Ask HN: How do you handle your music collection?

10 points by Zoxo 12 years ago | 17 comments

Recently, I've been listening to more music, going to more concerts, and building up a music collection. How do you all organize/store/listen your music? I can't hear the difference between audio files above 256kbps, how do you guys with similar ears store your music? Do you listen using iTunes, cmus, or something in between? How do you manage album art (if any)?

J_Darnley 12 years ago |

Album art is an image file which goes in the folder for the album. Then I sort my files into Genre\Album folder structure. I play it with Winamp. I also put it all in Winamp's Music Library.

I store my music as flac files when available. I don't claim to be able to hear the difference between that and a good quality mp3 file. It is mostly to give me options in the future.

ctb_mg 12 years ago |

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.

ScottWhigham 12 years ago |

I'm an album person, not a singles person, so I manage things by folder: Genre\Artist\Album. I then tag appropriately. To play an album, I just browse to the folder and play the folder. I keep a folder called "New Music" that I put all incoming/new albums in (so that it is New Music\Artist\Album) - about once a quarter or so, I'll move things out of that folder into the appropriate Genre folder. I'd hate it to be more complex than this.

I don't need my music to be "instantly available on all devices" - I have probably 2,500 albums that I've bought/digitized through the years. I can't listen to that much - I like listening to 1-5 albums per week on rotation/repeat.

stevekemp 12 years ago |

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.

lamby 12 years ago |

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.

andyn 12 years ago |

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

Zoxo 12 years ago | |

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

tobylane 12 years ago |

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.

attilagyongyosi 12 years ago |

The good, old-fashioned way: I store my music on my hard drive (lots of gigs), and using MusicBee for playback and management. Awesome audio player! I am a huge music enthusiast and if a release doesn't come with album art, I download the picture from the net and put it in the metadata.

ragatskynet 12 years ago |

Mainly I use spotify. Music I have bought are sorted by genre/year/[month/]album. This works for electronic music singles/EPs well. E.g.

music/drumandbass/2014/03/missing_persons_ep

bgar 12 years ago |

Stored locally, because I don't feel comfortable trusting a streaming site with my music collection. I use doubletwist to sync it to my Nexus 5 and listen using the Shuttle+ app.

Phogo 12 years ago |

I use Subsonic, perfect for my needs.

http://subsonic.org/

scope 12 years ago | |

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?

Phogo 12 years ago | | |

I believe so, lots of activity on their site.

ycaspirant 12 years ago |

I use iTunes Match so that my music collection is available on all my devices without taking up any disk space.

scope 12 years ago |

i use rhythmbox; neat, easy to use and familiar [since it's inspired by Apple iTunes]

quality: if you want to take your music to the next level, i recommend getting a good set of headphones AND using flac format instead of mp3

sigvef 12 years ago |

I exclusively stream music on demand from the Internet these days, primarily from Spotify.