How I manage my Music library

 In recent years, streaming has taken off, and so many people who have only recently come of age may think of streaming as the default.  Likewise, with many people primarily using smart phones, managing a collection of music would be even more tedious than usual.  

When I was in college there was no YouTube Music or Spotify, but there was a free-for-all of low quality MP3 file sharing, but I was never really interested in this.  The file names would be inconsistent, the quality and file types would vary greatly, etc.  Cleaning all of this up and organizing it would be a huge mess.   

This was something that most of the people in the dorms who had PowerPC based Macs, and a few people with higher end PCs engaged in.  

I couldn't play MP3 files on the Atari TT I had at the time.  Decoding could be done with mpg123, but it would take roughly 10 minutes for an average song, so I would have to write it out to a WAV first, and then play it.  Even MP3 files were relatively large given the storage technology at the time, and CD quiality WAV files were positively huge.  

1. The MiniDisc Era

Even when I got a Mac to make it easyer for me to do my homework, it was a used 68k based Mac, which also couldn't play mp3 files in real time.

What I did have, though, was an MD player I brought from Japan.  

Since I went back and forth between Japan and the US a bit, I would buy CDs in both places.

It was interesting to me that not only could you rent CDs in Japan, but they would even offer you blank CDRs and MDs to go with your purchase, encouraging you to make a personal copy.  In fact, it is perfecly legal to do so in Japan.  If you think about it, this is somewhat like streaming in that you are paying a fee and getting the music, but it's cheaper than buying the music outright.  You also have less rights.  If you own the original, you could make copies of that.  If you have a backup copy from a rental, you aren't permitted to make copies of that.  MD Players enforce that restriction through technical means, by the way.  This restriction could obviously be bypassed by ripping CDs to your computer, but the basic idea was that you could copy a rental CD for your own use, but not make copies for your 300 closest friends.  

So I would rent CDs, and if I really liked a CD I would buy it.  Older CDs could sometimes be purchased used for cheaper than the rental cost!  

In the US, on the other hand, for some reason I could rent DVDs but not CDs, so I bought anything I wanted.  It is true that sometimes I would listened to a bootleg MP3 on my roomate's computer to see if something was worth buying.  If it was, I could go pick up the CD at the Tower records near Broad Street in Philadelphia.  

2. The Linux PC Era

I eventually got a PC running Linux, and started ripping all of the CDs I had purchased over the years to my desktop using a program called Sound Juicer.

There were some things that I only had on MD, which meant I could only listen to them on my MD player, which was mildly annoying.

Eventually I got a newer "NetMD" unit, which could be accessed from the computer, but came with horrendous Windows only "Sonic Stage" software.  Sony makes great cameras, audio equipment, and phones, but their software is just aweful.

At least it came with some credits for free songs, right?  Sure, so I set up a VM, used up the codes, and even bought some music as well - only to have Sony close the store later.  Closing their store meant that you would never be able to move your music to another PC, as it was DRM protected.  Amusingly, their suggested work-around was to butn the music to a CD.  

Not really a bad idea, and once you burned one CD, you would copy that in infinite numbe of times.  There would also be no quality loss above and beyond the MD compression, unless you wanted to re-compress into MP3 or such.  

Still, Sony unilaterally closing down their store tought me a valuable lesson - don't trust your corporate overloads.  I could have guessed as much.  Anything tethered to the internet can disappear at any time, and eventually will.  This is why I keep copies of drivers, manuals, etc.  

When I was ripping all of my CDs, I faces a dilemma.  

MP3 was the most common standard, guaranteed to work with almost anything, but also the suckiest standard.  Apple was using the newer AAC format, which resulted in smaller files and/or better quality audio.  The open source world had produced OGG files, which would out of the box with Linux, and had an even better quality to size ratio than AAC, but didn't work out of the box on any other platform.  If you ripped to one format and wanted to convert to another format later, you would lose quality.  The way around this dilemma would have been to use a lossless compression called FLAC.  

Although hard drive sizes had increased over the years, FLAC files were still pretty huge.  There still weren't multi-terabyte drives available on the consumer market yet, let alone at a reasonable price.  A typical size for a hard disk would have been around 80 GB.  To put that in perspective, both the self titled blink-182 album and Utada Hikaru's "First Love" album came in at around 390MB when compressed with FLAC, while some larger albums took up around 510MB.  

You might say "But if you have 80GB, you can fit around 140 albums of 500MB, or even more of the 390MB variety!" - sure, but that is assuming you wanted to use up your entire drive for music.  

I ended up compromising and using FLAC for my very favorite albums, and OGG for everything else.  

3. The Mac Era

Once the old buggy, crashy classic Mac OS started to be supplanted by the Unix based OS X, I started to get interested.  "If only", I told myself, "They would come out with an ultra slim laptop!"  I wanted something that was similar to my Sharp Actius MM20, but running OS X.  A few years later, they did, and I bought it.  It was a huge investment for me at the time, but I told myself I would baby it and make it last through until I finished graduate school.  Sadly, it broke in two different ways before then! (one of which Apple fixed for free).  

Although I can't fathom why any Mac users bother with Mail or Safari, I started using iTunes right away.  One of the major issues I had with it, though, was that it coudln't play OGG files! (It couldn't play FLAC files either, if I remember correctly).  

I re-ripped all my CDs again, and then I continues to buy and rip CDs, and also music from the iTune store (which, luckliy was not DRM "protected"), and Amazon music.  

I also started listening to music on YouTube if all I wanted was background music.  

At some point, Apple started offering Apple lossless (a.k.a. ALAC) files as well, but I didno't notice at the time.  

3. The New Linux Era

I subscribed to YouTube premium, mainly because I hate advertizements, but a happy side effect of this was YouTube music - so I also technically have a streaming subscription.  

Having moved houses multiple times, and sold the Mac Mini I was using as a media center, the old hard drives I had full of music were sitting idle for a few years.  The most important music had been copied onto my NAS, which allows me to play music through a web app.  

Changing to new Mac, I discovered that all of the metadata I had painstakingly fixed on my MacMini had been a waste of time, because it only exists in the iTunes database, and so viewing the files on other machines did not show the album art, etc.  (I suppose I could have copied the iTunes library over...)

Moreover I was starting to get fed up with Apple, over the quality control of their machines, and the lack of upgradibility/expandibility.

I have had numerous machines break (the mostherboard and HDD on my original macbook air, the memory on the 2nd gen macbook air, the screen on an 11 inch macbook air, and finally the motherboard on my 2019 MacBook Pro had to be replaced due to bad RAM).  Each generation is even less modular than the last, to the point that you can no longer swap RAM or storage even on a "Pro" machine.  If you want to upgrade your machine every fre years, then you can forget about swapping in some parts from your old machine either.  

So, when a machine that I had spend an enormous amount of money on died just 2 years later with no recourse except to pay over $700 to swap out the motherboard, I bit the bullet and got it repaired - but then I sold it as quickly as possible.  I bought myself a new laptop and NUC, both of which run Linux.  

I have gone through the old hard disks and imported most of the music, but now I have started to lament the fact that much of it is in AAC and OGG when even with SSD being more expensive I could easily hold everything in FLAC these days.  

I also remembered fondly how good the sound on the old MD players was, lamented how even the best phones just don't sound that good.  I did some research and picked up a Walkman, which is not the old casette tape kind, but basically an Android verion of the iPod Touch with much improved Audio hardware.  This sounds fantastic with a decent pair of earphones, but unfortunately it also makes the deficiencies of lowe bitrate AAC and MP3 files apparent to me, so here I go re-ripping some CDs again.  

This time if I want something new I haven't got, I might buy the CD used from the likes of Merucai, rent it from Tsutaya, or buy the digital version from Mora, who also sell FLACs.  

The tools I am using now on linux include:

1. Asunder - to rip CDs to FLAC

2. EasyTAG - to tag FLAC files

3. Ciano - To convert to other formats like OGG or AAC if necessary (or to convert from ALAC files purchased on iTunes to FLAC)

4. ResilioSync - to keep my files synched between my PC, NAS, Laptop, and Walkman

Interestingly enough, I payed a visit to Tsutaya recently.  They no longer offer blank Minidiscs for rental.  No, they now offer a CD Ripping appliance instead!  The idea is that if you don't have a PC, you can use this appliance to tip directly to your phone or an SD Card.  You just put a MicroSD card in and press the "Rip" button.  It will rip and tag the music, and save it on the SD card.  Or, you use the app, which will rip and tag the music and save it on your device.  

Renting is still more expensive than streaming for many people, but you can be sure that songs won't disappear out of your catalog either, and the sound quality is better than most streaming services.  (As I said, I don't mind Youtube Music for background music, and I also use it with my Aftershox for cycling, but it actually sound super compressed to me if I concentrate on the music with decent earphones).  

There are some CDs I had in storage that I thought "Ah.. I'll just rent those rather than trying to find them", and I couldn't find either for rent. I was able to find one for download, but i could just buy a used CD for less.  The second one I couldn't find for download either.  I could only find the CD for around $60 - and that was overseas, so I would have had to pay for international shipping too.  So, I had go dig this stuff out of storage to rip again.  

For those of you who just listedn to everything on streaming, or download random stuff and delete it, bear this in mind:

Sony's old music store already shut down without unlocking the DRM, Apple and Amazon let you download previous purchases now, but this was not always the case, and may not always be the case.  Google's Play Music also shut down, along with access to anything you had uploaded.  We have seen series disappear from streaming services like Hulu all the time, I am sure it will happen to audio services as well.  

If you want to make sure you can have your music in high quality and have access to them at any time in the future, I would still recommend ripping or downloadinf FLAC files, and then keeping them somewhere safe with a backup.  These days you can buy a 256GB USB Drive or MicroSD card cheap, so it's not hard at all to have a copy of the data on your phone or music player and another copy in your desk drawer.   

Streaming services like Youtube Music are also great to discover music you like before investing in a CD or purchased download.