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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

What bugs me is that quite a lot of things are not available. I ripped my entire CD collection and uploaded into Google Music (not sure if that feature still exists). I have all this music available but I can not find it on other peoples google music. So if I share a song, they get an error. Most of this music is nothing special and quite mainstream but if I search on other peoples devices I can not find the songs only alternate versions from other people who made a cover version of the song.

I am also worried now that songs will just disappear. I no longer remember specific names but instead hit thumbs up to add them to a list. If the song gets removed from google due to license expiring or what ever that song just disappears from my list and in have no idea that I every had it on my list.

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This is why it's so important that we resist pressure to upload everything to the cloud. Buy a 64 or 128GiB flash drive and put your whole collection there. (plus one probably for backup). Copy it to all your local machine(s). Copy the important stuff to your mobile.

Missing my 160GB iPod Classic honestly. But nowadays oddly enough Google Play Music has most of the music I want and when they dont as OP does I upload them. One thing I do is buy the music and download it locally. Google Play Music gives me proper high quality MP3s compared to Apples m3a or whatever those were.

Licensing deals are stupid. Also I do see smaller artists on Google Play Music being lumped together with half a dozen other smaller artists. I cant believe how broken that is and sometimes the artists songs I am looking for doesnt show up cause they dont even show albums featuring that artist in their album listing.

i mean...you can load a good chunk of your library on an 400gb sd card and play it on your phone. it seems more battery efficient than constantly streaming music from an online account even when the cache expires consistently

People who spend thousands of dollars on music tend to be people who buy expensive phones that don't allow SD cards.

But 128GB phones have enough storage for most music collections

> expensive phones that don't allow SD cards Oh 21st century, what have you done.

Use double Enter

for line breaks on HN.

Thanks. I realized it too late :(

> People who spend thousands of dollars on music tend to be people who buy expensive phones that don't allow SD cards.

The lack of an SD card slot is a dealbreaker in a phone for me, regardless of price.

I wouldn't trust flash drives for a whole library of hard-to-replace music, they fail all the time and they're hard to recover once they do. Better to use a NAS, external hard drive, or cloud storage you pay for like S3.

A RAID NAS! Anything less won't cut it.

Still incredibly vulnerable to physical disasters e.g. a fire

A 2 x 12TB RAID NAS with two separate backups in two other physical locations.

That would work, but at that point is it really less effort and expense that using a managed solution (AWS etc).

RAID is not backup. It doesn't protect against accidental deletion, malware, fire, etc...

It only protects you against disk failure, and it is mostly used to make sure the data is still available as you change disks. Not for long term data protection. Overall, a RAID NAS is probably not that safer than a standard external hard drive. RAID is mostly there to make sure that you can benefit from high performance, high capacity and networking without sacrificing reliability.

If you have two disks and availability is not a problem (you can afford not to listen to music as you restore from backup), you are better off with an external hard drive used only for backup/restore operation and kept somewhere safe when not in use.

Seems like overkill for OP's 64 gigs of music. Just buy two or three flash drives as backups. They're dirt cheap and bog simple.

Or you could burn them to bluray if you have a device.

Signing up for a s3 account is probably less work than going out to buy USB drives. If you factor in redundant copies, it's probably cheaper too.

If privacy is not an issue, a dump feature solves this. Available for Google services and unofficial ones are there for many more. Clouds that don't provide such a feature are probably not worth using.

> This is why it's so important that we resist pressure to upload everything to the cloud. Buy a 64 or 128GiB flash drive and put your whole collection there. (plus one probably for backup). Copy it to all your local machine(s). Copy the important stuff to your mobile.

Collections are not static. I discover new music every once in a while. Syncing with cloud makes sense; it is just that you could be the owner of the hardware behind the cloud, to maintain privacy or you encrypt the data in the cloud (or both, and use one cloud as backup).

You could use rsync or something with a flash drive though. Android smartphones will happily eat microSD cards containing hundreds of GB of music.

Which means the iPod Classic 160 GB is finally obsolete. However I think you can hack those devices anyway, to put in a new 2.5" SATA SSD (if they eat SATA).

> Buy a 64 or 128GiB flash drive and put your whole collection there.

That's too small for my collection! (I use a 64 gig card for taking my music on the road alone). My music collection is stored on a 1Tb drive.

I think you're going to like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19919163

Yeah, that's pretty cool! I'll probably wait for the price to come down a bit, and to see what the real lifespan of the things are, before I start doing anything more than experimenting with them, though.

> I can not find the songs only alternate versions from other people who made a cover version of the song.

Try some jazz like Coltrane or Miles Davis. It seems they never stoped issuing albums - remastered, Coltrane for lovers, Miles for cooking.

It is next to impossible to find original album or remastered original.

Yesterday on Youtube Music oldest Coltrane album was from 2015.

I think all these algorithms reward novelty to keep you engaged, which means snipers making phony compilations beat the original.

"or" here really simplifies things. Nowadays almost every 70s-90s album on streaming services is a remaster with overloaded levels and clippings. One has to resort to torrent sites to find rips from original CDs or vinyls.

This[0] is a good resource if you're interested in the dynamic range of remasters.

If you listen to anything that falls into the "progressive" genre, this[1] channel may interest you. Only high-dynamic-range versions of albums, often ripped from vinyl. Steven Wilson has been mixing everything he can get his hands on and most of it is both brilliant and faithful.

[0]http://dr.loudness-war.info/

[1]https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCXL-7ZVrR7wf7Nf5-FcUVRw/about

> Try some jazz like Coltrane or Miles Davis. It seems they never stoped issuing albums - remastered

This is only done to prevent copyright expiration and having the album become public domain.

You’ll see they only do it for “oldish” albums. It’s quite a scam.

I thought copyright had been extended long enough that they don't need to do that? For example you don't see the same thing quite so much with other genres of music and music of the same age in those scenes haven't fallen into the public domain.

(this is a question rather than statement)

For new works, but not necessarily old ones.

The remaster acts as a new, “derivative” work and thus gets whatever new copyright protection is offered by newer laws.

But the older work doesn't, and nearly all recorded music is already covered by Disney's forever copyright just because of the history of when the technology was invented.

This was my understanding as well.

> Coltrane for lovers, Miles for cooking.

And programming?

Personally, Goa works for me. Try Astral Projection, Hallucinogen.

https://ektoplazm.com/ is a great place to start sampling this type of music for free.

I generally like throwing on di.fm while working, but have started to really dislike commercial breaks.

Try mixcloud.

“I am actually flying into a star!”

Astral Projection - Another World - Nilaya

I was passenger in a hydroplane car wreck while we listened to this song. No one was hurt though we were moving at highway speed it was just an accident. Everything moved so slowly as we went from parallel with the other cars to perpendicular at 65mph. Still love that song and album.

Holdsworth works for programming.

Enduser

Man, I lost my precious childhood videos after "saving" on the cloud. Google deleted it because of some seconds of the background music of AC/DC's on the radio.

And there is no way to get them back? Completely deleted?

I can play it on a small window on the youtube editor page. But I could not find a way to download it back yet.

Please elaborate, was this Google Drive?

Oh, sorry.. it is on Youtube. But I will never trust in any Google service again, as I did.

Aww. This will only get worse over time!

Were these on youtube? I wasn't aware that Google did the DMCA takedowns complaints for the rights holder - I thought the rights holder had to make a complaint, and that would necessitate them being somewhere the rights holder could view them.

Yes, youtube. Now I can't download it.

You played AC/DC on multiple videos, and deleted all your originals and other copies after uploading it to YouTube?

No, it just blocked my videos where there were, at least, a few minutes of music on the background.

Oh, now I understood your question. I lost my physical backup, and now I can't recover it from Google.

Flickr lost all my photos when it was acquired by Yahoo, so I'm with you on this one... The cloud is useful... but don't trust it too much.

I've learned to replace "the cloud" with "someone else's computer". Always worth repeating to yourself when you're considering uploading sensitive documents or something you can't afford to lose.

I wrote "deleted" but the truth is that I can see it on a small window, after navigating on my upload history to the very past, on some private Youtube account details page, and I can't download it anymore. I tried many many times. It's already have been years it is blocked from downloading it. I will try again soon if I can find a browser plugin that can help me with this.

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