copied everything from a to q. or synchronized if you want the right tech term. the great thing about this 120 meg limitation is that i am now forced to listen to the music. what i do is i rate it. crap to be deleted from the pc hard disk gets one star, stuff which isn't good enough for the ipod but which can stay on the pc gets two and all the rest which will be kept on the ipod gets three and more stars. i have listened to about 3000 songs (often just for a couple of secs) and rated them. right now most of my smiths mp3s are on the ipod. soon there will be sonic youth, swell, talk talk and yo la tengo. maybe around xmas the ipod will contain only music i like (there are still lots of cds to be ripped). i love my little ipod. and the bose earplugs and the sounddock music system. very handy.

which would have been more or less to store all my mp3s =
which would have been more or less big enough to store all my mp3s

I'm curious how big people's digital collections are. Not in a dick-wagging contest, just how much music do you have at your fingertips at home? And do you struggle with choosing what goes on your portable device?

I have about 225gb and am still ripping my CDs. I've got a 160gb iPod for the main library and an 8gb Sansa for new stuff (past year) with a 16gb microsd card for compilations. I constantly have to shift stuff around, which is a pain, and occasionally swap stuff out of my main library with recently ripped older stuff. I was disappointed Apple didn't release a 240gb model - that's the sweet spot where I'll have space for everything I feel is critical. For me, it's not about listening to EVERYTHING, it's about having the choice to listen to ANYTHING. My play stats indicate I listen to about 20-25% of my collection per year so it's not like there's a ton of stuff I never play.

Backed up my mp3 music collection to ten DVD's recently.

i've cut way down on the cds I purchase; I've bought maybe eight all year, plus the beatles box sets. which was a lot of money, really. but I've also found myself downloading less across the board. I think this is just age and time; I have a kid, a family, work two jobs where it's hard for me to listen to music, so the binging years of a few years ago where I acquired untold hundreds of albums in a one week period are just over. I've also grown less attached to physical cds lately (except, like I said, for fetish objects like the Beatles remasters); I just realized the other day that although I purchased the last AMC album when it came out (and love it), I never even played the CD from it because all I've listened to have been mp3s that I got before it came out for the past two years.

also, very nicely done collections like the recycled new order collection make the existing cds kind of superfluous.

C:\MUSIC
209 GB
32,602 files, 3142 folders

I think one thing the mp3 revolution has taught me is that I'll never really enjoy music I don't have an emotional connection to, and I'll never have an emotional connection to music I rarely hear. So a good portion of my listening time is spent considering lesser albums tagged with a 'purgatory' rating, with the expectation that either I'll feel an emotional spark of recognition, or I'll tire of them and delete them.

I'd be happy to have half of my collection, if only to have a stronger emotional response. But figuring out which half is a bastard of a problem.

Anyone else on the cusp of not maintaining a digital music collection at all? I'm at the stage of not backing up or organizing anything, but still being loathe to delete any mp3s I have already.

Anyone else on the cusp of not maintaining a digital music collection at all? I'm at the stage of not backing up or organizing anything, but still being loathe to delete any mp3s I have already.

That's where I've gotten to. I had been backing everything up to dvd-rs and then to external hard drives, but gave up about a year ago (about the time my first kid was born). I think I realized that this stuff would always be available and that it wasn't any major coup to find and download something, legally or otherwise.

So a good portion of my listening time is spent considering lesser albums tagged with a 'purgatory' rating, with the expectation that either I'll feel an emotional spark of recognition, or I'll tire of them and delete them.

me too, as my last.fm stats often indicate. it only just hit me how much of my listening it analytical and evaluative, not so much 'trying to like things more' but trying to develop proper arguments for/against and so its a process that perversely rewards mediocre artists and albums over stuff i've heard just a few times, classified as great and not thought about as much. weird sure but i still feel like i listen to awesome stuff often enough.

I deleted 8,000 MP3s today, as it happens.

i've also listened to new albums a lot more this year than previous years due to spotify making it so easy to do so, so on that basis the volume of music i don't actually like much if at all has probably risen (you have to hear it to hate it). downloading stuff to hear tended to result in a lot of songs just taking up space and remaining unheard.

I'd be happy to have half of my collection, if only to have a stronger emotional response. But figuring out which half is a bastard of a problem.

Hells yeah, especially when you're dealing with the volume of stuff we have. I'll be damned if I'm going to rate 40,000 individual tracks. Properly tagging each was enough of an effort!

it only just hit me how much of my listening is analytical and evaluative

I go through periods like that, too, where I'm CONSUMING music as opposed to ENGAGING music. That's ok - when I get a ton of stuff from the library or download a bunch of albums, I'm looking for something new that will float my boat. I gave up evaluating mediocre stuff long ago and just sell stuff eventually.

I deleted 8,000 MP3s today, as it happens.

Based on any particular criteria?

@blueski:

In a sense, I think we've all become private curators.

At one time, when I was younger and collecting physical formats and watching "Day After" and "Threads" I think I had a vision that I was making a time capsule of a time, place and mindset, and that centuries after the apocalypse archeologists might dig up my collection and have some insight into this life.

After a few decades, I've seen too many collections dispersed in estate sales. I'd probably weep watching vinyl melted down during recycling. Collections are temporary accretions, all is burning, burning.

I think the real value of collecting now has become the way it allows me to construct a metanarrative, broad historical swoops and impregnations and dilutions of style - to think about these ephemeral things as a moving cloud.

The 8,000 was all the music I had on my work computer. If I want to listen to something at work now I use my iPhone so I thought I'd clear space.

There's only about 8,000 mp3s on our home computer anyway; we keep most things on CD still.

i don't so much do the evaluative/analytical thing at all anymore (and i've never gone so far as rating tracks anyway), and several 'pleasant surprise' shuffle sessions of my ripped folder have scared me off just deleting stuff cause it didn't hit me right once or twice. i probably have > 150 gb of material and about a tb total of free space to work with so i don't think i'll have to be too selective anytime soon. i think i actually sell cds more readily than delete mp3s and even i can't make sense of that.

well, it is money duh, but i get tired of glancing at the covers of stuff that gives me a meh impression more than anything

i get tired of glancing at the covers of stuff that gives me a meh impression more than anything

I can totally relate! And I just feel *cleaner* when that stuff is gone from my house!

There's only about 8,000 mp3s on our home computer anyway; we keep most things on CD still.

So you don't feel the need to have all your music available while you're out and about? Just whatever you can stream or have on the iPhone?

"So you don't feel the need to have all your music available while you're out and about? Just whatever you can stream or have on the iPhone?"

Good god no. WTF is wrong with you people?

Why is that so wrong?

Okay maybe for you whipper-snappers the idea of having your complete music collection at your fingertips at all times is something you "need" but for most folks born before oh let's say 1990 it just sounds like overkill.

I don't carry all of my books around with me, so why all of my music?

Once I surmounted that (in hindsight) strange idea, I could buy a tiny little 8 GB flash-memory based device that lasts 30 hours on a charge. The library is still there at home, and someday the devices will converge again. Till then, I pack all the music I'll need for my mental vacations, about once a month.

> I don't carry all of my books around with me, so why all of my music?

because you can?

I "can" poison my girlfriend and throw my cats out of the window to a certain death, but I don't.

I also like the rigmarole of making and syncing new playlists to my iPhone, so I only have certain stuff on me at any time. Like, big Beatles tip right now, so I've just taken off some 90s indie and put on a load of Zombies / Stones / Hendrix / Curtis Mayfield etc. It makes me think, and structures my listening in a way I appreciate.

I don't carry all of my books around with me, so why all of my music?

Music can be enjoyed while doing a bunch activities (working out, grocery shopping, working, etc). It's pretty hard to read a book while exercising, working, blah blah blah.

Saying that, I don't carry all of my music with me. My ipod has about 35GB of music out of 80 (I probably own about 300GB of music on CDs on the whole).

i used to think that was important....I had an 80GB ipod for exactly this reason. when I switched to an iphone was all, "what the hell, how am I going to scale all this down by over half?" then I did and didn't even notice. I got that simplifymedia app so I can stream stuff from home if need be but have used it maybe ten times.

Maybe for you whipper-snappers the idea of having your complete music collection at your fingertips at all times is something you "need" but for most folks born before oh let's say 1990 it just sounds like overkill.

Uh, I was born a helluva long time before 1990. I don't understand people who dismiss the desire to have all one's music at any given time. Just because you aren't interested in the idea doesn't mean no one else should be.

I also like the rigmarole of making and syncing new playlists

I can understand that, but I'm geared towards albums and have no desire to muck about with playlists. I used to hate the morning ritual of staring at my CD racks trying to figure out what 8 CDs I was going to bring to work with me. Now I don't have to make that decision anymore.

I have about 10,000 songs, 60 GB but I haven't uploaded all of my CDs. I am also digitizing two to three LPs or cassettes every day.

I am kinda embarrassed to even answer this, but here ya go.

around 170 gigs of MP3s from various sources on DVDR and some CDRs (from longer ago).

around 400 gigs of lossless bootlegs from D1M3 etc.

around 100 gigs on DVDR that are FLAC rips of stuff I've sold.

iTunes library hovers around 150 gigs as new stuff gets added and old stuff deleted. Maybe 20 gigs of that is stuff I've ripped from CDs I still ahve.

iPod goes back and forth between 10% and 60% of the iTunes depending on my mood and what I'm into at the time.

Don't feel embarrassed, sleeve.

Trust me.

also I still have at least 1000 CDs to rip, but I want to keep most of them so I have no real incentive to do so unless I need it on the iPod for some reason.

lol xpost

i ripped more than half my cd collection and sold it a week or so ago. got a decent return too which is funny because cds are worthless to me other than the booklet or packaging having something interesting

I was born quite a bit before 1990 and the idea of having all my music with me at all times is still really appealing to me. I've got a 120gb ipod but my music collection is around 250gb so too often I end up thinking about listening to something I haven't heard in ages but not having it with me.

I was also thinking the other day about how much I don't miss the time I spent every day picking the 12 CDs that I would have with me at work all day; it's so much easier to carry this tiny little box with 100x more albums on it. I also don't miss walking around with a bulky discman that ran for two hours before losing battery power.

But on the other hand, records from that era when I was in college, delivering pizzas, listening the the same CDs in my car over and over just stick with me and mean so much more. Listening to things that I couldn't find for years and stumbled upon in some record store somewhere, or put off buying for years because something else was always a bit more urgent, when I can just google particular phrases and listen to pretty much anything within 10 minutes. I don't get that attachment and involvement any more, I just do it because I can so why not?

"I don't understand people who dismiss the desire to have all one's music at any given time. Just because you aren't interested in the idea doesn't mean no one else should be."

Well I don't understand the desire at all (or more accurately I don't understand someone being incredulous about someone else not caring about not having access to ALL one's music at any given time.)