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Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

#11

Post by ctb_mg »

I use grooveshark for 'casual' listening. For anything I want to keep and put on the phone or play in the car:

Music is stored on a samba file server on the network as: Music/Artist/Album/file.mp3, or Music/Artist/file.mp3

Played over the network using foobar2000. Most music is mp3 format, I get flac when possible for future purposes. I can't tell the difference between a high bitrate mp3 and flac.

Music is only backed up to a secondary drive, not to any cloud. It's so massive and replaceable that it's not justifiable for me to upload it to a cloud backup.

My workflow for importing music files is not the best and needs improvement. Currently I use foobar2000's feature of moving songs to a specific folder (samba file share) named after the artist/album. But I import music so infrequently I forget how to use it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

#12

Post by lamby »

I have a diverse collection of classical music which doesn't fit either of the usual Artist/Album/Track entity relationships or my OCD, so I ended up writing my own music database.

The feature-set is mostly geared towards accurately storing western classical music circa 1500 to the present day. It also supports albums ("non-classical") too with correct support for multiple CDs.

Whilst it is web-based, it basically spits out XSPF (essentially a "better" M3U playlist) that point to the files themselves.

Source is https://github.com/lamby/musicdb if anyone is interested.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

#13

Post by Zoxo »

andyn wrote: post #6

One day I got a cheap-ish NAS then used beets [1] to organise and copy all the music on my computer to it, listening to it with Banshee[2] over the network. Then I got Spotify and don't bother much with it anymore... [1] http://beets.radbox.org/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banshee_%28media_player%29

I really like this setup, I think I'll go with it. Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

#14

Post by Phogo »

scope wrote: post #10
Phogo wrote: post #9

I use Subsonic, perfect for my needs. http://subsonic.org/

i tried to install (version 4.9) it on my machine (Ubuntu 13.10) and i got 'The package is of bad quality' , is it still maintained?

I believe so, lots of activity on their site.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

#16

Post by stevekemp »

I store my music beneath a common prefix, and try to file it neatly:

    /srv/music/
    /srv/music/$Artist/$album1/
    /srv/music/$Artist/$album2/
That allows me to quickly find things, although it doesn't work well for classical music, and I found that I tend to create subgroups for soundtracks which throws things off too:

     /srv/music/Soundtracks/$film1
     /srv/music/Soundtracks/$film2
For playing I use mpd as a music-server, and sonata to play it back. I also run the logitech media deamon thing to present the music to a squeezebox inside the flat.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

#18

Post by tobylane »

Standardly sensible directory system (External/My Music/Lorde/Pure Heroine [2013]/Team.mp3), correct metadata managed by iTunes, including taking out Deluxe from album names, ripper tags from comments/composers. FLACs are in a separate folder, there's very few of them.

I don't have this accessible by the internet or anything like that, just shared on home wifi, and make up short (~1 day) playlists for my phone, or CDs for older cars.

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