Submitted 8 months ago by Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
I have a folder of MP3s, some of which date back to 1999, just a few years after the format was popularised. Most of them have utterly terrible names (think RIDEONAM.MP3). I think at this point they might even survive the heat death of the universe.
I can’t possibly calculate how many hours I spent curating my music library. I don’t use it anymore but you better bet that I still have it saved to the cloud and locally and it’s there in case I need it.
I’m amazed you still have the old files. I was late for Napster but I downloaded loads of individual files from kazaa/limewire/frostwire and used them to burn CDs.
Only a few years later though I would get into torrenting and replace pretty much all those shitty old low bitrate files with 320kbps mp3 discographies.
Many years later after college when I finally had a little extra money I started buying all my favorite CDs I discovered from the previous meana and ripped them myself to ~1000 kbps FLAC and meticulously tagged and organized them into my current music collection.
CDs are unfortunately getting harder and harder to find and I’ve only very recently started torrenting a little again, and I prefer everything be FLAC but if it’s not available I still do have some 320kbps mp3 left in the collection.
Everything I could find that was of higher quality, I downloaded over time. I have some bootlegs though along with some music I’ve found from no other sources. I’ll never replace some of it, but that’s fine.
Yep. Got archives with some files dating back to around 1999/2000, a fair part of the stuff impossible to find anywhere nowdays. Same for movies.
True. Mine’s already over 25 years old. Just keeps hopping from hard drive to hard drive.
hey now, they’re flac files and painstakingly sorted with the help of musicbrainz picard
Why, what does it do better than picard?
I have that too! I also have that one folder of random shit that I’ve avoided sorting for the last 20 years.
I also have that one folder of random shit that I’ve avoided sorting for the last 20 years.
pff I have so many folders like that that I have folders for those kinds of folders. I should probably put those folders all into a single folder…
Imma go against the grain on this one and say, thank fuck for Spotify, I don’t want to waste my time sorting and downloading music that i can have on demand anywhere anytime and I can discover cool new music every week.
Ofc, you know, everyone should do what they like, personally I like the spotify model, the same way Steam stopped my gaming piracy, it stopped my need to pirate music.
i still go to the high sees for Movies and TV shows because personally I am passionate about that and I don’t want to deal with shit like music being switched in Scrubs because licenses expired, the music in that show is a huge part for a lot of episodes you can’t just switch it out.
Have you heard of MetaBrainz? I reckon they have tools to help with music stuff, including tagging and organising music, and keeping track of listens and getting recommendations. Take a look into the MetaBrainz Projects
I think you vastly overestimate my care for how much time I want to invest into setting up music playing, that time is 0.
I want to open an app and have music available for listening, and I want to be able to play it on my alexas so I can listen to music in the bathroom and on my toilet.
That’s it.
everyone has cool recommendations, but so many people disregard UX.
Gnome Easytag worked perfectly circa 2005.
So will all my records. And probably tapes. And probably my stack of hdds that I have 3 backups of.
Bite me, corpo streaming leeches
I just wish people would name their shit well enough that I don’t accidentally download live albums anymore.
left spotify and started downloading all my music from [COMPLETELY LEGAL AVENUES] and bandcamp. It’s good to have music that Spotify cannot take away from me.
I have a happy middle ground:
I pay for Tidal’s student subscription. I leverage the fact Tidal streams FLAC files that can be decrypted by your account to build my local collection.
So I never actually stream or use their app, but technically am paying for the downloads.
I tried buying FLACs from companies that actually wanted to sell FLACs but they have ridiculously bad catalogues.
The files downloaded this way are usable offline? Is there some utility you are using to do this? I am very interested.
I download music from YouTube. Are the “completely legal avenues” better than that? In that case can you provide links in DM so I make sure to block these domains and to promptly inform the authorities? Thank you.
Slskd is something that you should never consider using
What? you have your own music that you can listen to any time, even offline without some annoying app?
And you can get niche and non-corporate music that’s not on that app?
That’s not progress, get with the times!
I have two hard drives from decades ago full of entire albums that are meticulously sorted and tagged. It was.my magnum opus of OCD.
To this day nearly a third of my Jellyfin library is stuff I downloaded through ourTunes over the dorm LAN in 2004/2005.
How to protect against bitrot?
ZFS is your friend.
superuser.com/…/how-exactly-do-btrfs-zfs-and-rela…
But nothing replaces a good backup strategy! Borg backup can help you there.
RAID1 combined with a separate backup drive, and ZFS with EEC RAM helps a lot, too (as another poster mentioned).
No, it’s not a full 3-2-1 backup solution, but you have to spend quite a bit as a data hoarder to actually get that. As far as I can tell, few data hoarders actually have a 3-2-1 backup without squinting about the details.
In like 5 years we’ll all have self-hostd LLM agents and you just send the lil’ bastard on YT to scrape the audio in higher bitrates all over again. It’ll be FINE.
I also have MP3s that are 20+years old at this point, and they were bad rips in the first place. Some of them from CDs that skipped during the rip. bitrot on this low quality MP3 I’m too lazy to re-get is on me.
Honestly, the community should make such a tool.
Since the argument is that LLMs scraping content isn’t piracy, if we just “scrape” the songs with a LLM it’s protected use.
heh I’d like to trust that plan for sure
yt-dlp already tougher to use today than in years past—and assuming everything will survive new content deals, uploader purges, etc. is optimistic
M-disc
ZFS NAS and ECC ram. Or backup to back blaze and let them worry about it
This, except the same also applies to those with OCD tendencies who spent like 2,000 hours meticulously renaming and organizing file and folders. At times the archive has felt pointless but you’re correct – I should never get rid of it. Even besides the sunk cost fallacy aspect, it might actually turn out to be very valuable in the future. I don’t listen to a ton of music anymore but I recently axed Spotify and started using Plexamp for when I do listen. I like Plexamp – just needs a bit more polish to feel like a AAA app.
You’ll find that MusicBrainz Picard is a heaven sent tool to properly tag your files, with optional proper renaming.
It takes some getting used to, and I find it works best in whole albums, but produces a much more professional library.
Picard sometimes falls short on cover arts and track names of some niche or non-english albums because of that mp3tag with discogs is sometimes needed
Oh I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. I wonder how this integrates into something like Jellyfin if I want to host my own personal music streaming for myself.
I use Jellyfin also.
My workflow is like this: buy CDs from Discogs, rip them to FLAC, adjust filenames, covers and metadata with Picard, push the files to Jellyfin that promptly detects the new files.
I also use Soundconverter in Linux to generate MP3s files for devices that don’t support FLAC.
I’m very happy with this setup and my collection has never been so organized.
In addition to autorenaming Picard can also auto organize into folders. So any time I buy new music, I run it through Picard to ensure metadata is correct, grab lyrics, and put it in the right folder that is then picked up by my self hosted navidrome
Does anyone know why Jellyfin cant auto scan for mp3 signatures of random directories i have it targeting and auto-populate song/album/artist metadata into the existing library? Do I need a specific addon?
Not unless you keep up with migrating your files. Drives fail over time.
Gotta have a good backup strategy for sure. I would’ve lost my collection a few times if I didn’t have one.
Yeah, that’s what I thought too, until that drive failed during a system upgrade. I’m not ripping 300+ CD’s AGAIN. Youtube it is.
Soulseek is your friend, use nicotine+
That’s why I have at least 3 copies of my library at any time.
Spotify or the last subscription I have. I'm otherwise completely free of big tech.
The reason I can't let it go is because I actually would never find new music I like without it's algorithm. I've found such got music based off it's recommendations. I know I could still find these bands without a premium subscription. But, music is a big part of my life and I just don't want to faff around when trying to find some music I like. For the same reason I think I'd struggle to self host my music because it's totally fail to work at the worst times no doubt
You just too used to agorithms. I have zero issue finding new music without them to th point whwre i has to stop exporing new artists because i already listen to over 2000 artists without algos
It's not the quantity, it's the quality. Sure I can search for similar artists with other means, but the Spotify algo is just on point. Probably so after many years of feeding it my listening habits.
I'll eventually drop it for a self hosted service with machine learning that I can train.
Have you tried just surfing bandcamp? I love discovering new shit there and my friends are like howd you find this!
The reason I can’t let it go is because I actually would never find new music I like without it’s algorithm.
I’m a bit old fashioned, when I want new music I listen to the radio, I get that doesn’t work for everyone though :)
The radio? But there's so many commercials!
Oh, just edit the tags, you lazy fuck 😂
I… Still use the same tools I’ve used about two decades ago…
Jamp! Organizer, and/or MP3 Tagger. MP3 Tagger for fixing the id3 tags, and Jamp! for renaming the files in bulk how I want (artist - song, usually).
And it won’t have modern ai rubbish in it, just old gold.
I find it funny how we’ve resorted to streaming services in an age where you can put 256 gigabytes ono a pinky nail sized storage solution. Ereaders are even better, an old kindle with 4gb of storage can hold an entire library.
I’ve always used Foobar2k with Picard plug-in, but admittedly have added little to my robust catalog since what.cd shut down a decade or so ago. I do buy from cherished artists but rarely share alike anymore, unsure where to look really.
I wish. I lost my 1TB drive of somewhat sorted MP3s and it took all the energy of collecting music with it. I’ve been using Spotify since then. But I still miss that drive.
Nah, it has very much been replaced with properly sorted .flac files. What ever is left is stuff I don’t listen to anymore.
File format has nothing to do with proper sorting. I’ve got 350k songs properly organized by artist, album, etc, but mp3. I’ve no need for flac.
File format has nothing to do with proper sorting.
Correct, it doesn’t.
Main difference to mp3 is that flac is “lossless” so the audio quality is a bit better, but it requires considerably more space (though still a pretty insignificant compared to video).
I really want to go this route. Had Spotify, tempted to get Tidal but I don’t want to deal with content coming and going anymore. I have about 300 gigs of random MP3s, and Flac files. I want to obtain more and move over fully to flac. Any recommendations on making the transition back to locally stored music.
I’m currently making the move myself and I’ve had a really easy time with soundiiz.com and YouTube-dl with a Linux GUI. Basically soundiiz takes your playlist from one service and makes an identical one on another service. You move all your jams to YouTube and rip the audio out of them with youtube-dl. Here’s a wikihow with the deets
I gave up on trying to sort my initial batch and just started replacing.
First I try to find a full discography of an artist by a solid release group (for example "PEMEDIA or “88”). With those you can just copy the entire folder into the artist directory and plex/jellyfin etc will perfectly detect it. Then just add new albums as they are released.
You can probably find a converter that will rip those files from Youtube for you. I did mine a year and a half ago. If I open Spotify it’s just to see the playlists they made for me, because those are actually pretty good, but I rip those files and store them too.
My library is better organized than Spotify’s database at this point.
And in my library I actually know what version I have not some 2018 “remix”.
Same with my movie library. I can have theatrical and directors or unrated extended version.
You’re missing the new albums from dead singers generated by the slop machine though.
only if you keep backups
I’m always disappointed to remembt that the average computer user doesn’t keep any backups whatsoever :/
I’ll sort it next year. Or next computer. Or…
Postimo@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
What high seas have good sources for music these days? I feel like a lot of music is harder to come by on the trackers I’ve searched. Occasionally I can find a particular album but is the more niche stuff invite trackers only?
Hoimo@ani.social 8 months ago
Soulseek is the most popular now. It’s peer-to-peer on a different level than torrents, you download from a single other user, which is a little more finicky than connecting to a swarm. But there’s a lot of music available there.
SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 8 months ago
for decades now
WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why not just use yt-dlp?
Postimo@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
That has been my method, I wondered if there was something better. But if I stumbled into the answer, that works too!