ALeX por Nota

Help me organize my music.

nostrich:

cleversimon:

I have 45 GB of music in my iTunes library

(…)

How do you keep your music library organized?

My advice regarding library organization is always unpopular and always ignored, but hear me out here: delete most of your music.

This works for me, because I have a specific way of listening to music, and may not work so well for other people, but at least give it a chance. If you’re like me, you don’t listen to most of your music very regularly. In fact, you tend to have ~5-8 albums on constant rotation, switching one in and another out every week or so. Thus, if you’re like me, you don’t need that much music in your iTunes library. Anything that isn’t a regular listen? Delete it. Don’t back it up, don’t archive it somewhere, don’t give it any funny smart playlist-referenced tags, just fucking delete it.

iTunes isn’t suited to huge libraries of music. After a certain point, depending on your computer’s specifications, it will start taking longer and longer to launch, you’ll see more of that “Loading iTunes library” bar, and iTunes will become hell to use. iTunes is for music you listen to, not for music you own. Archive that somewhere else. (At the very least, remove it from your library and archive the files to an external HD or something.)

Sounds wasteful, you say? If you deleted something you ripped from a CD, rip it again next time you want it. If you downloaded it from some illicit file-sharing site, you’ll be able to again, probably in less than 10 minutes if you look in the right places (hell, less than a minute is possible). And if you own it on vinyl, I’m pretty sure you’re breaking some law by listening to an MP3 instead (but I don’t know how fucked up the law is over there in Canada).

Once you pare your library down to just music you listen to, you’ll find it infinitely more manageable. I understand the urge to hoard all the music you own in one place and never delete anything, as long as disk space allows. I did that too — around 220GB was my peak, I think — but since getting it down to a far more manageable 20GB or so (if it all fits on your iPod, ur doin it rite), my life is much easier, I spend less time deciding what I want to listen to, and it’s easier to find once I do.

MP3s are a fantastic way to archive your music (but FLAC and OGG are better), and I sympathise when people would rather not delete their music collections, which is why backing it up to an external HD is just as good an option as simply deleting it. If you have over a certain amount — if your gigabytes are in triple digits, you’re pushing it — you’re not a music listener, you’re a music collector, and that shit doesn’t belong in your everyday library, because you don’t listen to it all (impossible), it belongs backed up somewhere where nothing will ever happen to your precious digital files.

Endnote: I always think it’s funny when these kind of posts come up (on Tumblr, on a forum, on Yahoo! Answers, or whatever), and there’s always one dude who’s like, “my library’s 500GB! I have all the music in the WORLD! Here’s how I organise it…” First question: Really dude, that’s nice, how long did you spend organising that? Days, you say? Oh, weeks! Good grief. And how much of it has a play count above zero? Oh, almost none of it? Well, that seems like time well spent. “ALL THE MUSIC IN THE WORLD!!!”

I see your point, nostrich, and I guess that’s my reasoning behind not having a hard disc iPod, but instead relying on my phone’s memory (HTC Excalibur, 2GB RAM, going 8GB after OS upgrade) for music on the go. (And this way I get to carry only one gadget with me). But for my library, that’s another story.

I want a bigger hard drive. I want two, as a matter of fact, so I can have a reliable backup. And I seldom delete anything. It must really suck in order to be deleted. This is not to say I keep lots of mediocre stuff; I prefer to think that I’ve developed a sense of what music to get. And I don’t delete if I don’t have a good reason to.

You said it right: I’m a collector. And collectors have other motivations added to the listening. But I am actually a listener, no doubt about it. You pose an interesting question: how many tracks have been played exactly 0 times? I just checked my office’s small library (67GB only, this is not THE library; music here comes and goes) and I’ve listened to almost 50% of the tracks. And that without counting:

1. Music I’ve brought from home, which I’ve heard there but not here.
2. New music I’ve got in the last 10 days or less, that I’ve not had the time to listen to yet.
3. Music I’ve not listened to @office or @home, but indeed @car.

Considering this, I guess I’ve listened more than 70% of these 67GB.

My advice? (not that anybody asked for it, and at the risk of sounding like flame-war bait) Delete iTunes. It sucks with big collections. It sucks most of the time. The interface is slick and clean, and Coverflow looks beautiful. But to me, the magic stops there. Listening to small collections is an acceptable experience. But for collection keeping, it’s awful. I use MediaMonkey. So you have an iPod? Great: MM syncs happily to it. My wife gave up on syncing her music to her iPhone through iTunes and is using MM now. They claim they perform well with collections of 100,000+ songs. I still don’t get there (many CDs to rip yet), but so far, it performs quite well, does the housekeeping my collector-self needs easily, and lets me play and sync to my devices. I love features like “find more from the same… album / artist / genre…” These are more for the listener than for the collector, and they’re great. By the way, no, I am not affiliated in any way to these guys. Just a loyal user for some years now.

You may be right on this: organize your filesystem. This approach is more “future-proof” than compromising 100% to any library software. Filesystems haven’t changed much in many years, and won’t likely do. And a decent library software can definitely help you with actually organizing at the filesystem level, too.

I believe that eventually, the “store everything” approach will become pointless (if and) when a reasonable business model allows me to play whatever I want whenever I want to. But once there, I guess I will still have a collection. Not a TB collection of music, but a big collection of metadata about music: who else likes this band, what movie featured this song, what was the playlist during our honeymoon (yes: I’ve erased the mini-discs, but I still keep the playlist), what do I like to listen to while cooking a nice dinner with my wife, on the car with the kids, what bands has this guitar player played with, what other versions does this song have (official, bootleg, remix, cover, live… ), the artwork of everything, pictures of the members, links to their sites, an introduction to this or that genre or subgenre…

Discogs, Wikipedia, AllMusicGuide, Boxee, Last.fm, every other social network… The pieces are already getting there. We just need the music industry to change their so-last-century mindset, create a new business model where the cornerstone of all this, music, becomes easily (and legally, and unexpensively) available to anyone. Until that day, my collection will keep on growing, and I will keep on trimming and grooming and nourishing it. And listening, of course.

Question

evrt:

ltwp:

Historians always wish that ancient civilizations had better-kept records from which to learn from. How can we try to make sure that in today’s world we are leaving sufficient evidence to fill up textbooks of tomorrow? Photos on flickr? Blog posts? It’s all in data formats that will die sooner or later. This age in which everything is digital has potential to be a huge blank spot in history if we don’t change those file formats.

I think that is a pretty good observation you have made.  I think people will always see a resurgence of certain things or media that are more for collecting, instead of just data on a hard drive.

For example, Vinyl record sales were up 15% in 2007, and up 37% last year.  I think it has to do with disastisfaction of sound quality with the digital age.  You cannot beat the quality of vinyl.  I am continually amazed at the sounds that you don’t get with an mp3, and then I play the vinyl record and it’s like I’m hearing the song for the first time.

I am not exactly sure why vinyl is back. For audiophiles, it has never left, that’s for sure, and the quality you can get from a US$15,000 sound system with vinyl is nothing you can imagine from you US$500 iPod + dock.

But I don’t think your average teen discovering vinyl is doing it because of the audio quality. They have their dad’s US$200 turntable with an old styli. And does a US$200 turntable REALLY give you a better quality than a US$200 CD player or MP3 player, for that matter?

It’s something else; it’s getting in touch with the older generations, it’s “the vintage touch”, it’s trying to understand an experience thought gone. Much like when I started wearing my grandfather’s vests while being a teenager. In the end, fashion brought those knit vests back, and I looked cool and they were fine quality vests. But I wore them because he wore them before. I felt connected.

Of course, along with “getting the experience” comes the features from the experience itself. Those with good hearing and fine hardware will actually discover the quality difference, and might follow the audiophile route.

Some will find out that leaving your iPod in shuffle mode is a completely different experience from taking a disc out of its sleeve and listening through a whole side of it, then turning it around and listening to side B. In the digital world, it’s too easy to click “next”. But it’s not that easy to fetch for another vinyl, take it out, and take the needle up to the song you want. So, you feel more compelled to stay, calm down and appreciate the whole album. Two different experiences, none is better than the other; they just belong to different moments, different mindsets. And those not in contact with vinyl might never discover this other mindset.

Some will start on this path because old vinyls are cheap. It’s tempting: heaps of music for pennies. Thus, they will discover older music. They might not make vinyl such a big thing later on, because they find the digital path more convenient. But they will have discovered artists that won’t make it to iTunes frontpage but who are cornerstones in music, now forgotten by the mainstream.

But on the quality side, I have always had this issue with hardcore audiophiles: what is really better quality? I fully understand the analog vs. digital issue. I know Nyquist and its implications. And I’m not exactly cheapo on my audio equipment taste.

But at your average consumer levels, the CD experience will usually be better than vinyl. Why? However cheap, CD players don’t get rumble or wow-and-flutter; the resilience of the media to mild scratches is better; you can store more CDs in your cabinets than LPs; your car comes with CD player. MP3s still raise the bar more: one CD can carry 100+ songs, and you don’t even need discs, you can clip an iPod nano to your belt.

I remember a guy posting at Hydrogen Audio’s forums making a review that went more or less like this:

Test: listen to the same song on vinyl, tape, CD and MP3… on my bike, downhill.

Vinyl: Impossible. Awful quality. Skipped all the way. Power cable too short. Might try with a battery operated turntable…

Tape: Not bad. Sound quality is a bit crappy, but could take some abuse. Track search sucks. Acceptable battery life.

CD: Way better sound that tape, but could take less abuse without skipping. Track search is good. Acceptable battery life.

MP3: It rocks! For the background noise you get while on the bike, the sound quality is equivalent to CD, but it will NEVER skip, no matter the abuse. Best track search of all. Best battery life of all.

Couldn’t find the original, so I tried my best to re-do it.

Going to the original post: digital can be risky. archive.org, among others, is trying to do something about it. I guess libraries and other content-related organizations should be keeping digital assets safely. Maybe we don’t really have a time-proof media solution as of now. We know CDs lose information after some years. We need a solution that can last for thousands of years.

But then again, digital can also be better in some ways. Open, documented formats will remain, for they are not only data; there is meta-data that explains the data, that extends it, that puts data in context. Information experts are no strangers to the format obsolescence issue, and little by little, important steps are being taken. I wish we’ll be wise enough to provide future archeologists with the Rosetta stone to uncode our current data.