I've more or less been managing music libraries of various sorts since I was like 10 years old. I'm kind of reflecting on the various iterations of this, as technology has changed over the years, since I'm in the midst of a bit of a sea-change at the moment.

Prehistory

So back before I even really listened to music at all, a weird thing I would do for fun was sort my dad's CD collection. I don't know what made me want to do this¹, but I do remember taking them all down from the shelf and setting them in various piles on the living room floor. Going through each one, re-shelving it. Looking back, there was probably four or five hundred or so, all told. It was kind of like assembling a big brick wall out of Lego or something.

I liked looking at the album art, taking the little booklets out and skimming through them. I remember being scandalized by some of the art, like the Blind Faith cover, or Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy². I wasn't a huge listener of music, except by osmosis from whatever my parents listened to at home or in the car, and sometimes I got excited when I recognized that that song was from this band on this album. Neat!

I think I would ask my dad questions, and so this is where I learned very important sorting rules³. Individuals are sorted by last name ("Eric Clapton" goes under C, for "Clapton"). Ignore the The if there is one before the band name. Etc. I don't think I was drilling down so far as to sort a given artist's albums by release order (which is correct and proper). I was 10, give me a break.

At least twice that I recall, I took everything back down off of the shelf and shuffled them around on the floor so that I could do it again. It was weird.

My Own Shelf

Somewhere in junior high school, I started listening to music seriously. The story there is probably a blog post in itself. But for now, the point is that I still remember the first CD I ever "owned": Superunknown by Soundgarden. My dad was signing up for one of those Columbia House record club dealies where you would get thirty CDs for a penny or whatever. He let me pick a handful⁴.

Dad would occasionally get me more CDs via mail order, but also I started saving my allowance money and would go buy CDs myself from the store. There was a MusicWorld in a mall within walking distance of my junior high school, I would go down sometimes during my lunch break and shop⁵. I still vaguely remember the woman that worked there most days; after the location shut down many years later when I was in university I remember bumping into her at a location in a different mall. I remember asking her why new albums came out on Tuesdays. She told me that the boxes were delivered from the distribution centre on Mondays, when people would actually be working. So at the end of the day on Monday after closing up, they would unbox everything and put the new stuff on the shelf for sale on Tuesday. Made sense.

At first, my dad reserved a little chunk of his CD shelf for my stuff. I didn't mix it in with his, but they were definitely sorted. Eventually for a Christmas gift I got my own little shelf for my bedroom. It was a vertically standing one, with individual slots for each CD, with the discs oriented horizontally. Later I got a little shorter one that was like a rotating cube. I had to learn how to compromise when I bought Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by Smashing Pumpkins; since it was a double-disc release⁶ it wouldn't fit in the individualized trays. Eventually my parents got some new shelving for the living room; I inherited dad's old shelf and moved it upstairs to my room. It just had free rails without individual disc slots: a much superior solution.

Nowadays, new music usually comes out on Fridays, not Tuesdays. I don't know why, probably something to do with algorithms. I find this kind of sad.

The Queue

Somewhere around the start of high school, I got my own personal computer. I think it was a hand-me-down from dad when he got a new one. It was a Pentium, remember those? It had a CD drive.

I remember Quake had a soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails. If you had the CD in the tray, it would play various tracks based on the map. But the trick was, you could just put any old CD in there and it would work. If E2M3 played track 7⁷, and you had Load by Metallica⁸ in the tray, it would just loop Bleeding Me while you played.

It was around here that I first developed The System, which is how I ingest my music. The PC was a tower sitting on the floor beside my desk. I would have a stack of a dozen or so CDs on the tower, consisting of my most recently purchased albums. I would listen to the one on top while I worked on homework or browsed the "world wide web" or, yes, played Quake. When the disc finished, I would put it on the bottom of the pile and play the one on top.

When I bought a new CD, it would go onto the pile. The oldest one would be taken off of the pile, and go onto the shelves in my room. So by the time a CD left the queue, I had probably listened to it several dozen times. I would know it inside and out, not just the singles⁹.

I would listen to old stuff on my discman in my bed, usually while I read. Back then, my collection was still small enough that I could more or less get through it all within a reasonable amount of time. This isn't really true anymore. There's definitely old stuff I haven't listened to cover-to-cover in years, sadly.

MP3s get invented sometime here, as does Napster. I mostly used Napster to hunt down B-sides and bootleg recordings, etc. Sometimes to discover new stuff, but since I had my System going I never really just downloaded whole albums to listen to. That didn't stop me from making Metallica dead to me when they led the lawsuit that killed Napster though. Still have never spent a dime on them (on used or new albums) ever since.

The Digital Age

It's university, and I become an Apple guy for a handful of years. I had an iBook (MacBook? I can't remember the branding.) I bought an iPod (Video).

Then I spent a few weeks spending my evenings methodically ripping each CD I owned. Now I could bring my music collection to school, to work, on the road. I basically replicated my "pile of CDs" virtually with a manually curated playlist of my new purchases.

The new wrinkle I introduced was using the "rating" metadata. In the metadata tags there was like a star rating, zero to five stars¹⁰. I'm not out here reviewing every individual track. But what I start to do is this: After an album is bumped from the queue, I start marking my favourite tracks with a 5-star rating. Then I make a "smart playlist" that is all of the 5-star songs in my entire library. This sort of becomes my driving, party, etc. playlists, when I just wanna hear the bangers.

Death to Apple

So obviously I'm a big iTunes user for all of this, and it's iTunes that eventually makes me fed up with Apple. By now I've moved to Ottawa, and I'm on my third WhateverBook. And literally every time iTunes gets an update, it takes away features I was using. I can't even remember what they all were, but I remember every single time they pushed out a patch I felt like the software got worse.

The big one, of course, is when one day I open iTunes and every single song in my library gets a big blue arrow button that takes me to the iTunes Store where I can buy the song that I physically ripped from my own purchased CD.

Also, my iPod is getting full and Apple stops making physical disk based devices. Everything is SSD now, but back then that meant taking a very significant hit to storage.

So I went out and bought a Cowon X7, a device that unfortunately broke down on me eventually. But I loved that little guy, and it lasted a good long decade or more. And I set about migrating. Holy shit, was this ever a pain.

It turns out that the iPod had some cryptic file structure with obfuscated file names and an internal database to track it or something. Plus everything was compressed with their AAC format. And all of this was in an earlier era: there was a lot of open source software out there but not nearly as rich and mature an ecosystem as today for this sort of thing. This is what pushed me over the edge and made me swear off Apple devices.

I spent weeks fighting with scripts to extract my music off of the iPod, convert to more open codecs (I'm not sure FLAC was a common thing yet?), re-organize my file structures, etc. I try a few different iTunes replacements. I eventually settled on MediaMonkey. For Windows users, I will vouch for it. It's always got some glitchy bits here and there, and it can be a bit finnicky and temperamental, and I could never get DLNA working reliably. But it did everything I needed it to do for many years. I bought the lifetime license probably 15 years ago now or something, and it was well worth it.

Now I'm still buying physical media, but in this era it's mainly to collect cards. I mainly get three formats: CDs, which I would rip myself using MediaMonkey, which would also scrape metadata and artwork from various sources (to varying degrees of success over the years, but pretty solid by now.) Vinyl, which usually came with download codes for MP3s (bleh), FLAC (heck yeah), or even sometimes WAV files (into it). Also I do a fair amount on Bandcamp.

Moving On

When I first moved to Ottawa, I brought my shelving with me but never really maintained it. My collection mostly remained in boxes in my basement, and when I bought new stuff I would just add it to the piles of clutter down there. We eventually moved into a much nicer home here, and one of the first things I did was get some proper shelves from the good people at IKEA.

By this time I'm a professional adult. My queue of new music is now of varying length, targeting just enough music that I can get through it all in roughly one week's worth of work, depending on how much headphones time I get in that week.

My digital collection was kind of a mess though, between stuff ripped to highly compressed MP3 dating back twenty years, OGG Vorbis, re-compressed junk, all sorts of garbage. And I needed to unpack all my now unsorted boxes of CDs and make use of my fancy new shelves. So I spent almost a year re-digitizing my collection of CDs. Vinyl/downloads were OK as-is since they usually came from official sources.

Whenever I was just reading something on my PC or watching something or playing something relatively passive, I'd grab a small stack of CDs from the shelf and go to town. Pop it in the drive. Go to MediaMonkey, look up the metadata. Rip the disc to lossless FLAC. Then, get this, I would have to manually go update my little "star ratings" from the old version of the tracks. Also, sometimes the rips would fail due to disc rot, so sometimes I didn't want to erase my originals. Finally put the disc up on the shelf, ordered by artist, then by release order, which as I mentioned above is good and proper¹¹. I experience a slight psychic pain that the CDs must remain segregated from the vinyl, because even I'm not that crazy.

This was more or less a minor hobby of mine for probably almost a year. Good way to kill time alt-tabbed when someone was taking too long to make their move in my online Gloomhaven campaign. It reminded me of my youth, taking down the sorted shelves and re-shelving everything one at a time. Again, I enjoyed skimming through the art, reminiscing over whatever era of my life each given disc reminded me of.

I've expanded my smart list system. I pick out songs I like more than most as four stars, and have a playlist with everything over four stars. This is my broadest background shuffle playlist. I pick out the songs I really love as five stars, and have a corresponding playlist. This is what gets sync'd to my phone. Then I pick out a subset of those five-starred items as "favourites" - this is the playlist you'd probably hear on shuffle if you were a guest at my house. That way I can filter out some of the weirdo shit.

The New Era

MediaMonkey is fine, but it's an old fashioned app for an old-fashioned world. Vinyl doesn't come with download codes anymore. I guess there's good reason for it, but I hate it all the same. So when I get vinyl now, it's a pirate's life for me. But now I'm like those rubes that believed those old emulator websites that said that you were only allowed to download a ROM if you owned the original cartridge or something.

My Cowon died and I switched to just copying stuff onto my phone. I did also use Spotify for discovering stuff or listening to something on the go without having to cache it on my phone. But as part of my un-webbing¹² I've been standing up a server to self-host various services.

I've got a headless Linux box running Navidrome. This can stream out to all sorts of things; now I'm running Symfonium on my phone and Feishin on my desktop. All the DLNA or whatever-whatever to stream to speakers and the like seems to work much better (or at least, was much easier to get working for dumb me) than MediaMonkey.

I'm learning how to use Beets as a command line tool for importing and tagging music, and migrating over to a new folder structure. Why? Well, I could just point Navidrome at my existing folder structure set up from MediaMonkey and it more-or-less worked, but it seemed a little flaky. Stuff like duplicate albums or artists, things like that. So I'm just re-importing everything.

It's not quite so fun this time around. I'm not flipping through art books and reminiscing. I'm fighting with Docker compose files, drive mappings, NFS and SMB permissions, etc. Feels more like work. At least I'm re-listening to a bunch of stuff though, because for frig's sake this process has me losing my star ratings again.

I'm doing things slowly. I do a handful of albums at a time, to make sure things are working as expected, to catch little errors or complications right away. I have some shell scripts set up, and a little folder where I put the next batch of files to be imported. I copy in a handful of albums from my old library, then run the scripts, check the output, and move on to the next batch. Just me, perpetually re-shelving small piles of (virtual) discs.

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1. I'm pretty sure they weren't really sorted before then? I think my dad just had them on the shelf in whatever order? ↩

2. NSFW, I suppose, if you wanted to look them up. ↩

3. Know that if I notice you have your own collection sorted in this way but are not following these rules, I am very much silently judging you. ↩

4. I count Superunknown as my first because it was the first one I picked. If I recall correctly, the others were: No Need To Argue by The Cranberries, Gordon by Barenaked Ladies, and God Shuffled his Feet by Crash Test Dummies. ↩

5. First purchase: New Adventures in Hi-Fi, R.E.M.. Still one of my all-time favourite albums. ↩

6. Sneak peek at a potential future post, but multi-disc albums: also a pain in the ass, digitally. ↩

7. It does; I double checked now. ↩

8. I did. Also, I'm the weird guy that will pound the table insisting that this is actually the pinnacle of Metallica's output. ↩

9. Though I will provide a bit of a contrarian take: the cigar-chompers at the record labels are actually pretty good at picking out the good stuff. For any given band, I can pretty much guarantee that the "singles" are, by and large, the best songs they have. Of course, there are also great non-single songs, the famed "deep cuts", but if you are talking to someone who is being very snotty about these "deep cuts" then I call them posers. ↩

10. This is, of course, 2 stars (counting the zero) too many. ↩

11. What's kind of funny is that I do not at all share this obsession with any other media. I'll group books by author, but the authors aren't particularly sorted. There are maybe some genre separations going on my bookshelves. As for DVDs/Blu-Rays there's even less organization, but also I don't have a ton of them. ↩

12. While it was what motivated setting this blog back up, I think I might give up on the concept as something to write about, as I clearly have lost the willpower to stick to it. ↩