June192009
Organizing large music collections »
jstn:
My advice regarding library organization is always unpopular and always ignored, but hear me out here: delete most of your music.
It’s a convincing argument — especially the external hard drive option.
I hate it when reasonable questions get answered like this. Q: “What’s the best way to keep my fingernails trim?” A: “Cut off your hands!”
I have the exact opposite philosophy: I never delete music, unless it’s something I especially loathe. I’m the kind of person who, when something pops into my head that I haven’t heard in ten years, I want to listen to it immediately. Since we live in the future and storage is cheap, I can actually do this, and I fucking love it.
Everyone consumes music differently, which is fine. If you’re the type of person who only cares about the shit Pitchfork reviewed last week, by all means, delete it this week. On the other hand, if your collection passed four digits of gigabytes a long time ago, deletion probably isn’t in your vocabulary.
Another gem of advice from the same guy: “If you deleted something you ripped from a CD, rip it again next time you want it.” Seriously? Why rip it at all?
One more: “MP3s are a fantastic way to archive your music (but FLAC and OGG are better)”. No, they’re not. Esoteric formats, even if they’re super OMG high fidelity, are usually a terrible choice for long-term storage of any kind of data. MP3s are about as universal as it gets, and they support ID3 tags, which is an organizational godsend that FLAC and OGG lack.
I was reminded of something Alex Payne wrote a little while ago, albeit in a different context: “If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out the filesystem.” That’s how I do it. I’ve only got ~50GB in my iTunes library at any given time, but I keep everything else in a simple hierarchy on an external RAID. No fancy groupings or playlists, just a folder for each artist with a folder inside for each album (or loose tracks). That’s it. iTunes starts to choke after a few thousand songs, but the total filesystem limit on a Mac is in the billions. You’ll never hit the ceiling.
Does it take time and effort to organize? Of course, but I loves my musics and I think it’s time well spent. The trick is to organize as you go. New downloads go into an “unsorted” folder, and every couple weeks I spend half an hour making sure everything is tagged properly and dropping them into the right folders. I used to be OCD about the filenames, but I realized eventually that having the right track numbers is good enough as long as they’re tagged right.
Sorry for the rant. This is an issue close to my heart :)
Dear Justin,
I was going to write you an email, but then I remembered how Tumblr is supposed to work. Your blog post on music organization touched close to the obsessive part of my heart so I’m going to weigh in and pose a couple questions.
-I agree entirely that its worth the time and effort to keep an orderly and comprehensive library. I think people with Marco’s attitude will end up regretting their deletions - and with the price of HD space I really don’t see the point. When I found a box of CD’s from high school in my parent’s basement I was overjoyed, and that was only 30-40 albums. I think pack-rat instincts translate easily from your living space to your digital space. But while living with a bunch of crap in your apartment is a drag, living with a bunch of files is not.
-I’m “that guy” Marco cited with a 500gb library (though I don’t go commenting about it, except on my own blog), actually only about 350gb but that’s all replacement build up from the 600gb of music I had on a HD that died with no backup (the most tragic moment of my otherwise pleasant life). I’ve moved on to a Drobo (Yeah, I know. It’s not real RAID. Meh.) to store music and movies, and it’s well worth it for the peace of mind. Your thoughts on compehensive archiving also applies to movies in my book - why not rip DVDs I like onto a HD? .
-I keep everything in iTunes. I know this is crazy - but I haven’t found a better way. What do you do when you want to listen to stuff in your folder system? I’m too impatient for the 3 second import. My iTunes stays open all the time, so the loadup time isn’t too bothersome. iTunes does lag though, which is a shame, since otherwise I like it as a program, in that it auto-organizes my files into the exact system you’ve described. (I tried Songbird too, which has some awesome features, but suffers from an even slower load than iTunes and more hangs).
-Now my question: Why can’t iTunes (or another music player) work with such large libraries? I’ve quite literally lay awake thinking about this issue. Obviously Apple doesn’t give a shit about the “mega-library” user, but we exist and we deserve great software that archives and plays mp3s. I know that iTunes organizes itself with an XML library - is there anything that one can do to speed up or improve the functioning of that library?
-I agree that FLAC and OGG are problematic. I do use FLAC occasionally for stuff I can only find in that format - and import it into iTunes using Fluke. What you didn’t mention in your post that I would like to cast a vote for is the M4A, on the AAC Apple Lossless codec. It offers all the great metatagging of mp3s with sound quality that people are going to want in the future and I want now. It doesn’t take an audiophile to hear a massive difference between 128 mp3 and M4A (people most obviously pick up on this when a DJ is playing mp3s). There are lots of other obstacles in sound quality, and it’s hard to get people who are listening to music with miniature computer speakers to care, but I consider digital music files an investment for life (or at least, you know, the foreseeable future).
The first step to improving sound is getting a USB DAC to bypass the quality loss implicit in running audio through a speaker jack (by running it through a speaker jack and then an amp or powered speakers you are basically amplifying it twice - not good) and then getting an amp and speakers that reflect a listener’s taste in sound. By the time I put together a sound system I liked (not a fancy one - under $1000), I wanted Apple Lossless for all of the records that I really like - which is a lot of records.
I listened quite a bit to the crummy Grizzly Bear rip that was floating around pre-release - then bought the vinyl which came with a free download. When I saw some Apple Lossless files floating around (somewhere…cough) I snapped them up and replaced the files for a third time. And it was worth - because I intend to listen to that record for many years. The small music sharing circle I have established with friends now requests everyone to use Apple Lossless whenever possible, and while for a lot of albums I don’t care to much about quality, when I find something I love it’s all worth it.-AL
Reblogged from Lammer.
