Basic External Hard Drive Library Questions

[mrehorst]

When you rip those files to flac or mp3 (for the car, maybe), use MP3tag to fix the tags that the ripping software pulls from the internet. There will be case errors, spelling errors, date errors, genre errors, formatting errors. Be sure to use the track numbering wizard and use leading zeroes so that tracks will play in proper order.
Use foobar2000 to add replaygain tags, or if using mp3, to adjust the files' levels according to the replaygain tags.

 

[0b11011001]

I rip to aiff. I use my iPhone as the player that is connected to the head unit in the car. I am also not concerned about disk space, and not interested in compression, of any sort.

I also embed cover art and metadata to the aiff files.

 

[GlamrLama]

There are various types of compression some are lossless some are not. MP3 is a lossy compression technique. FLAC is a lossless compression technique. FLAC does compress the original file to save space on your storage device but upon opening it recreates the original (uncompressed) file.

 

[0b11011001]

There are various types of compression some are lossless some are not. MP3 is a lossy compression technique. FLAC is a lossless compression technique. FLAC does compress the original file to save space on your storage device but upon opening it recreates the original (uncompressed) file.

Yes, there is lossless compression. I just don’t feel the need for it at home. Solid state drives are cheap.

 

[Gigantic]

Yes, there is lossless compression. I just don’t feel the need for it at home. Solid state drives are cheap.

I take it you haven't shopped for them lately. The AI fad every tech bro is pursuing has at least tripled the price of ssd storage and media. They aren't cheap anymore.

 

[0b11011001]

Yes, there is lossless compression. I just don’t feel the need for it at home. Solid state drives are cheap.

I take it you haven't shopped for them lately. The AI fad every tech bro is pursuing has at least tripled the price of ssd storage and media. They aren't cheap anymore.

Yes, I have. 2TB NVMe device for $260 sounds cheap to me. I remember paying that in 80s money for a 40MB drive.

So no, compression not needed in 21st century, for home use. I have even streamed my large aiff files to my phone while I am in the car. So they are not really needed in mobile either.

 

[Ylizzy]

Keeping things simple, I stick to FLAC for ripping and exFAT for the drive so everything plays nice across devices. On the storage side, I’ve had to prep a few external drives after they got glitchy, and using https://hddformat.com made wiping and reformatting them quick and painless before loading my music back on. Having a clean, healthy drive matters more than people think, especially for a growing library.

 

[DeadTrader]

I've been a long time collector of unreleased live concerts. By the late 90's I had well over 1000 cassettes. Got my first CD burner in in 97 for $350, I was now committed to the digital age. At that time good blank CD's were $2/each, but it was the cheapest storage. In the 2000's ide hard drives were getting larger, and if finally became cheaper to use hard drives for storage. During these early days I used .shn (a lossless file format that with some proprietary issues) for storage this is before flac came along. By the late 2000's I had 15 hd's of flac files all in hot swap cases with 3 desktops in my music office. I had 2 hd's that crashed, I lost the files from one forever the other I still had the shn discs on spindles. This directed me to make backups. The 1st NAS was a WD with two bays & 4TB drives. But if I wanted to listen to any of the files on my main system I still had to burn it to a cd. Then in 2012 I got my first network player, a Pioneer 30n which had all sorts of glitches but now I could play files from my NAS on the main system. Upgraded to the 50n when it came out, less glitches but still not a great player. In 2016 I got a Marantz ND8006 network player (the term streamer hadn't been invented yet). At this time I got my current NAS an Asustor AS5202T. It has a pair of enterprise grade 16TB drives, I have over 8TB's of music on it now. Raid 1 full mirror, and I have a friend who loved my collection, so I convinced him to get a NAS, and copied the collection to his NAS, I update his drive twice a yr. So I now have an offsite backup also.

On the server I have an app called MiniDLNA, it takes care of streaming on my local network for 3 systems (http). I also have Bubble UPnP server installed, it's for www (https) streaming. I leave it off unless I'm traveling.

The biggest problem I had was tagging. Since the vast majority of my collection is live music, and there is no database that stores this info. That's when I found Foobar2000, it is the tagging king. Someone mentioned that they didn't want to take on the task of converting a large amount of ALAC files to FLAC, with Foobar you can load a directory and tell it to convert and just walk away. Older versions of Foobar had a module called "Live Show Tagger", with this and a properly organised txt file it will pull the info from the txt file and fill in all the metadata. Took over 3 yrs to tag everthing I already had on the server. Now it doesn't go on the server until it is properly tagged.

My piece of advice to anyone starting to build a hard drive collection is to think about creating a good folder structure and folder naming scheme.
This is what I use, but you can do it any way you want just keep consistant. Once you get to over 10,000 entries you'll understand how important this is.

artist - Album title.source
ec - 461 Ocean Boulevard.cd (I have abbv for downloads from HDtracks, Qbuze, etc)
If you want the albums listed by release date not alvabetical
ec.1974 - 461 Ocean Boulevard.cd
Live shows: artist_date_source_location_additional info if wanted
ec1975-08-14.akg.Forum Inglewood CA(Millard Master JEMS) (akg is the mic brand)
ec1999-11-24.sbd_ex.Kanagawa Yokohama Arena, Yokohama, Japan (on many entries I'll include the sound quality after the source)

 

[0b11011001]

I've been a long time collector of unreleased live concerts. By the late 90's I had well over 1000 cassettes. Got my first CD burner in in 97 for $350, I was now committed to the digital age. At that time good blank CD's were $2/each, but it was the cheapest storage. In the 2000's ide hard drives were getting larger, and if finally became cheaper to use hard drives for storage. During these early days I used .shn (a lossless file format that with some proprietary issues) for storage this is before flac came along. By the late 2000's I had 15 hd's of flac files all in hot swap cases with 3 desktops in my music office. I had 2 hd's that crashed, I lost the files from one forever the other I still had the shn discs on spindles. This directed me to make backups. The 1st NAS was a WD with two bays & 4TB drives. But if I wanted to listen to any of the files on my main system I still had to burn it to a cd. Then in 2012 I got my first network player, a Pioneer 30n which had all sorts of glitches but now I could play files from my NAS on the main system. Upgraded to the 50n when it came out, less glitches but still not a great player. In 2016 I got a Marantz ND8006 network player (the term streamer hadn't been invented yet). At this time I got my current NAS an Asustor AS5202T. It has a pair of enterprise grade 16TB drives, I have over 8TB's of music on it now. Raid 1 full mirror, and I have a friend who loved my collection, so I convinced him to get a NAS, and copied the collection to his NAS, I update his drive twice a yr. So I now have an offsite backup also.

On the server I have an app called MiniDLNA, it takes care of streaming on my local network for 3 systems (http). I also have Bubble UPnP server installed, it's for www (https) streaming. I leave it off unless I'm traveling.

The biggest problem I had was tagging. Since the vast majority of my collection is live music, and there is no database that stores this info. That's when I found Foobar2000, it is the tagging king. Someone mentioned that they didn't want to take on the task of converting a large amount of ALAC files to FLAC, with Foobar you can load a directory and tell it to convert and just walk away. Older versions of Foobar had a module called "Live Show Tagger", with this and a properly organised txt file it will pull the info from the txt file and fill in all the metadata. Took over 3 yrs to tag everthing I already had on the server. Now it doesn't go on the server until it is properly tagged.

My piece of advice to anyone starting to build a hard drive collection is to think about creating a good folder structure and folder naming scheme.
This is what I use, but you can do it any way you want just keep consistant. Once you get to over 10,000 entries you'll understand how important this is.

I don’t worry about a directory structure. I just rip a CD to aiff. The scripts gets the track names, album art, album title and artist info and tags each file.

The music server scans the hard drives, NAS storage, et al and builds a DB. It presents your music by artist, album title, genre.

 

[Haverholm]

The receiving end that feeds my main system - the WiimPro and DAC (displays bit rate) that feed an Acurus preamp, Acurus power amp,
and whatever speakers are connected at the time

That blue box alone is a massive systems upgrade!

 

[linuxfan]

I don’t worry about a directory structure. I just rip a CD to aiff. The scripts gets the track names, album art, album title and artist info and tags each file.
The music server scans the hard drives, NAS storage, et al and builds a DB. It presents your music by artist, album title, genre.

Yes, a directory structure is not needed for a music library to be machine-readable ...
but a directory structure is extremely useful for it to be human-readable, while managing said library.

 

[Tromatic]

Yes, a directory structure is not needed for a music library to be machine-readable ...
but a directory structure is extremely useful for it to be human-readable, while managing said library.

I don't know why you wouldn't want a clean directory structure. iTunes libraries must be a titanic mess.

 

[0b11011001]

I don't know why you wouldn't want a clean directory structure. iTunes libraries must be a titanic mess.

I don’t know about iTunes directory structure, but all my albums are in their own directory, in alpha order. This is done automatically.

Also the music server DB backup file provides the directory information.

 

[justin_r_23]

I don't know why you wouldn't want a clean directory structure. iTunes libraries must be a titanic mess.

If you set iTunes/Apple Music to automatically organize your files, it actually does a good job of setting up a directory structure that is sensible for basic use - Artist / Album / Song files, if the tagging is up to snuff.

On my Windows machine, I use iTunes for ripping to ALAC, foobar2000 for ReplayGain and Dynamic Range tagging (because I find it interesting). I've been playing with Roon and it just uses available files and creates its own local metadata cache so it won't mess with your files at all. Audirvana functionally acts the same.

foobar2000 is a fantastically flexible software package, and you can install plugins that can run a DLNA server and remote control foobar2000 on a main computer from a phone or another computer.

While ALAC is "proprietary" in that Apple created it, it is open source and royalty free (Apple Lossless Audio Codec - Wikipedia) and can be read by foobar2000 and Roon natively and you can convert from ALAC to FLAC in foobar2000 (for example). Player *device* support will be up to the device manufacturer

 

[Gigantic]

I don't know why you wouldn't want a clean directory structure. iTunes libraries must be a titanic mess.

I've used iTunes for 25 years now. its library, folder and file structure is pretty standard, alpha by artist/album/numbered song title, with metadata provided by Gracenote. I don't know that it gets any cleaner than that. Certainly, it's much more navigable than anything I've encountered on the windows side.

 

[DeadTrader]

foobar2000 is a fantastically flexible software package, and you can install plugins that can run a DLNA server and remote control foobar2000 on a main computer from a phone or another computer.

Foobar is the player on my desktop, and has you mentioned it does so much more than a basic player. I like it's library and the way you can change it's layout to suit my personal needs. Right now I have it pointed at multiple folders on the desktop, the 5TB portable drive, and the 32TB NAS. And it all shows up in the library view.
Screenshot of my player, you can change the layout to include cover art, spectral analyzer, and much more. my setup is very utilitarian.