----------------------------------------
Music library cleanup
september 22nd, 2019
----------------------------------------
This weekend I started a little project that has been
on my todo-list for ages: sorting and cleaning up my
digital music collection. Over the years I've ended up
with several copies of my music library on several
machines with various levels of completeness. Some
parts were rips of my CDs in ogg format which I made in
the late 90s and early 2000s. Others were in MP3
format, also ripped from my CD collection, some MP3
files were bought from 7digital.com[1] and a couple of
albums were copied from some of my collegues. I've
always resisted to copy tons of music files from the
internet, especially when Napster & co. where at its
top. Though I seldom play a CD these days (except from
a few in my car), I like having the cover with lyrics
and physical box available.
The metadata of my collection was questionable at best,
mostly without coverart, lyrics, and the song naming
was inconsistent. I've played the the excellent beets
utility [2] before, but never came about to organize my
whole collection. Until this weekend.
I'm still not finished, but so far everything is
looking good, so I guess in a couple of hours (okay, to
be honest, it might be days) I will have a completly
tagged music library on my FreeNAS box. From there, I
can sync the collection to my various devices. One of
my challenges is that many CDs in my collection are
rare Jazz records where music metadata is not always
available, so I might end up contributing some data to
musicbrainz.org.
I still like the OGG format, and luckily my litte MP3
player, a SanDisk Sansa Clip 8GB [3] supports this
filetype, so does the player in my car. I like the
Sansa Clip a lot, especially when going for a walk and
I don't want to carry my phone with me. It's super
lightweight and the battery lifetime if quite
good. More than enough for a weekend of music
listening. I also have an old 1st generation iPod nano,
but unfortunately, it does not play OGG files. I'd like
to write a little script to copy a random selection of
files given a genre to my Sansa Clip, but this has to
wait for another time.
Occationally, I also stream music. After years with
Spotify, I wanted to try something new and a little
while ago I switched to Deezer, which has an excellent
choice of jazz-records. I mostly use Deezer for
discovery of new albums. After a while I usually end up
buying DRM-free digital files from 7digital.com.
I'd like to (re-)jump on the Vinyl bandwagon, but space
in my home is limited and most of my music listening
happens on the road. Besides, I already have enogh
stuff to look after.
[1] https://7digital.com
[1] https://beets.io/
[2] https://www.digitaltrends.com/gadget-reviews/sandisk-sansa-clip-review/
(DIR) Back
______________________________________________________________________________
Gophered by Gophernicus/3.0.1 on FreeBSD/amd64 12.3