Mp3s last forever

I've been ripping and downloading music for 10+ years now. I have 200+ gigs. I keep a "work" folder for tracks that don't have proper ID3 tags or album art ect.. After I fix them I move them to a "burn" folder. Once that folder reaches 4.5 gigs, I burn it to DVD for backup and move the Mp3s to my library. I was interested in buying a blu-ray burner, but external hard drives are cheaper than blank blu-rays. I'm thinking of buying another external just for backup. How do you backup your music?

  On 12/1/2010 at 2:34 AM, MadnessR said:

I've been ripping and downloading music for 10+ years now. I have 200+ gigs. I keep a "work" folder for tracks that don't have proper ID3 tags or album art ect.. After I fix them I move them to a "burn" folder. Once that folder reaches 4.5 gigs, I burn it to DVD for backup and move the Mp3s to my library. I was interested in buying a blu-ray burner, but external hard drives are cheaper than blank blu-rays. I'm thinking of buying another external just for backup. How do you backup your music?

2tb external, mirrored on dvd-rs

And how much time do you spend renaming, id3s and artwork? (mp3tag has saved me ALOT of time)

  On 12/1/2010 at 2:40 AM, MadnessR said:

And how much time do you spend renaming, id3s and artwork? (mp3tag has saved me ALOT of time)

0... all my mp3s come correct because they're from wat

I have a certain format for my filenames because I refuse to use itunes. If you collect music the way I do, you have to have a system.

  On 12/1/2010 at 3:13 AM, MadnessR said:

I have a certain format for my filenames because I refuse to use itunes. If you collect music the way I do, you have to have a system.

i nicked my system off this guy on slsk, example from my autechre folder:

[ep] 1994 anti ep

...

[lp] 1993 incunabula

...

[single] 1991 cavity job

all my folders are organized that way

for downloaded things i tag and download art with discogs foobar plugin

rename files with this file operation: $if(%tracknumber%,%tracknumber%). %title%

move files with this (and a few more for compilations, splits etc): $left($stripprefix(%artist%),1)\%album artist%\%album%\%filename%

and i don't bother backing up.

dood... just got a what.cd invite today so i'm thinking about getting a bigger hard-drive

it's awesome knowing i can explore music even more deeply now. still though i encourage people to expand themselves and make the right decisions when deciding what to purchase and what to download... you can't pay for everything but if you really feel a connection to an artist's music then you should definitely buy some of it to support them.

  On 12/1/2010 at 3:13 AM, MadnessR said:

I have a certain format for my filenames because I refuse to use itunes. If you collect music the way I do, you have to have a system.

yup. i'm considering setting up a serious system soon, organization by genres and the like, all folders organized and named properly. probably would be an extremely painful process but I think it could pay off. that or it would give me something nice to obsess over for a while.

  On 12/1/2010 at 2:42 AM, tht tne said:

0... all my mp3s come correct because they're from wat

I got something mistagged recently from what. Can't remember what it was though.

I've got the majority of mine on both my computer and my external hard drive... I plan on buying another specifically for backing up my music, as my external is 2 and a half years old and I used to use it a lot. It hasn't shown any signs of giving out, but I'm paranoid.

I use foobar2000 get tags from freedb when I want to tag the tracks of an album.

I spent 2 full days over the Summer, tagging and adding album art to my mp3s, I think I spent about 12-14 hours on it, but then again I only have just over 150gigs of music. Now whenever I get a new LP or whatnot, I tag it instantly, takes a few seconds to find the album art on Discogs or RYM

I backup to my 500gb EHDD, of which I will need to purchase a new one soon. I want to get the Apple Time Capsule to back up my macbook, but I heard those things blow major.

FLACs on numerous hard drives

Speaking of FLACs, are they really that superior to regular mp3s? And is it possible to play them on Itunes or on my ipod?

  On 12/1/2010 at 3:38 PM, halisray said:

Speaking of FLACs, are they really that superior to regular mp3s? And is it possible to play them on Itunes or on my ipod?

First question, yes. Second question, no.

  On 12/1/2010 at 3:38 PM, halisray said:

Speaking of FLACs, are they really that superior to regular mp3s? And is it possible to play them on Itunes or on my ipod?

Nice trolling.

Otherwise, see every other thread in watmm ever. 90% of thread end up in bit rate discussion(and bit depth).

You can play FLACs in iTunes with a plug-in. can't remember what it is and it's kind of a pain.

Backing up on CDs/DVDs is also a bit of a crap shoot, sometimes CDs can last forever, other times not so long.

Just buy a couple of externals and be redundant.

  On 12/1/2010 at 2:42 AM, tht tne said:

  On 12/1/2010 at 2:40 AM, MadnessR said:

And how much time do you spend renaming, id3s and artwork? (mp3tag has saved me ALOT of time)

 

0... all my mp3s come correct because they're from wat

I dl loads of stuff from wat that has terrible tags/filenames

the plugin is called fluke. i just got it yesterday and it works decently. some problems but if you want all your music in itunes it's as good as you'll get im pretty sure

instructions

http://www.simplehelp.net/2008/06/12/how-to-play-flac-files-in-itunes/

program

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/28768/fluke

personally I do like having the FLAC files but 320 sounds good enough if you're listening on less than amazing headphones/speakers. 320 for life

Yeah, I don't think my ears can distinguish between a 320kbps mp3 and a wav. At 256 there are sometimes very slight discrepancies I can notice in the low frequencies, but only if I A/B the files closely (ie. not something that would ever occur to me otherwise). At 196 the quality loss starts to become more apparent.

As for backing up mp3s, I don't do it. The music I really like I buy on CD, or if it's super rare I'll find a decent rip of it and burn it to CDs. I almost never listen to mp3s.

  On 12/1/2010 at 7:21 PM, chassis said:

  On 12/1/2010 at 3:38 PM, halisray said:

Speaking of FLACs, are they really that superior to regular mp3s? And is it possible to play them on Itunes or on my ipod?

 

Nice trolling.

 

Otherwise, see every other thread in watmm ever. 90% of thread end up in bit rate discussion(and bit depth).

at what point can human ears not perceive anything better? can our ability really reach lossless quality frequencies, or do we hit our limit sometime before that? honest question. i remember getting into a similar discussion once about frames per second with video games, and that at one point it makes no difference.

  On 12/1/2010 at 2:34 AM, MadnessR said:

I'm thinking of buying another external just for backup. How do you backup your music?

And you should, external drives are indeed cheaper per GB than Blu-ray disks are. And backing up to Blu-ray or dvd is incredibly cumbersome, which will probably make you postpone it.

I run a daily "rsync -a --delete" to keep a copy of all my important data. There are probably good syncing tools for Windows as well. Once you set them up correctly, you never have to worry about it again. Until you run out of space again that is.

Everything on my laptop.

Then everything also copied to two external backup hard drives - one in my house, and another one at another location.

This is my backup scheme for everything, not just music.

I did not find DVD-Rs to be a reliable backup mechanism so I just use hard drives.

Periodically I have to buy larger backup hard drives but they are not expensive.

I use SyncToy to sync between the laptop and the backup drives. Its ok but there's probably better tools.

i use synctoy, it seems fine.

Since I have the hard drive space I back everything up in FLAC on a 1TB drive, and "check out" everything locally on a different machine. Lossless audio is the only way I feel secure having as a backup since it's actually (or at least very close to) the same audio as the CD.

I convert to 256Kbps MP3 if I want to put something on a media player instead of just throwing everything on there in FLAC, which is to say that I choose not to have a giant library with me everywhere as I find it's really intimidating and hard to actually listen to something you don't usually listen to.