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Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library... I threw out my CDs a long time ago, but my digital library is my baby.

Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library... I threw out my CDs a long time ago, but my digital library is my baby. I've been curating this since I was 10. It's who I am! Most of the time, you only need to listen to music on your phone or your computer, right? My main collection (mostly FLAC) is on a NAS with RAID. But then I've got some scripts that maintain a copy of that collection, except converted to MP3 at a variable bitrate [1]. I just store the entirety of it on my phone. It's 107GB. Adding a new album to my phone is as simple as using a SMB app to copy from my NAS. Now when I'm stuck in traffic under a tunnel, or driving through the country, my music keeps playing! [1] - a variable bitrate (VBR) keeps a smaller file size but pretty decent sound quality. it just lowers the bitrate when there's silence or simple sounds, where a high bitrate isn't required.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library. I totally do too. And we're not alone. I not only ripped all my old CDs to FLAC (which I use both as archive/backup and source) but I still buy CDs. Nobody want CDs anymore, so I just buy them used. And then I rip them. And then the CDs go into a box in the garage/shed. My car doesn't take FLAC files but it's got its own storage so I convert the FLAC to 320 kbps MP3s. I don't bother "streaming" from my phone (which I rarely have with me anyway): the music is directly in the car's SSD. At home I play the FLAC files directly.
- dawnerd 4y ago
  Plus there’s still tons of older albums not on streaming services. I’m big on older theme park soundtracks and many of them never made it to digital officially. In fact I just paid over 130 bucks for a cd.
LarryDarrell 4y ago
I do roughly the same thing, but I use Syncthing. I always had trouble keeping my phone connected reliably enough to run a long running script, and Syncthing works well. I have a 1TB sdcard in my phone that has a mirror of my 600GB+ library. I use Foobar2000 on my phone because it's easy to just pin my Music folder from the filesystem and navigate through the folders. Just about every other music player out there seems to be designed around importing tags into a library, which I don't like.
- urbanporcupine 4y ago
  I do the same thing, but I am facing some read only problem. The changes have stopped getting synced. I need to investigate more. Do you face any syncing problem?
jamesfinlayson 4y ago
I have a limited enough music taste that buying what I like will be much cheaper in the long run than paying for a monthly service. I briefly used a family member's Spotify once and the UI was utterly enraging - I. thought there was something wrong with me until I started seeing the same comments echoed here on HackerNews.
sen 4y ago
> Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library... I threw out my CDs a long time ago, but my digital library is my baby. I've been curating this since I was 10. It's who I am! You’re definitely not alone. I’ve been collecting MP3s since they first began, choosing 1-2 songs a night to leave downloading over dialup. I still have ever MP3 I ever downloaded short of deleting the files from that period where you’d download a song on IRC and it’d be something else named wrong on purpose. I do use Apple Music for my family/kids, but my MP3 collection is one of my prized possessions and the basis of nearly all my daily music listening.
- siquick 4y ago
  Have you ever bought any of that music you prize?
  - Teever 4y ago
    I prefer to not pay record companies to listen to music of long dead musicians, and I try and see as many live shows of performers who are still touring, and I buy their shirts.
    - walthamstow 4y ago
      Not just record companies, private equity firms now own the rights to a lot of popular 20th century music
  - HollowEyes 4y ago
    I have wasted so much money on music I barely bother with. Lots of stuff is a one play only for me these days and streaming suits that for experimentation. I do pay for ad-hoc streaming but don't get value out of it (time), nevermind the artists. And yet it's still better value than what I used to pay for records.
  - alt227 4y ago
    Music itself has no value now, streaming services killed that. If you like an artist go to their shows and buy their merch, thats how artists make money these days.
brewdad 4y ago
I do the same thing only I keep opus files on my phone. They sound just as good as mp3 in my listening environment and take up even less space on my phone.
weq 4y ago
I have music constantly on in my life, but you know what, i really hate hearing the same songs over and over again. I used to leech music and have a collection of it (i still do) but i prefer humans mixing it up, in random orders, with different sythns, styles or vibes over it. So while i have never subscribed to any streaming services, i do subscribe to DI.FM. I get access from any device i have, as many as i want, and instead of scouring the net constantly for new music, i now just feed off the bounty. They have sister stations for all styles. Literly i have music on all day everyday. I have different styles for different moods, times of the day, emotions. When you listen at that rate, you either love repeats or you spend your whole life looking for the next song. Curating a playlist is most of the battle.
EamonnMR 4y ago
I expose everything as a Samba share and stream with VLC. But nowdays most of my music purchases are on Bandcamp so I use their app (which has a nice interface for saving stuff to your phone) a lot of the time. I usually spin albums so playlists aren't really a concern.
secretsatan 4y ago
If you use iOS, you can set music synching to automatically encode to mp3 when synching with the phone, that worked really well for me, for a while..... Apple music, if you keep your own music, has completely gone off the rails for me this last year. I couldn't sync for ages because it told me my device was full, it had just lost it's handle on the music, none of the syncing options would add or remove anything, eventually, the other night, I went into the settings for the music app and manually deleted everything and resynced and it finally started working again! But then, 12 hours later after sync completes (Same as you, around 100GB of music), I discover the album artwork is completely messed up, almost no albums have the correct artwork, they've all been swapped around at random, all albums have the same artwork for all tracks, just that they're completely the wrong ones. Checking the apple forums, it seems this is not uncommon, and has been happening for a year. I did actually notice that one or 2 albums were wrong but put it down to slight glitch I could live with, but having them all wrong is infuriating, I recognise many albums by their covers and it helps browsing to pick something out. I really loved iTunes, especially for automatically storing the music in a nice structured directory format. I tried apple music briefly when it first came out, and the first thing it did was to screw up albums, splitting up compilations, getting the wrong editions of albums and started downgrading all my unencoded music, put me off for life, I'm quite happy managing it myself and don't have to fear losing favourite albums due to licensing issues.
pjmlp 4y ago
Nope, maybe it shows my age, but I still buy CDs and them ripp them, or buy MP3s. Then I have my set of playlists that I either sync to the phone, or set of SD/USB cards to plug into the car. I am not keen in losing my audio collection to some subscription service. Movies is another matter, it is most throw away content anyway besides some jewels, and for those, DVD/Blue-Ray. Just in case, someone makes the comparisasion with Netflix and friends.
- spinadisk 4y ago
  I wonder if there is any advantage to a digital recording converted to say high quality aac, flac or whatever over ripping from a cd. Lots of my cds have very poor production on them. And on that note, how many recordings have been revisited? Can they improve them from re-masters, have they been, are they, or is that all a con to get you to buy them again?
declnz 4y ago
> But then I've got some scripts that maintain a copy of that collection, except converted to MP3 at a variable bitrate Yes. I have / had been doing this for years, and just want to sing high praises of mp3fs[1], assuming some kind of Linux or macOS machine. It solves this problem in a way that I think more people should know about! [1] https://khenriks.github.io/mp3fs/ https://khenriks.github.io/mp3fs/
commandersaki 4y ago
Yep I store my music collection on my phone as MP3s on my iPhone 6s -- only 32GB. My collection is only MP3s to begin with anyways, and I keep a copy on multiple desktops and backblaze, using backblaze as origin/source to distribute to the rest. I only ever listen in the car. I create playlists that I can vocalise so that Siri can pick them up and play them so I can listen to stuff hands free. It's a pretty good system. The only real issue is the iPhone can sync to only one mac/library, and you can't do the reverse which is sync your library from your phone back to a mac or Windows or Linux. I can't imagine a good solution for this without redesigning the interface to upload your music is like copying to another filesystem -- but Apple doesn't want you thinking about filesystems anymore.
jzb 4y ago
Nope. I have about 1TB of music, FLAC mostly, on a NAS with Plex serving it up. I started seriously curating my digital collection whenever the Creative Nomad media player came out. Haven’t ditched physical media, though - I like to have a physical copy in addition to digital. I only take a subset of the collection with me in the car, but I don’t spend much time driving anyway.
dghughes 4y ago
>I threw out my CDs a long time ago I have a pile of CDs and my plan was to do that. Now I wonder if some are any good or if the metal coating has degraded. Some are nearly 40 years old!
- spinadisk 4y ago
  I have one from the late 80s, or very early nineties that degraded. Certainly worth having a look.
navjack27 4y ago
I've taken to doing a similar thing except on my phone and anywhere with limited storage I use different things instead of MP3 because that is an ancient technology. I have the lossless copy on my big storage. And on my phone I have xHE-AAC copies of pretty much my entire library. I figure since everything I listen to on my phone goes through compression anyway even through the highest quality ldac that my nice headset has and especially because the vehicles I drive in have crappy Bluetooth audio that using this way more efficient codec is a pretty good trade-off.

TacticalCoder 4y ago

> Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library. I totally do too. And we're not alone. I not only ripped all my old CDs to FLAC (which I use both as archive/backup and source) but I still buy CDs. Nobody want CDs anymore, so I just buy them used. And then I rip them. And then the CDs go into a box in the garage/shed. My car doesn't take FLAC files but it's got its own storage so I convert the FLAC to 320 kbps MP3s. I don't bother "streaming" from my phone (which I rarely have with me anyway): the music is directly in the car's SSD. At home I play the FLAC files directly.

dawnerd 4y ago
Plus there’s still tons of older albums not on streaming services. I’m big on older theme park soundtracks and many of them never made it to digital officially. In fact I just paid over 130 bucks for a cd.

LarryDarrell 4y ago

I do roughly the same thing, but I use Syncthing. I always had trouble keeping my phone connected reliably enough to run a long running script, and Syncthing works well. I have a 1TB sdcard in my phone that has a mirror of my 600GB+ library. I use Foobar2000 on my phone because it's easy to just pin my Music folder from the filesystem and navigate through the folders. Just about every other music player out there seems to be designed around importing tags into a library, which I don't like.

urbanporcupine 4y ago
I do the same thing, but I am facing some read only problem. The changes have stopped getting synced. I need to investigate more. Do you face any syncing problem?

jamesfinlayson 4y ago

I have a limited enough music taste that buying what I like will be much cheaper in the long run than paying for a monthly service. I briefly used a family member's Spotify once and the UI was utterly enraging - I. thought there was something wrong with me until I started seeing the same comments echoed here on HackerNews.

sen 4y ago

> Oh man I thought I was the only one who still had a carefully curated digital library... I threw out my CDs a long time ago, but my digital library is my baby. I've been curating this since I was 10. It's who I am! You’re definitely not alone. I’ve been collecting MP3s since they first began, choosing 1-2 songs a night to leave downloading over dialup. I still have ever MP3 I ever downloaded short of deleting the files from that period where you’d download a song on IRC and it’d be something else named wrong on purpose. I do use Apple Music for my family/kids, but my MP3 collection is one of my prized possessions and the basis of nearly all my daily music listening.

siquick 4y ago
Have you ever bought any of that music you prize?
- Teever 4y ago
  I prefer to not pay record companies to listen to music of long dead musicians, and I try and see as many live shows of performers who are still touring, and I buy their shirts.
  - walthamstow 4y ago
    Not just record companies, private equity firms now own the rights to a lot of popular 20th century music
- HollowEyes 4y ago
  I have wasted so much money on music I barely bother with. Lots of stuff is a one play only for me these days and streaming suits that for experimentation. I do pay for ad-hoc streaming but don't get value out of it (time), nevermind the artists. And yet it's still better value than what I used to pay for records.
- alt227 4y ago
  Music itself has no value now, streaming services killed that. If you like an artist go to their shows and buy their merch, thats how artists make money these days.

brewdad 4y ago

I do the same thing only I keep opus files on my phone. They sound just as good as mp3 in my listening environment and take up even less space on my phone.

weq 4y ago

I have music constantly on in my life, but you know what, i really hate hearing the same songs over and over again. I used to leech music and have a collection of it (i still do) but i prefer humans mixing it up, in random orders, with different sythns, styles or vibes over it. So while i have never subscribed to any streaming services, i do subscribe to DI.FM. I get access from any device i have, as many as i want, and instead of scouring the net constantly for new music, i now just feed off the bounty. They have sister stations for all styles. Literly i have music on all day everyday. I have different styles for different moods, times of the day, emotions. When you listen at that rate, you either love repeats or you spend your whole life looking for the next song. Curating a playlist is most of the battle.

EamonnMR 4y ago

I expose everything as a Samba share and stream with VLC. But nowdays most of my music purchases are on Bandcamp so I use their app (which has a nice interface for saving stuff to your phone) a lot of the time. I usually spin albums so playlists aren't really a concern.

secretsatan 4y ago

If you use iOS, you can set music synching to automatically encode to mp3 when synching with the phone, that worked really well for me, for a while..... Apple music, if you keep your own music, has completely gone off the rails for me this last year. I couldn't sync for ages because it told me my device was full, it had just lost it's handle on the music, none of the syncing options would add or remove anything, eventually, the other night, I went into the settings for the music app and manually deleted everything and resynced and it finally started working again! But then, 12 hours later after sync completes (Same as you, around 100GB of music), I discover the album artwork is completely messed up, almost no albums have the correct artwork, they've all been swapped around at random, all albums have the same artwork for all tracks, just that they're completely the wrong ones. Checking the apple forums, it seems this is not uncommon, and has been happening for a year. I did actually notice that one or 2 albums were wrong but put it down to slight glitch I could live with, but having them all wrong is infuriating, I recognise many albums by their covers and it helps browsing to pick something out. I really loved iTunes, especially for automatically storing the music in a nice structured directory format. I tried apple music briefly when it first came out, and the first thing it did was to screw up albums, splitting up compilations, getting the wrong editions of albums and started downgrading all my unencoded music, put me off for life, I'm quite happy managing it myself and don't have to fear losing favourite albums due to licensing issues.

pjmlp 4y ago

Nope, maybe it shows my age, but I still buy CDs and them ripp them, or buy MP3s. Then I have my set of playlists that I either sync to the phone, or set of SD/USB cards to plug into the car. I am not keen in losing my audio collection to some subscription service. Movies is another matter, it is most throw away content anyway besides some jewels, and for those, DVD/Blue-Ray. Just in case, someone makes the comparisasion with Netflix and friends.

spinadisk 4y ago
I wonder if there is any advantage to a digital recording converted to say high quality aac, flac or whatever over ripping from a cd. Lots of my cds have very poor production on them. And on that note, how many recordings have been revisited? Can they improve them from re-masters, have they been, are they, or is that all a con to get you to buy them again?

declnz 4y ago

> But then I've got some scripts that maintain a copy of that collection, except converted to MP3 at a variable bitrate Yes. I have / had been doing this for years, and just want to sing high praises of mp3fs[1], assuming some kind of Linux or macOS machine. It solves this problem in a way that I think more people should know about! [1] https://khenriks.github.io/mp3fs/ https://khenriks.github.io/mp3fs/

commandersaki 4y ago

Yep I store my music collection on my phone as MP3s on my iPhone 6s -- only 32GB. My collection is only MP3s to begin with anyways, and I keep a copy on multiple desktops and backblaze, using backblaze as origin/source to distribute to the rest. I only ever listen in the car. I create playlists that I can vocalise so that Siri can pick them up and play them so I can listen to stuff hands free. It's a pretty good system. The only real issue is the iPhone can sync to only one mac/library, and you can't do the reverse which is sync your library from your phone back to a mac or Windows or Linux. I can't imagine a good solution for this without redesigning the interface to upload your music is like copying to another filesystem -- but Apple doesn't want you thinking about filesystems anymore.

jzb 4y ago

Nope. I have about 1TB of music, FLAC mostly, on a NAS with Plex serving it up. I started seriously curating my digital collection whenever the Creative Nomad media player came out. Haven’t ditched physical media, though - I like to have a physical copy in addition to digital. I only take a subset of the collection with me in the car, but I don’t spend much time driving anyway.

dghughes 4y ago

>I threw out my CDs a long time ago I have a pile of CDs and my plan was to do that. Now I wonder if some are any good or if the metal coating has degraded. Some are nearly 40 years old!

spinadisk 4y ago
I have one from the late 80s, or very early nineties that degraded. Certainly worth having a look.

navjack27 4y ago

I've taken to doing a similar thing except on my phone and anywhere with limited storage I use different things instead of MP3 because that is an ancient technology. I have the lossless copy on my big storage. And on my phone I have xHE-AAC copies of pretty much my entire library. I figure since everything I listen to on my phone goes through compression anyway even through the highest quality ldac that my nice headset has and especially because the vehicles I drive in have crappy Bluetooth audio that using this way more efficient codec is a pretty good trade-off.