Maintaining a Music Library, Ten Years On | Hacker News Reader

Maintaining a Music Library, Ten Years On

brianschrader.com

I've had the same iTunes (now Music.app) library since 2004, with only one botched library migration with an iTunes update in like 2013. It has 40,000 MP3s or so. I still keep it on my boot drive too.

It's a treasure. I understand why most people don't do this, but I will probably forever.

A really significant amount of it isn't otherwise available on streaming services. While I'm an Apple Music subscriber, I still acquire my own mp3s for most of the new music I listen to.

iCloud Music Library is an immense value here as well. Rarely it will sync the wrong version of something in my library, but usually it's on the money. The fact that it doesn't cost anything extra on top of an Apple Music subscription is a huge boon, and it doesn't count against my iCloud data either.

I’m similar to you. I started ripping my CD collection to mp3s around 2002, and I have them all on my boot disk and synced to both Dropbox and an external drive for backup.

Many of those CDs, which I started buying in 1986, are not available on streaming services. Over the years I have accumulated a lot of other nonstreamed music, including radio programs I’ve recorded, live music downloaded from the Internet Archive, purchased music from Bandcamp and elsewhere, and music I composed and performed myself for my own enjoyment.

It’s a bit obsessive, I admit, and the chances that my heirs will find the files and want to preserve them after I’m gone are slim. But I am happy I have them now.

I'm in the same boat as you, even with a botched migration about 12-14 years ago and am really passionate about this stance. I've lately been getting further enjoyment from thrifting CDs and ripping FLAC upgraded tracks to my library, overwriting old 128kb/s fuzz. Actually have been at this for about 3 years now and around 1200 ripped. I try now to only listen to those albums + bandcamp, etc purchases where possible.

At one point, probably when I got a new computer, I spent a bunch of time cleaning out both music and photo libraries. Things had just gotten into a real mess over time with various merges, software changes, etc. to get the stuff I actually care about in some semblance of order. At some point, I probably need to do another pass but it hasn't been a priority.

I occasionally wonder, if I should just puchase 100-200 mainstream songs that I don't actually own--the money is trivial. But I generally end up at the point that these are not the sort of music I'd likely ever have trouble purchasing if I wanted to.

I’ve recently begun the same journey, except I skipped sync and went straight to Jellyfin (open source Plex) with the files stored on a home NAS. With Tailscale it means I can stream from anywhere. I’ve even been working on a native Linux client written in Rust and Gtk [1] which has been an absolute blast. I expect to have it on Flathub by the end of the month.

The whole process has made me more excited about music again. Part of that is listening to entire albums, another part is the feeling you get from directly supporting an artist when you purchase from Bandcamp.

[1] https://github.com/Fingel/gelly

Tangential point: The song Terryfold has been removed from Spotify.

It's still available on Youtube if I want to listen to it, but the point is that it's not in the same place, if you're a Spotify user, as all the other music you listen to.

Yes, there's a whole thing with Justin Roiland that's controversial (putting it lightly, maybe he should be in jail, but that's not for me to decide), and that song has obvious elements that relate to the controversy, but, dammit, I like the song for the song.

The point this article is making, and the reason for the author's decision ten years ago, is still relevant and I can't ever see it being irrelevant.

Yeah, disappearing songs (or content in general) is the part that I HATE about streaming. I'm happy to pay for the service, but unhappy to have content yanked at any moment. Especially with songs I used to love, it's like having part of my identity erased against my will.

If anyone has any tips on how to "back up" a Spotify account (and systematically detect yanked content) I would love to hear them.

Call me boring, but for almost 20 years, my music library has been simply a NFS share on a generic PC host running Debian. I've never seen a need to complicate it further with iTunes-this and Jelly-that and Plex and radarr and sonarr and all the blah, blah, blah modern new software that keeps coming out to solve problems I don't seem to ever have.

To me that sounds like coding without version control. Sure you can do it but do you hate yourself that much?

I don't think so! It's been set-and-forget for years. If I find any new music I want to save, just copy it over. If I need the library somewhere outside my home, I can either VPN in or just rsync it to a USB drive. It requires next to no maintenance. Just occasional backups.

Anything I was into in 2005 is so played out that I would never listen to it now. I am really the opposite of all this in that I routinely delete my entire music collection to intentionally start over. It forces me to find what is new and interesting.

I lost a ton of indie electronic music from the early days of myspace music in a 2009 hard drive fuckup. I can't imagine doing that willingly, because I still wish I could find some of those hobby musicians again. I do occasionally trim a few gigabytes of music I don't care for anymore, but I regularly listen to most of my collection that sits around 280gb of mainly flac files.

My NAS has snapshots to I have everything. If I'm making music I'd want version control but for music someone else made I just want it unchanged.

I'm the same. For my use case there is little benefit in using those tools, and for security and privacy reasons I don't want to unleash all this software on my computers and network.

If that works for you, great. But I for one like to listen to music when I'm out and about and don't have access to an NFS mount.

Jellyfin and a domain name with a dynamic DNS update will do that for you, no problem.

In the house: NFS read-only for desktops and laptops; Owntone to send music to Wiim Mini or stereo receivers (Yamaha, Denon, Marantz, Onkyo -- all of them are compatible).

Outside the house, JellyAmp on phones.

512gb mSD card in a cheap android phone + VLC app works wonders.

So a TB drive drive doesn't work for you?

it doesn't they can get lost or stolen easily

just copy it to an sd card

1. What if I add new music? I have to update every SD card.

2. What if I want more music than is easily carried on an SD card? I have literal TBs of music.

I see this sentiment a lot, and I appreciate it. However personally the fewer things I own the better. The thought of having these things that I bought and have to remember I bought and then keep track of them brings me more anxiety than joy. I'm 64 and I grew up when music was scarce and options were limited. The only thing I want to own now is a playlist that points to songs I like. I'll then move to whatever service I like best and has most of the songs I like. Streaming services should cost much more than they do today so that artists can get compensated.

At which point do you draw the line where you abrogate ownership of something?

Music is something you can easily live without if the internet or cloud vanishes on you but my music will still stream from my FLAACs at home that I made from CDs and DVDs years ago. I also have it converted to .mp3 at bit rates that make sense for a phone and ear plugs used by a middle ages bloke with tinnitus! The whole lot fits on a modern phone easily.

I bought records and tapes at first, then CDROMs. I also accidentally bought the same CD/tapes twice or a well meaning prezzie duplicated one I already owned. Also you have "summary" or "collection" efforts etc eg Led Zep "Remasters". I have already paid the music industry a couple of times over.

Now that is my personal collection - some of it is unavailable elsewhere, sometimes without being illegal. I can augment my stuff with pay per play just as you do but the Deep Purple CD rip with a digitally smoothed over scratch part way through "Smoke on the water" is personal because I know what caused that scratch.

You are a few years older than me but we both know the joy of buying a new single, stacking LPs for an extended hands off session, the horror of scratches and a cheap D60 tape turning into a weird concertina. Remember those blocks for removing dust from a record when it was playing and accidentally nudging the needle.

Spotify and co are all a bit ersatz by comparison. I think music is way more than simply the medium, so context is important too. Unlike, say the progression from steam to petrol, which is simply a convenience.

It's clear that you have a hobby that you enjoy. I was always annoyed that I had to buy a new single, LP, or CD. It was one more thing that I had to keep organized. Cleaning LPs to remove dust before playing was irritating. And then having an album that you loved get worse and worse with each replay. Another personal quirk is that I don't like listening to music from my past. I want to constantly find new things to listen to across all genres. I love music. It plays a big role in my life, but I want to get the new.

I agree, while I love older music, generally I find I can only hear a song so many times before my enjoyment starts to fade. It takes considerable time away to recover a song from that point.

They could compensate the artists already but choose to line their own pockets instead.

I understand the sentiment. The problem is that if too many people adopt it, the alternative may disappear or be paywalled.

Nice to read, nice to see this message going out more.

I'm old enough (61) that owning music is what I've known most of my life. I have to say I've never not owned my own music. I went from vinyl to CDs—and then ripped the CDs digitally. The ripped tracks I have kept on hard drives, in the cloud. (I am continually adding music as I discover it so that it grows.)

Even though I eschew CDs these days for new music, I buy the digital tracks of the highest quality from Band Camp and add them to my storage locations.

For really top-notch albums, I still buy vinyl as a way of supporting the artist, I guess. I do infrequently put on vinyl (although I still think it is better than CD—it took The Muffs to convince me of that).

I have a music folder 45000+ tracks and counting dating from as far back as 2003. I sync this 450 GB folder to two computers using syncthing and then use rsync to synchronize a subset of these albums (folders by format) to SD Cards inside iPod's. I use Strawberry player for listening (a fork of Clementine) and a combination of beets and MusicBrainz for tagging. Then, I scrobble my listens on ListenBrainz. When I'm in the car or on mobile, I use YouTube Music and it scrobbles to ListenBrainz as well.

I probably should use navidrome or a similar technology to serve the files. I already do this for audiobooks and podcasts and use Tailscale to access it when I'm not on my local network.

I maintain my own library too where I spent a while ripping my CD collection back in the early 2000s (and then again maybe 6 years ago when storage was cheaper to a lossless format). The CDs are all boxed up safely for archival storage, and most of my recent music has been purchased from wherever I can get DRM-free stuff. I fiddled with various self hosted servers but I’ve mostly stuck with iTunes Match since it lets me access it all from my phone, and then I just back up the library from my Mac to my NAS. I just don’t have the time or patience to play sysadmin at home anymore. I use Apple Music streaming for stuff I don’t care about potentially vanishing, but for the stuff that I really love and would be sad to lose, I buy it and put it in the archive. It does happen occasionally that stuff I don’t own that I found on Apple Music disappears, which can be annoying.

I think for most people this is overkill, but for music nerds like me where the collecting and curation is a big part of the enjoyment, maintaining your own library makes sense.

Hijacking this thread with this question: What's the modern equivalent of the classic WinAmp that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux? I want to just point the app at a folder of music and have it do its thing.

> modern equivalent of the classic WinAmp that runs on Windows

WACUP — originally Win Amp Community Update Project, although they have distanced themselves from any mention of the original for legal reasons. It's literally Winamp, and it rules: https://getwacup.com/

Get the 32-bit version for now if you want to use the “Modern” (Winamp 3 & 5) skinning engine that has not yet been ported to the 64-bit ver. Worth it because I really really love the “Classic Modern” theme it includes: https://www.deviantart.com/victhor/art/Winamp-Classic-Modern...

Here it is on Windows 11 on my Framework 12 :D https://i.imgur.com/teYadOi.jpeg

> modern equivalent of the classic WinAmp that runs on Linux

Probably Audacious. Its modern defaults don't look very Winamp-ish, but it's a descendant of XMMS (a straight-up WinAmp clone from back in the '90s) by way of Beep-Media-Player: https://audacious-media-player.org/

> modern equivalent of the classic WinAmp that runs on macOS

No idea :)

For Windows & Mac, you can do foobar2000.

For MacOS, you can use Vox, https://vox.rocks/mac-music-player

I personally use MPD (or something like moodeAudio), and then use clients to listen on various platforms.

Foobar2000, but I'd recommend hosting something like Navidrome and using a browser for playback these days depending on your setup / household

Rather than using a browser for playback, I would recommend Supersonic or some other player that can speak the Subsonic protocol that Navidrome supports. Desktop apps will be a much more pleasant experience than a browser.

Strawberry can do this and was already my favorite music player on Linux/BSD systems even without that: https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/#features

It's a maintained Qt6 fork of Clementine, which was a port of the amazing Amarok 1.4 to Qt4, which is all that Amarok 2 should have been in the first place.

Somebody needs to introduce this man to Bandcamp. Pretty much all my music buying is through there now, I don't miss the "sometimes iTunes/Music adds two copies of your purchases to the library" bug at all. I do miss Old Itunes though, Music has so many little problems like the fact that hitting command-L to go to the currently playing track's info is broken from a lot of views, and none of my visualizer plugins work any more. RIP Aeon.

Pretty much. As a consumer, it's where I can find the cheapest albums to buy (for digital releases). As a musician, it is the only platform where I have seen any money – albeit, still not much :P

If something isn't available there, usually my next choice is Qobuz. At least both of those sites let you download files and listen to them however you want.

< As a musician, it is the only platform where I have seen any money – albeit, still not much :P>

Which is why my wife and I still buy albums and CDs, to support the artists. For us, music is a type of therapy, live concerts are being in the same room with people who perform real-time sound paintings. In today's political landscape, arts are denigrated, just look at how funds have been slashed at all levels of education. By building up a decent music library we can, in a small way, support the arts.

I buy everything on Bandcamp... when it's available there, which is increasingly not the case. It's a real shame, even bands that used to upload to Bandcamp don't even bother anymore. I pray to all the gods that Bandcamp will experience a renaissance, but it's getting rough up there.

Not sure if you missed it in the article, but the author acknowledges buying from Bandcamp in the article

> Buy music on Bandcamp or download it from Soundcloud, stick it in the Music app, and you're off!

I did, though I thought I double-checked it before hitting 'post', saw that, and closed the tab! Ah well.

I'm with JKCaloun on having owned music for as long as I can remember. From the late 90s until the early 2010s I routinely bought CDs and ended up with a library of... 1200 or 1600 or so? A bunch of years back I made a concerted effort to rip all of them to a lossless format and then play that because, frankly, it's simpler.

Since then I've bought music digitally (Bleep, Bandcamp, etc), saved off copies of live sets (thanks, yt-dlp), or when needed bought CDs and ripped them.

It's just so nice having the library. Yes, tagging was a big pain. And yes, I need to have a backup strategy for it. But, I've ended up with a pretty substantial and well-curated library of stuff that requires no streaming services. I currently use Plexamp (via Plex) to listen to it because the system works well, but also because it's a directory of files I can eventually move to something else.

There's just so many hassles with streaming systems that, outside of discovering new music (which you can do other ways) I don't find them worth it. From dead spots while traveling to stuff that's been pulled to weird versions (or not being able to find weird versions) it's just nice to have My Collection when I want it.

I'm also really liking this Triode app [1] from the article. Sometimes I just want to listen to different things but without using some station-specific app... Here we go.

Old writeup on my CD ripping workflow, excuse the broken images: https://nuxx.net/blog/2016/01/17/full-cd-collection-ripping-...

[1] https://triode.app/

Thanks for the Triode recommendation. I've been looking for a clean and lightweight internet radio player. Will be checking it out.

Check out Shortwave if you are on Linux.

> but even better is the feeling that you're free from the capricious whims of any corporate policy change

Not even just policy changes per se. Spotify stopped supporting certain hardware. They changed their API so other DJ apps I used no longer had access to the library. It’s just annoying when you’re trying to establish workflows and things change for no good reason.

Personally I use classic Windows Media Player and sync the folder between my house and my car. (Yes, my car has a Windows PC in it.)

I rip CDs I own, if you buy on Amazon you often get "autorip" when you purchase. Amazon's MP3 store is fine, I used to buy on Microsoft's back when it existed.

Tell us more about this carputer...

It is not that exciting primarily because I have limited time to work on it!

I run a copy of my home automation software (don't get excited, it's written in Visual Basic .NET) on a NUC in my car. The user interface consists of a 16x2 LCD display attached on my dashboard which displays the GPS position and speed of the car (I log this) as well as the song and artist when the playing music track changes, and an Elgato Stream Deck which sits in the center console and allows me the ability to launch playlists, advance tracks, etc. If it has Internet (it doesn't usually, I'm cheap), it can hypothetically do some limited navigation, but I haven't tuned the behavior of that much because it's hard (illegal) to program while driving.

I also really want to work on CANBUS connectivity, but it's a big project and I have bills to pay and kids to feed.

I continue to pay for iTunes Match out of fear and lack of understanding of what would happen if I stopped. I've had the same iTunes library since 2007 and losing the local content I've uploaded over those years is simply not something I am willing to risk for $24/yr.

> I continue to pay for iTunes Match out of fear and lack of understanding of what would happen if I stopped.*

https://support.apple.com/en-us/118287, "Do you have an active subscription to Apple Music?"

"If you canceled your subscription to Apple Music or iTunes Match, your music library is removed on all of your devices except for the original computer where your music library is downloaded. Your iTunes purchases will remain in your Library on all devices. All music that you added or downloaded from the Apple Music catalog is removed. Any playlists added from the Apple Music catalog, created using music from the Apple Music catalog, or synced to a device using Sync Library are also removed."

So you cancel iTunes Match, your "cloud library" disappears. Meaning: Apple stops hosting your uploads and matches, but none of your local files are deleted.

If you ever want to turn it off, just make sure you've downloaded every song that shows as Matched or Uploaded so you’re not relying on Apple's copies. Then back them up somewhere outside your Apple Music or iTunes library folder to wherever you keep your full, DRM-free music collection.

I've pursued a similar strategy via CDs found in resale shops. I've gotten a good collection going, but there's a very specific selection of CDs popular enough for people to buy but not so good that they kept it.

I made this switch years ago and love it. I also strongly recommend Marvis Pro, a fantastic app for navigating your Apple Music collection on iOS.

Any time I see an article about music streaming, I pour one out for Rdio.

It had all the benefits of streaming and the properties that one would expect from library ownership. When I compare the 'features' offered by all the streaming services (I've encountered thus far), things have regressed drastically.

A few of the benefits I recall (from memory) that Rdio had:

- when setting a radio station and when you 'downvoted' an artist or a song, it only effected that particular station. So, if you wanted a 70's metal radio station, downvoting Metallica wouldn't affect your general 'metal' radio station or your 80s Metal Radio station.

- You could search by numerous parameters, including Label. So if you were looking for classical albums by Deutsche Grammophon, you could actually find those albums or songs.

These are just a couple of things I can recall from memory. I think it's also important to point out (this is based on memory and vibes), that the Rdio algorithm actually respected the user's wishes and didn't try to force things you might not want. Said algorithm was bought by Pandora (IIRC) and based on my experience with Pandora (and past experience with Rdio)...Pandora seems to have thrown it in the trash.

Compare all of these awesome UX experiences vs YouTube Music...where you can't even filter out AI trash from New Releases.

Suffice to say, Rdio was the crest of the wave for music streaming / discovery and everything since has been a regression. But you do get a bit more control if you go down the path of owning your library.

Heh I still have the first mp3 I downloaded in 1998.

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