No Discussions on Ripping/Managing Music Collections?

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I don't see much discussion on CD ripping, and digital music serving and managing. Is it just because it's not directly hardware related, or is there an unwritten rule because it's in a bit of a legal grey area that we don't go there? Or am I really bad at using the search function?

I'd be glad to share my tips and trick and also would love to hear from others on the topic. I just got a Naim Uniti Atom and it's changing my streaming ecosystem a bit.

Sheldon
 
Ummm,

Depending on jurisdiction the legal aspect matters. We seem to be heading into subscription based net/cloud delivered media.

No doubt there is a market for higher (much higher) quality recordings. But the mass market is reducing audio to on-demand and through minimal footprint. The bit where the wife gets the BOSE out of the handbag to sit on the coffee table whilst browsing spotify etc. You may make sensible requests for tracks. :)

Jeez that last bit is too depressing.

J.
 
Hydrogenaudio I believe is the community dedicated to this things. I've dedicated the last two years cleaning, tagging and organizing my music collection. Believe me there are times You go nuts and don't know what to do and how to do it. I use Mediamonkey, Mp3tag and Foobar and associated scripts for it. Bulkrename utility is also very handy. Mediamonkey as main database. Tagging Inconsistencies script is awesome and a must. (Ex Patti, Patty, Cindy, Cindi, Cyndi etc ) Mp3tag because it displays all possible tags including that track/total tracks that Mediamonkey only sees up to the slash, and does tag - Filename. I use it for mainly those Trackxx titled based albums. Foobar because it removes those perky iTunes comments and some stupid track gain tags by means of the rebuild mp3 stream function and Fix Mp3 header. By the way, Ape tags don't fit in my collection, specially with mp3 file types. For tag sources I use Amazon, Discogs, Rateyourmusic and sometimes Digital download sites like Spotify, iTunes etc. It is Nightmare formatting to Tag-ready import text files. I have thousands CDs, Ripped Vinyls and also some downloaded pirated music, mainly old things and a 8TB NAS ready to store it. When You are DJ or entertainer, You have to have !! and You have to buy music every week. You have Your collection organized at home by Artist-Album-Track, but in order to perform You have to choose tracks and organize it by Genre-Artist-Title on You lappy or pendrive with no track numbers preferably...

Have fun !!
 
Yeah, I tried searching and get very little. I thought I was using good keywords, but apparently I failed.

I'm going to describe my needs in hopes that someone may find it useful.

For the last 15 years or so, I've had all my music in iTunes (on the mac which doesn't suck as much as it does on the PC). I stream to airport expresses, and use the digital output on them to go to DACs of my own making (tube DAC or my newer ones). I have two laptops and to desktops and a mac mini as a server (mainly for stealing british TV). All my computers have SSDs so there isn't a huge amount of storage (1Tb). My music library is about 26000 tracks and in apple lossless format is about 600gig. That's a big bite out of my SSD's so my desktop machines have a 320K MP3 version of my music. That's great for loading on my phone or casual listening. For serious listening, I use the apple remote app to access the server iTunes app and airplay to whatever system I want to play to in the house or garage.

Two things changed recently, first Apple's neglect of the airport express turned into complete abandonment. Secondly, I bought a Naim Uniti Atom for my main system (driving a pair of Quad 2912's).

Before I bought the Naim, I had been (and am still) playing with the various Raspberry Pi solutions to replace the airport expresses. I realize that the expresses aren't useless yet, but with Apple abandoning me, I'm going to abandon them back. The raspberry pi and software like Moode or Volumio, or just shareport on the vanilla raspian install can replace the airport express nicely for my needs. I was considering boxing up a Pi and calling it good, but the Naim kept calling to me with it's seductive sexy volume knob and promise of a simple one box solution to all my needs.

To confound these changes, I was given a bunch of hi-res music, and about 3000 lps digitized on a top notch system at 192k/24, and another 20000 tracks of good music. So now the airport expresses won't do justice to the higher bitrate music. Currently I've got a big hard drive attached to the Naim for the high res stuff, but I'm toying with a QNAP nas or something similar.

So I've got two different ecosystems, one is iTunes based, which is better for browsing, and the Naim app which lets me access the high-res music bu the user interface isn't nearly as nice as iTunes (I can't believe I said that).

I'd love to tidy everything up and bring all this music under one common umbrella.
 
I long ago ripped all of my digital music to a Netgear NAS (initially a Stora then a ReadyNAS when Stora fell off support) using jRiver Media Center. Since my habit is listening to albums rather than playlists I have put no effort into tagging and curating and it works just fine for me. The player is a Logitech Squeezebox Touch which some time ago went out of production but is still supported and working fine. LPs are still dealt with the old fashioned way...hold by edges, place carefully, clean, clean stylus, align, uncue, listen 20 minutes, rinse, repeat. Don't really much bother with LPs any more.
 
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I find tagging and organizing the biggest chore, as MAACO explains. I do Genre/Artist/Album except when there are multiple artists, then it gets confusing. Classical can be difficult. Sometimes you want to search composer, or conductor, orchestra, artist.
JRiver is my player for the past 10 years because of its robust library management.

It would be nice to see some good discussion of vinyl "ripping". If Bill finds that thread, maybe he can link to it.
 
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