Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

There's been some talk about digital music collections in the past on threads like The Data Migration Thread , but I wanted to start a new thread! dedicated solely to those of us who are actively building up (legally acquired) digital music collections. I'm not talking about buying a CD or LP and then digitizing it, but buying music natively in mp3, FLAC, or some other format. The majority of posters on ILM seem to prefer their music on LPs and CDs, and I definitely see the appeal in doing that--up until very recently, I had to have everything in CD-- but I think there might be a few others who, like me, are starting to purchase most of their music digitally.

Recently, I've decided to go (mostly) digital. The first step in this process has been culling my CD collection. I sold off a chunk of the collection in two batches, and I'm getting ready to sell off a third. My goal is to eventually have as few physical CDs as possible, and I want all of my digital music to sit on two hard drives. Most of the new music I buy is from Amazon mp3, although I'm currently searching for some good online stores that sell everything in FLAC.

I'm doing this for several reasons:

(1) I'm 22, so I'm of the generation that sees CDs as nothing more than a storage medium. I buy a CD, rip it into iTunes, and place it on my CD shelves, where it sits forever.
(2) I have a lot of books, and I'm not a fan of eBook readers, so I plan on acquiring many more books than I already own, and I don't want to maintain two physical media collections.
(3) I need less shit in my life in general.
(4) There's a lot of stuff that's difficult for me to easily acquire where I live, and I've been able to find some stuff that I've had a lot of difficulty tracking down in brick-and-mortar stores on Amazon mp3 and iTunes.
(5) A lot of artists are starting to do the whole LP + mp3/FLAC thing, and I have no desire to start collecting LPs. I think that soon enough more and more artists will start going this route as CDs sales continue to tank.

Is anyone else actively maintaining a digital record collection or planning on doing so? Where are you buying from? How are you storing and organizing everything?

As I said, I'm sure that the audience for this thread on this board is relatively small, but I'm hoping there might be at least a few others out there who are going this route, and perhaps we can get a discussion going.

i can't even fathom doing what you're doing. seems no stretch of my imagination no matter how great will alow me to even consider the possibility paying for an mp3. sorry!

Keep all your favorite/best CDs, or yer gonna feel like a chump when that hard drive explodes

Much more convenient for housebreakers too, like being able to carry away a whole collection in a binder.

I'm more interested in how people are organizing large digital collections. Do you just chuck it all in one folder or do you take the time to set things up in an artist/album way? Do you keep multiple CDs as multiple folders or just combine it all? Do you get rid of duplicates or is that too much work? Etc.

I trust that when you say "two hard drives" you mean one to back up the other. Wouldn't be the dumbest thing to, from time to time, dump everything to a third that you send offsite--back to your parents' house, for example. I'd also make sure you were getting everything at the highest quality possible. What seems good now, won't. And storage will someday be irrelevant.

I just use iTunes, so that takes care of the folders and files. Two external drives (one good quality for constant use, the other, cheaper, to backup the first once a week). I do try to eliminate duplicates, but that can be a lot of work. And also to maintain consistency of names and genres. There are certainly times I feel more like a database manager than a music listener.

But I still can't see getting rid of the originals. Risky. Maybe putting them in deeper storage?

I'm more interested in how people are organizing large digital collections.

I don't have an enormous digital collection, only about 4000 songs. I organize it in a pretty standard way, I think. A folder for each artist, and then within that, folders for each album, using the format of:

year - album name

Adding the year onto the front can be a hassle if you didn't do it from the start, but once everything uses that format it's convenient because it arranges everything chronologically under each artist.

I also make sure that I have album art for each album, which has come in handy recently with my new iPhone acquisition, since you can flip through your collection by scrolling through album covers.

My concern with acquiring material digitally is bad rips - I'm paranoid about downloading something from Amazon and hearing digital noise. I've heard reports of this a number of times; I'd rather make my own rips and have the quality under my own control.

Z S, do you still buy many physical releases?

I'm more interested in how people are organizing large digital collections. Do you just chuck it all in one folder or do you take the time to set things up in an artist/album way? Do you keep multiple CDs as multiple folders or just combine it all? Do you get rid of duplicates or is that too much work? Etc.

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Saturday, August 22, 2009 7:03 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

For right now my shit's all over the place, but I'm starting to work out in my head how I'm going to manage this . . .

I'm considering starting off by organizing by the SOURCE of the mp3. So, if I download something from Amazon, it will go into an Amazon/[artist name] folder. Then I'll copy everything into iTunes and have it copy everything into its own directory structure and sort everything for me.

Keep all your favorite/best CDs, or yer gonna feel like a chump when that hard drive explodes

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Saturday, August 22, 2009 6:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

^ This is the plan, Whiney.

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.

I buy records with pretty much all of my spare money, which isn't much, admittedly. I download everything else.

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

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

bought a NAS, spent the weekend backing up files. my new hobby is renaming files (movies first, then TV, then music). it'll be a while.

My life

so long as the media server i'm running on the NAS can parse all the tags and lay the library out sensibly, i could not give the slightest care about the filenames

Emby seems to primarily use filenames because it was originally video focused and embedded metadata in video is harder. i hate that it uses filenames with spaces and brackets and square brackets which makes scripting harder.

(and a lot of my video is archived from pvr and needs transcoding to a more modern format for space reasons. but it's probably approaching 1000 hours at this point)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/music-industrys-1990s-hard-drives-like-all-hdds-are-dying/

I'm less worried about my music collection than my photos and creative projects, and have already lost enough precious data over the years to have come to the conclusion that outsourcing to the cloud is the best protection. That alongside some protection against "bit rot", like a hash-checking file system, or application.

double CDs, how do you number then?

i add CD1, CD2 to the album title (sometimes) and add an extra digit to the front of the track number, 101..10n, 201..20m, but merge the directories

are there better alternatives?

(just copying them all the the new nas, 800GB of it, will see how the emby media server software likes it very shortly)

actually that's not quite accurate

the filename becomes 1xx and 2xx within the combined directory but the metadata is

Title CD1, Track xx
Title CD2, Track xx

two digit, zero padded track number, suffix on the album title

I use the disc number tag, my apps can all use that.

that's what I do

never seen the disc number tag... until just now - it's in the emby metadata page

and emby seems to be doing the correct thing with Various Artists collections and using the Album Artist on the collection page, the individual artists on the individual album page (and not just using the first artist as the album artist like XBMC seemed to)

i keep each CD in its own subdir (filenames 1.01, etc), use the standard metadata fields for disc numbering, and only add a suffix to the album title tag if there's an "official" one, otherwise it's just $albumtitle

but it's added every track artist on Wire Tapper 43 as an individual artist, which is going to cause all sorts of problems - like 20,000 artists, lots of them with only 1 track, and inconsistent names...

but it's added every track artist on Wire Tapper 43 as an individual artist, which is going to cause all sorts of problems - like 20,000 artists, lots of them with only 1 track, and inconsistent names...

You don't have the option to tick a box labeled "Album is a compilation of songs by various artists"? Apple Music has that.

not that I've seen. the software is a bit new to me though.

in some ways this is useful - if the only track i have by an artist is on a compilation i wouldn't be able to find it easily - but in the other hand i have a lot of these and it's going to swamp the 'real' artists

(oh, maybe it's under 'filters')

I put zz before the name of any artist that I have less than 5 songs of. Then they're always going to be at the end and out of the way if I'm on a thingy that doesn't support the various artists thing.

What if you have less than 5 songs of ZZ Top

zz ZZ Top

That looks like they're napping.

emby didn't seem to mind my

a/aphex_twin/selected_ambient_works/01_ajodiashduhi.flac

origanisation scheme, although it did use 'aphex_twin' for the artist title rather than use the actual tag. all the other values were as per the tags. it also did let me fix its idea of the artist name in its metadata.

figure i need to put flacs, oggs and 'others' into seperate folders and only point the software at the lossless version. (oggs are for walking around, 'others' are mp3s when that was the only purchase option (which i convert to flacs for consistency and to oggs for convenience, so everything should exist as flacs and oggs).

somehow accidentally deleted the entire "G" folder (77 GB) from my main drive, thank god for backups

correction: it was gone from the backup drive, not the main, new copy is going the other way

another weekend day of moving files here too, am up to r on the music. did find out that the 4tb music drive was actually only a 3tb drive (which means nas will have plenty of room for a laptop backup)

OK so an annoying thing about Bandcamp doing all the new downloads in 24/96 is that the WAV files don't fit if you are burning a CD with them.

#firstworldproblems

Hmm... just checked my own label's page and am rather surprised to see downloads in 24/44.1 offered, as I only uploaded 16/44.1 WAVs!

You could get Goldwave and save the files as 16bit 44hz before burning a cd. Extra step, but it would work.

sorry yes I meant 24/44.1 xp

and yeah I can recode them using Amadeus, but it's a giant PITA< I don't need 24 bit versions of Australian garage punk

I discovered this recently trying to make a mix CD of recent stuff

I’ve never downloaded anything but MP3s from Bandcamp.

People are still burning CDs?

for the car, yes

not just cds though. i've had problems with playing files on my (cheap) portable device because the files were 'better' than the usual files and i had to downsample them to get them to play.

wild

this weekend's task: afx SoundCloud dump. i found a list where someone had numbered them chronologically and decided to copy that. 270+ files to rename and sanitise and retag (and actually listen to)

list contains about 20 things i don't have (and includes links to those) and doesn't include the latest stuff (uploaded to the new account).

doesn't yt-dlp work on soundcloud? it can do the tagging/renaming for you once set up properly, but only if the SC tags are already good enough

they aren't! the upload is multiple tapes all of which are numbered 1-n so you have a lot of track number 1 with not enough disambiguation in the tags. so this was a faff but it gets easier as you go because there are less files to match against.

some of the files have a description tag in them with details i haven't seen before. the very first seems to claim that these are not afx related...

and he made the vast majority of the files downloadable from soundcloud originally. so they exist in various places as bulk downloads. the list i'm using is just a directory listing from archive.org

Koogs you probably saw these already but I found these resources useful when collating the SoundCloud dumps:

spreadsheet of SoundCloud tracklist +assorted data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11ouNaaVrNp60Ib34Kp0TO1n1XSc7-9DvfiZ9ZiTiD2c/htmlview

And rareafx made a nice comprehensive list of leaked songs with short descriptive blurbs:
https://rareafx.wordpress.com/aphex-twin-old-dat-and-cassette-demos-soundcloud-janfeb-2015/

very cool links there ty

> description=like early aphex but I'd never heard of him when I wrote all these tracks im going to be uploading

^ fake news

this would be a lot easier if the files weren't called things like

263 I want to be with you[afx editional][a side][edward'get down' crosby mix] [88]-street side boyz [prod master c&j, writ c&j [for get down productions][ss-102]+3db.mp3

but i'm done, with the 279 files i have anyway. 13GB of flacs.

(yeah, flacs made from lossy mp3s, but hey, disk space is cheap. keeps my workflow easier if all the masters are flacs)

there's a pretty comprehensive 4rch1v3.0r6 collection iirc