Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

I don't really get archiving mp3s on DVD-R. The one thing I've noticed is that DVD-Rs with even a few scratches in them are hard for computers to read. If I cared about losing mp3s, I'd hate to rely on those.

yeah DVD-Rs will probably last 3-5 years tops

OK so here we go...

I just burned my 412th DVD-R of audio. Adding that in with the video collection (most of which is out-of-print television or movies that aren't on Netflix) I'm looking at a minimum of 5-6 TB of storage. Everything is cataloged via CD FInder and a custom FileMaker database so it's easy to do lookups on criteria like "everything released in 1971" or "anytime Pink Floyd played 'Obscured By Clouds' live in 1972", etc. Getting everything into that catalog system took some work, but it's pretty easy now. On top of all that, there's band recordings, video projects, etc.. - all of which need to be archived.

Now that 10.6 is out with a speedy enough Finder, I'm looking at moving the whole works to some sort of desktop RAID 5 system.

>>> 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.

but there's no benefit in doing so. (i'm guessing 8) )

you don't carry books around with you because they are bulky and there's no easy way of getting digital copies of them, you certainly can't do it yourself. (plus the reading thing that musicfanatic points out - you can't read whilst walking down the street. not that people don't try)

whereas an ipod that'll carry everything you own is about the size of a fag packet. and costs only about double a 8G mp3 player.

that said, i have only an 8G player with about 2000 oggs on it. i tend to keep the most recent purchases on it (which is everything from this year and half of last year) rather than personal favourites. i'm tempted to buy another that'll be nothing but all-time personal favourites.

(there are a lack of large capacity personal players out there, ipods and those archos things (which are marketed as video players) being about your only options. and neither of those appeal to me for various reasons)

main collection, digitised from cds over a 6 month period, is 17,000 / 750G of flac files on a 1T disk somewhere. and mostly not backed up (what to, another £100 HD?), which i must do something about. but most of my listening is on the walk to work and back.

We should talk about who has the most over-engineered set of smart playlists to fill their iPod.

I don't use iTunes (too slow and a resource hog) but I use J. River Media Center, which has similar functionality but is much faster, watches folders and has an interface I prefer. I set up a Primary and an Offline folder for syncing, that way I know exactly what is on and off the iPod and it's easy to move things between the two. I've got two playlists - one for Recent Acquisitions (which is unplayed stuff I've ripped and added during my big rips over the last couple of years) and Sharp, Short Bursts which is 2 hours of random tracks not listened to in the last six months which are less than 3:30 and have a BPM>150 (mostly punk).

not backed up (what to, another £100 HD?)

Yes, exactly. Space is cheap, get two. Even better, get a drive for your mother, bring your drive when you visit and make an off-site backup while you're there.

J. River is great. since i finally lost it with itunes i try pretty much anything that comes out and media center is still my favorite by some way.

To clarify my point about books, it seems most of us collectors have accumulated hundreds of gigs of music files. Hence, with 2009-era technology (bulky hard disk players with short battery life that max out at 160 GB, or svelte flash players with long battery life that max out at 32 GB), any current portable will force us at some point to make a choice about what portion of our collection to carry. A larger fraction of the library that has to be recharged nightly, a smaller fraction of the library that has to be recharged weekly. But we're already consigned to having a mothership and our pod.

Some day memory costs and collection sizes will converge again. Maybe a smart manufacturer will provide a thoughtful base for a FLAC friendly player (with wifi (network & remote), high-quality s/pdif audio output, and hdmi output for TV file browsing), so that a portable can truly displace other media storage at the home too. But I suspect 160 GB is already well beyond the needs of all but a tiny fraction of users (ILMers, I presume, are atypical), so the market is small.

> Yes, exactly. Space is cheap, get two.

that's not cheap. plus i'd rather be spending the money on more cds.

price of numerous shelves/wallets/racks over the years vs price of a couple of hard disks

500 GB HDs in an external enclosure are running $60 these days. For $140, you can find external enclosures for your TB 3.5 drives that will play all your mp3s and HD video through the home system.

But the major advantage is simple: Backing up a large collection requires days of time swapping/labelling disks. An external drive requires about 2 minutes (and a few hours of overwriting while I sleep). My days are worth more than $60.

i'm probably gonna bite the bullet and stop bothering with archiving tracks/albums on external hard disks altogether other than back-ups of what's on the desktop pc itself. i hardly ever need to turn the external drives on for anything so fuck it. i've got between 17-20,000 or so tracks (+ mixes) just on the desktop hd and that's quite enough alongside streaming apps.

god i don't even know. i stopped counting at the 4TB mark. i have 5 1TB HDs and 1 shiny new 1.5TB drive that have, respectively, <50s-60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and Various. most are at the 80% or greater fill rate, also have two internal drives at 600MB that i use for formatting, sorting, renaming, downloading, etc

and i've been dumping all my backedup DVDrs back onto my drives, because i was finding they were not lasting very long and i was getting lots of CRC errors on them.

i also have given up on trying to systematcially rip my collection of cds and vinyl - but was doing so to archival quality (flac and big cover scans). too much effort.

the only thing i'm making "second" copies of now is flac and wavs i've bought off beatport and juno, etc - as i figure if i've paid money for them it would be a shame to lose them altogether. kinda dumb argument i know, but it is what it is.

i have more than i could possibly listen to in a lifetime, but it's amazingly manageable. and i continue to accumulate.

serious OCD fetishization too, all my directories/files are tagged and named correctly, through some handy apps - and my directory naming structure is "ARTIST - TITLE (YEAR) [FORMAT] {other info}" like :

Eddie Kendricks - Eddie Kendricks (1973) [FLAC] {2007 Remaster}

Probably more than any of y'all cared to know, but, again.... OCD

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Drobo:

http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/richmedia/images/blank.png

Perfect for an irreplaceable and unwieldy music collection.

Hot expandable up to 16TB
Redundant data protection
Mix n match drive capacities

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Drobo

I don't like that Drobo's storage format is proprietary, but' it's something to consider. From all the reviews of it, it's good as near-line storage but not something that you want to use as a home server.

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.

When I rip new music, I just ftp it from my NAS to my backup at work. I have 3 1.5 TB drives in a RAID config with 3TB available, with the option to add another 1.5TB. I'm about 90% done ripping my collection. I'm halfway through my Jamaican music, and just have Brazilian, world/global and jazz left. Woo hoo!

I find myself listening to music so much more at home now that it's mostly on flac-Squeezebox and can play simultaneously in every room in the house. I have a few playlists mainly for new music, that I create in MediaMonkey and export to Squeezecenter. The last few days I just put it on random on my Jamaican and soul folders, and hear stuff for the first time in years.

Just ripped my CD of Celtic Frost's Into The Pandemonium to iTunes, which means I now have exactly 33500 songs in my library (128.46GB). Still trying to get rid of more CDs...

so i'm thinking about redigitizing my cds next year and putting them on some networked storage. couple reasons, incl. it'd be nice to have all my shit in itunes at the same time, easier to add stuff to ipod/iphone, i'll be moving in with my gf and then we can both access music on the network, and most importantly a lot of my rips are like 9 years old and were done at 128 on musicmatch or something. even now i only rip at 192 to save space. so i think i have two basic questions--

anyone have experience with network storage--good/bad products, etc.

should i use apple lossless when i re-rip everything? is that overkill? would 320 be ok? ideally i'd like to do everything in itunes just because it's easier but i'm open to ideas. i really need to do some test rips at different bitrates soon.

if you are keeping the discs i personally would consider lossless overkill. i keep my vinyl transfers as flacs but everything else at 320

you should be fine w/192; i can't for the life of me distinguish 320 from 192.

this could be of interest:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/mp3/review/2009/11/18/Sounds-Good-To-Me/p1

I do everything to lossless so I never have to do it again.

mark thanks dude that was a cool article

if you rip with iTunes make sure you turn error correction on - if you're on a PC you should use EAC + lame, it's better. on Mac I like to use Max because it supports mp3 and FLAC.

I agree about the bitrate tho - you should worry more about upgrading your listening equipment before bitrate (then again upgrading bitrate is just a matter of hard drive space whereas it can cost $$$ to get good equipment). I do everything using VBR which is the best compromise between 320 and 192 imo

what popture said. do it lossless. then you only ever have to do the ripping once and can transcode everything into any current or future format as the need arises.

My music collection is sadly digital now, I couldn't afford to buy all the music I get.
While I agree in most part that a mp3 can't quite be as fetishised as much as cd/vinyl, there's still a pride in my music collection - making sure everything is i V0,except electronic releases i 320. I've got 341gb of mp3, split chronologically.

my folder structure is as such:
2008-09
2008-09\artist
2008-09\artist\album

then everything played through itunes.

I'd never buy a CD anymore, the only CDs I've received in the past year are promos. If I was to buy something it'd be o vinyl - but as I'm curretly sellling alot to make rent, I can't see myself doing that often in the future.

when you rip FLACs, what level of compression do you use? I'm confused about what the difference is. isn't any FLAC lossless, anyway?

i rip to VBR now after years of suspicion caved in, setting an average rate of 256. haven't actually ripped a CD in many months and in that time somehow my copy of CDex doesn't seem to work anymore. itunes ripping and .m4a can fuck off - since i updated itunes i can't import .m4a's directly into Acid Pro anymore (this was always kinda random tho)

> when you rip FLACs, what level of compression do you use?

the default (-5 i think). the others say they are faster (although -5 is fast enough) or smaller (but that's dependant on what you're compressing) so i don't bother. as you say, it's all lossless.

i've seen results from 11% of original size (very quiet track) to 70%+. it's usually 50-60% though. i have 17000+ flacs ripped from cds (and about as many ogg / mp3 copies of the same files) on a 1TB disk which is 75% full.

I rip to 192kbps MP3 to save space on my player. However, I use the LAME encoder and I always set the quality on the highest (slowest) setting. I find that using that setting makes a very noticeable difference in quality vs. a 192kbps MP3 encoded with other encoders. Since I do most of my listening in the car, where there's a ton of extraneous noise, I think that the quality is good enough.

the others say they are faster (although -5 is fast enough) or smaller (but that's dependant on what you're compressing) so i don't bother.

by "faster" do you just mean how long it takes to do the rip?

thanks, koogs.

(the ripping and compressing are usually two different stages, ripping is done to an intermediate wav file and the wav is then compressed and deleted).

but, yes, i meant how long it takes to compress the wav.

(how long it takes to do the rip seems to depend on how thorough it's being, the state of the disk and software - the windows box at work is way faster than my linux laptop but the laptop will successfully rip without errors things that the windows box can't)

i am intrigued by this "max" program mentioned above--could rip high-bitrate LAME-encoded mp3s which might be perfect.

unscientific test using the biggest wav i had lying around (822727292 byte mix cd)

compression level 0
josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 613424186 bytes, ratio=0.746
real 1m59.235s

compression level 5
josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 554256133 bytes, ratio=0.674
real 1m52.021s

compression level 8
josh_wink_acid_classics.wav: wrote 547994685 bytes, ratio=0.666
real 2m11.511s

so 5 (default) is actually faster than 0 (fast) and has only slightly worse compression than 8 (best)

I always rip at level 8, why not take time and save space.

lately I've really been enjoying the fact that VLC can play flac audio, makes it so much easier to check out sound quality of various files.

Much love for this thread, it makes me feel slightly less of an OCD lunatic.

I was inspired by some comments here to make the effort to add album art to the 3500 or so singles/non-lp tracks that lacked it. Took me a couple of months but I wound up with only 25 tracks that I couldn't find covers for. Quite amazing that between Discogs.com, Rateyourmusic.com and Google Image search there's art for almost everything.

If something doesn't have art, I make it myself. Like some mixes and comps.

One of my greatest victories was finally finding scans of each disc of the merzbox.

Yeah, for radio sessions and bootlegs that have no official art I mainly used interesting band shots - it's nice to have an image of the actual artists.

I forgot to mention I've also been ripping a lot more of my collection and have revised my must-carry-everything viewpoint. I've got a full 160gb iPod and as I was listening to my recent rips it dawned on me how much was second tier in the first place - nice to have, not needed to walk around with. So I've got about 2/3s of my stuff at any given time and feel satisfied.

this is seriously the biggest waste of time in the universe

what the fuck is wrong with us

What, maintaining it or organizing it?

i mean, both really

Yeah, man, CDs don't take 25% as much organising and backing-up as MP3s do.

i mean fucking honestly what an enormous waste of my life

i am still rating and deleting. i think i have almost rated 20,000 songs. less than 9,000 to go. i'll be finished in april, i guess.

cool snarky comeback bro, but i have like 80 gigs of music i've collected over the year clogging my itunes and now i have to waste a day figuring out what goes over to a hard drive and what gets deleted, and then move it all over folder by folder? get fucked, mp3s

and it's not like you can drag straight from itunes, you have to drag the FOLDER into your hard drive or the trash and then go BACK to itunes and delete it. So much easier than CDs thanks for breaking it down for me man

I'm not joking or being snarky; organising CDs, even if you're fastidious as hell, is far less time-consuming than organising MP3s. Digital music makes database nerds out of everyone. It's dull as fuck.

Don't get the dragging a folder into the trash thing? Just highlight in iTunes, delete, and select to delete the source file too?

Yesterday Elvis Telecom posted this useful hint:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20091231160510142

ha, sorry for snappin, glad yr on my team. fuck an mp3. i'm TOTALLY gonna listen to this Akron/Family album again

i almost envy some 12 year old kid now who may not ever have to worry about this shit haha