Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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

i almost envy some 30 year old man who has more fulfilling things in his life than this shit

oh i definitely envy them

Don't get the dragging a folder into the trash thing? Just highlight in iTunes, delete, and select to delete the source file too?
--exploding angel vagina (Scik Mouthy)

this is what I do and it works great?

I don't mind the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with MP3 farming. It gives my hands something to do while I'm listening to music. Makes a nice change from doing the ironing.

no, what i'm saying

1. I go through iTunes to decide what to keep and what to lose
2. I go into the iTunes folders to drag and drop into my harddrive
3. I have to go BACK to iTumes to delete the folders I just moved

I don't get point #2.

not using itunes to manage your music may actually help you a lot

i'm cleaning my itunes and moving the things i want to "keep" to my external hard drive, anagram. it's mind-numbing and pointless

I don't mind the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with MP3 farming. It gives my hands something to do while I'm listening to music. Makes a nice change from doing the ironing.

― mike t-diva, Friday, 8 January 2010 15:07 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You need Pro Evolution Soccer and masturbation in yr life, Mike,

Also, "fantasy air-conducting".

Like "air guitar" but REALLY wacko.

oh, an external hard drive. gotcha. can't you do it all in one go, though? just make sure the iTunes folders only contain what you want to keep. then when you're done with that drag the whole lot to your external drive in one go.