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

If you don’t have Apple Music-the-streaming-service or iTunes Match (both paid), AM is not going to do anything with your files. You just sync playlists to the phone like always.

thanks for the answers guys... I do have the streaming service :/

I'm just gonna have to use something else for local files.

May I ask why?

I get the deep suspicion that no matter how you set your preferences that Apple WILL fuck with your stuff when they feel like it.

I just thought I was missing a detail - I use "Music" / iTunes to manage my local files but they don't ever get screwed with by Apple.

I also don't buy music digitally through Apple services; 100% imported from hard drive / CD rips so wondering if that's part of it.

I have an Apple Music subscription too; I’ve never checked that sync box and have never had a problem with my local files (somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 songs) being messed with.

Do you keep backups in case anything happens? I usually have two backups running at all times; had a minor panic a few weeks as one of my backup drives died late last year and I hadn’t replaced it when my primary hard drive became corrupted recently. Fortunately the remaining backup came through for me. Looks like a few album art thumbnails got lost in the shuffle but otherwise ok.

gah, my phone player (Black Player) suddenly did the cookie popup thing this morning, asking for permission for a dozen differnt things, most of which were default enabled. i chose 'disable' for everything and now it won't play - 'error loading file' even though the file is still there.

Suggest you have a look at Poweramp, it's been my music player for years and I'm very happy with it (I have the paid version).

ok, yes, i was just about to ask for alternatives.

the three must haves are

a) android
b) capable of shuffling 5000 things
c) sleep function

0) ogg support

Yep, Poweramp has you covered for all of those. It's also highly customisable with third party skins which I like.

Second recommendation for Poweramp. The paid version is ridiculously cheap as well.

It also has good tech support via a very active forum that the main developer responds to.

i'm not sure i like the cartoony icons. and can't find a sleep timer in the preview

my phone took the opportunity of being connected to work wifi to update ALL my apps, including about 60 i've been stdiously ignoring for literal years. god knows what else has broken / installed AI crap

you could maybe have taken my word for it? but ok

https://i.imgur.com/YqpHW83.jpeg

icons are customisable

i did, just couldn't find it. but have now.

another reason I want a lil display is so it can run corny milkdrop visualizations

mh tell me about ISPs changing their NAT situation so that Plexamp doesn't work anymore....

Plex supports IPv6 these days, so you can use that

I keep thinking I should upgrade my Chromecast audio to a better DAC but, well, I'm not 100% sure what I'm buying. 95% of the time, I stream to my Chromecast - plugged into the back of my Cambridge Audioi amp - from either my phone or my laptop. What's the best thing to go for, currently?

I was looking at the AudioQuest Dragonfly, but not sure it's what I need...

I just got a Wiim Pro Plus which seems pretty good so far. it's my first proper DAC though so my only basis for comparison is an aux cable plugged into my laptop's headphone socket

how is your chromecast connected to your cambridge audio amp?

It's plugged into one of the aux ports in the back.

i meant what type of connection, and also what kind of inputs/outputs does your chromecast have? what model is the chromecast, what model is the amp?

Sorry, for the tardy response (and that was a dumb answer!): some realmax cables and it's a Azur 540a.

do you know if your chromecast supports some sort of digital out like toslink?

It's been a brilliant device for the cost but no digital out, no.

which model is it? what’s the model #?

if you don’t have a digital out then you won’t be able to use a dac

Ah, well then. I was thinking the DAC would be a replacement for the Chromecast, not an add-on - something like Colonel Poo suggested.

i'm still puzzling at how your chromecast is connected to your amp. is your chromecast this?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/64/Chromecast_Audio_RUX-J42-5811.jpg/250px-Chromecast_Audio_RUX-J42-5811.jpg

if so, it's got a combined 3.5mm/TOSLINK output. you could buy a DAC and then output the digital signal to the DAC from the chromecast. if you did that you'd be offloading the DAC responsibility of the chromecast onto whatever DAC doohickey you buy.

alternatively, you can replace the chromecast entirely with something like this wiim streamer which has a built-in dac that's "audiophile" grade: https://www.wiimhome.com/wiimpro/overview

fwiw the Wiim I got supports Chromecast so you can cast to it (instead of a Chromecast, you don't need both)

oops, i didn't see that you had bought a wiim colonel poo

I don't know how many standalone HD upgrades I've done over the years -- something like maybe eight or so since the start of the century, and the oldest tracks in the library absolutely date from 2000/2001 for sure -- but did my latest over the weekend, from a 24 to a 28TB (I had plenty of room left on the 24 but it's some months out of warranty and I wanted a new updated physical backup which I can leave at my folks' place in a couple of weeks). One of the smoothest transfers I've done so far -- even if it *did* take an almost literal 24 hours...

ha I just did this as well, although I am still hovering just below 5TB

offsite backups FTW

i recently transferred over from old NAS styled spinnng disc device, to a matchbox sized SSD drive.
(only 2TB to be fair - suspect cos i am happy with 320 mp3s)
felt good to do it as the old NAS thing is 10 years old and i was getting concerned.
weird to think that the NAS drive is now the back up device.
don't have upload speeds to make offsite backups an option.
current situation :
Live device for my Sonos Library = 2TB SSD device connected directly to my router.
Backup device(s) = WD MyCloud (10yrs +) which then backs up every week onto a connected spinning external drive.

xpost Yeah, it's definitely the way to go when possible. Also there was a sale on the new one which added an extra year of warranty. (I should, I realize, clarify that the 'new' backup offsite is in fact my older drive, which will join a couple of even older drives that are already there.)

My current setup: 4 TB SSD hanging off a Mac Mini, Apple Music, Rekordbox, Navidrome, Plex.

Time Machine backups to attached HDD, and once every 6 months an extra backup on another HDD stored elsewhere.

I back up my music drive to BackBlaze but that's it... makes me a little nervous... Feels crazy to get another 8TB drive just for backup but I probably should

You guys are freaking me out a little, I'm going to resume backing everything up on my programmer friend's personal cloud system they set up.

I'm building a respectable obscure classic indie digital library to archive what might otherwise be lost cassette rips and rare demos, comps, singles, albums etc. It's been a passion project. Would be pretty devastated if my SSD crapped out.

I have a 4TB drive plugged into a RaspberryPi. that's backed up daily to IDrive, so if the 4TB drive dies or explodes or gets stolen I can restore from the cloud

You guys are freaking me out a little, I'm going to resume backing everything up on my programmer friend's personal cloud system they set up.

Wise goddamn idea. Seriously! Think of it like insurance -- you may never need it but if something happens you will be damned glad you had it.

ILXors, back up your data. One local backup, one offsite. If you have less than 28TB of data, this involves buying two external hard drives.

I started using MonkeyMote to control foobar on my iphone and it works rather well. Kinda hate shit with “monkey” in the name, tho.

what's kinda freaked me out recently is a i have a lot of files that are 20, 30 years old now. there is a phenomenon known as bit rot whereby files may degrade over time - and if not caught the degraded file will perpetuate itself into your backups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation

there are ways to detect/prevent this but it gets pretty nerdy.

anyway if you are listening to an old mp3 and it sounds crappy or distorted you may be a victim of bitrot!

this has been a PSA.

modern hardware + filesystems do a really good job of preventing that kind of degradation via ECC and CRC if you're talking about hard drives, as long as you're replacing your disk media every decade or so it's unlikely to be an issue, it's catastrophic failure you need to be worried about - hardware issues, power surges, theft, floods, etc.

optical/tape media a different story maybe if you're bouncing data between them and HDDs over time

you know that's what i thought, but then i found out via john siracusa that APFS, i.e. what all macs use these days doesn't do checksums, and i imagine a lot of ilxors are on macs

some of the use cases being described here (single external, transferred to bigger and bigger externals over time, without backing up to a system that has checksum / bitrot prevention) does sound like there is potential for corrupted/degraded files to be copied over and over without detection/prevention!

interesting paper by someone who tried to purposely induce bitrot on jpeg files: https://openpreservation.org/system/files/Bit%20Rot_OPF_0.pdf

like to properly prevent bit rot you have to (i) detect that a file has become corrupt and (ii) find a known good copy of the file and replace the corrupted file. the detection part simply doesn't happen if you just have one copy of data or if you're backing up in a way that doesn't verify data integrity (i.e. no checksum process)

basically - keep the cd.

like to properly prevent bit rot you have to (i) detect that a file has become corrupt and (ii) find a known good copy of the file and replace the corrupted file.

for (ii) error correction files will do the job, even 1% redundancy should be enough, create them for finalised files and propagate them across all backups and archival copies.
par2 files do double-duty by taking care of both (i) and (ii) but for (i) user created hash/checksum files or the filesystem scrub feature if available are more convenient.

bitrot is overrated, catastrophic failure is more likely, but regardless PSA for SSDs/flash memory: if left powered off for months they suffer their own specific type of bitrot, so if your relying on them for infrequent backups or god forbid long term archival good luck with that.

I just throw everything into Google Cloud Storage