SERIOUS Music Management Issues
How are you people listening to your music digitally?
For years it has been external hard drive & iTunes. Unfortunately I had a hard drive crash recently that wiped out my collection of over 20,000 albums (lost a lot of raers too!). I'm a bit of an obsessive about archiving and cataloguing music.
After being a long time hold out, I just joined Spotify. While it does have a very impressive library it only has about 60% of what I had archived. Plus it only lets you save 10,000 songs!?
My dream is to have what I had in my iTunes library accessible through streaming and backed up so that I don't have to worry about hard drive crashes.
How are you managing?
For years it has been external hard drive & iTunes. Unfortunately I had a hard drive crash recently that wiped out my collection of over 20,000 albums (lost a lot of raers too!). I'm a bit of an obsessive about archiving and cataloguing music.
After being a long time hold out, I just joined Spotify. While it does have a very impressive library it only has about 60% of what I had archived. Plus it only lets you save 10,000 songs!?
My dream is to have what I had in my iTunes library accessible through streaming and backed up so that I don't have to worry about hard drive crashes.
How are you managing?
Comments
Finally got around to digitizing all of my CDs (yes, im 15 years late to the game) and adding them them to my mp3 library and now i have a 2 TB external Hard Drive that I am just hoping wont ever crash. What does anyone else do?
I use Plex for my music, movie/TV and photos. Use it locally and remotely.
I lost my internet connection for a couple weeks and I thought I would get some of my music in itunes that I hadn't gotten to yet, but itunes ran super slow without an internet connection. It made my two weeks with no internet very frustrating.
Get a decent NAS, stick your movies, photos and music on it. 4TB should do it. Hardwire it with ethernet CAT6 directly to your wifi router, make sure your wifi router has 1GB ethernet port.
Signup for cloud storage too (I recommend Crashplan as they can do NAS folders). I only cloudstore my photos, I can get the music off slsk or friends if somehow the NAS was stolen/blew the fuck up.
Once you are on NAS, all the devices in the house can browse content from it (I recommend Devolo homeplugs and wifi homeplugs) and decent NASs will give you a web interface so you can stream it from anywhere.
I use Media Monkey to manage my mp3s, all tagged up with artwork. I am a bit anal about it.
SAIL A VEE
If i can ask another management question. Do all you serato heads just use your itunes libary or do you have your serato libary separate ?
I run my serato from itunes but lately its become unmanageable trying to find things.
All my WAVs are now backed-up on discs that should outlast me.
- DB Cooper
What the hell is a NAS?
Thank you. Now we can feel old together!
There's no perfect backup, redundant hard drives plus cloud backup will probably be the easiest way to get things back. If you have Apple music then you can cloud stream anything in your iTunes library, it's terribly convenient. The downside is that you're locked into the Apple ecology, there's zero backup, and once you stop paying every month it all goes away. Apple has also made it more difficult to modify the album artwork and sometimes it changes the art for tracks you upload, it's hell on one's OCD. I use it because for convenience, but I have everything socked away on multiple hard drives as a backup. Floppies, hard-drives, zip-discs, usb drives, cloud storage--I've probably lost data from all of these media, redundancy is the only defence.
Protected from heat and light, the PVC plastic in LP records means that they will probably outlast every digital media I have. I would go with those.
CD-Rs fail as well.
I had a whole wallet of useless coasters that no cd drive can read now