what should i do with my mp3 collection?

[mbengs1]

I don't download much now but i did before. should i delete everything and subscribe to itunes and pay for all the music i listen to?

[MikeRivers]

I take it that "I did before" means that you have a collection of music that you didn't pay for. How about sending checks to the artists and composers of the music that you have in your collection right now? Be fair about it - 50 cents per song. Will you have enough money left over to subscribe to iTunes?

[mbengs1]

I take it that "I did before" means that you have a collection of music that you didn't pay for. How about sending checks to the artists and composers of the music that you have in your collection right now? Be fair about it - 50 cents per song. Will you have enough money left over to subscribe to iTunes?

 

I used to download early 2000's. haven't download at all since. i guess i will start getting my music from itunes instead.

[gubu]

Put it on your phone. As long as it's all tagged correctly, any music player app, including iTunes, will recognise and play it just fine.

 

If you need to organise and tag your collection before transferring to your phone, or importing/reimporting into ITunes, there is a free program called MusicBrainz Picard that does a great job. Very powerful way of organising and tagging mp3s automatically.

[blue2blue]

I suggest subscribing to Apple Music, Google Play, Spotify, Rhapsody, Tidal or another stream service. Reading between the lines it sounds like you feel you're ready to contributing to the income of the artists making the music and a stream service is a great way to do that that for many consumers.

 

For one thing, you'll get easy access to far more tracks than those you already 'otherwise acquired' -- including most new stuff (some big stars are experimenting with short-time 'exclusives' and such but, by and large, people realize if their music isn't in the stream-o-sphere, they're missing out on potential revenue... potential ongoing revenue. (Those pennies add up.)

 

You'll also get (what should be) professionally prepared files in relatively high fidelity quality bitrates.

 

(Most serious stream companies now offer 320 kbps; Apple Music only offers 256 kbps, presumably because that's what the iTunes store has sold for years and they don't want to further erode profitable iTunes outright sales any more than they have to claim their place in the stream-o-sphere. We can only assume that, down the road, Apple will up the quality from the just-barely-noticeably inferior 256 kbps files to keep up with the rest of the industry. I suspect they're counting on consumer ignorance of 'twiddly bits' like stream quality to ease them past that competitive hurdle. (Frankly, I think it's an odd hobbling of their product -- but then I thought they were utterly insane for buying Beats if what they really wanted to do was get into streaming, since Beats was -- bar none and by far -- the worst stream service of the 7 I've used over the last decade.)

 

And different services have different add-on features. Google, Apple, and now Spotify (and maybe others) all offer 'personal music lockers' where one can upload his own music [i'm not sure of the implications of uploading pirated music to such music lockers, however!] in case he has music that isn't available in the stream catalogs. Apple's uses Apple Match to match uploads with files on their own servers (saving space for them and possibly offering better [or worse] quality rips than you already have. Google uses a similar matching capability to substitute 320 kbps streams for your upload -- but you can force it to use the specific file you uploaded. (For instance, let's say you uploaded a lossless FLAC file and want that to play instead of a Google 320 -- you find the track/album in your library and check a box to tell G to use your file instead of matching.)

 

Apple Music has its much talked about live DJ radio, as well as curated playlists for different activities and moods. Google eschews the DJs but spent a pretty penny to buy Songza, a very-well-liked playlist-oriented service, and folded it into Google Play Music. (There's even a new free radio/playlist only tier similar to Pandora, although on-demand streaming still requires a subscription.)

 

 

[Notes_Norton]

I have hundreds of Vinyl LPs, hundreds of CDs and a few legal downloads. I even have some cassette tapes that I bought in weak moments when I couldn't get the music in a better sounding format.

 

I'm weird, and prefer hard copies like the CD or LP.

 

Then I rip what I like, put it on an iPod and play it in the car - I call it "Radio Bob - 808 on the dial" - because 808 looks like it spells BOB. I have almost 10,000 tunes on there and it goes with me whenever I'm on the road.

 

Streaming to me is like listening to the radio. If I hear something I want, I'll purchase a hard copy. On a few symphony hard copies I couldn't get, I bought the downloads and burned CDs. I've also burned CDs of many of my LPs. Why? I don't think they sound better (any transfer from one format to another adds distortions), but they are more convenient that way.

 

If you don't download anymore, I wouldn't delete them. I'd burn a DVD (or multiple) of what I purchased. If I bought it, it's mine, and although I may not want to listen to the song any more now, in a few years, listening to something you once got tired of can be like visiting an old friend.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

 

 

[blue2blue]

I have 1200+ LPs, around 500 CDs, 200 singles and 78s, and thousands of paid-for mp3s [from the all-you-can-eat-for-a-flat-fee days at Emusic -- which are all 128 and 192s, though]. I'd only bought a small handful of downloads (aside from those from Emusic) though.

 

However, what I was doing was buying CDs (often used) and then ripping them into mp3s for ease of playback. I would keep the CDs, mind you (keeping rips of them and then selling them would be illegal, though, of course, unbustable). But for a long time purchased mp3s tended to be either lo fi 128's [ugh] or, as iTunes still sells, mid-fi 256's. So I preferred to rip my own to whatever mp3 bitrate suited me (typically 320 in recent years but also lossless FLAC) and archive the discs for safe keeping.

 

However, in the US, resale of records (like books) offers nothing to the artist or other rights holders. Zip nada. The used record store makes a bunch, around here typically only knocking off a couple bucks from the new price. But the music rights holders? Zilch on used sales.

 

So, for that reason, I've really embraced the streaming model.

 

You will hear a lot of noise about artists 'not getting paid' by stream services -- but if one looks a bit closer, one often finds that those doing the complaining are getting ripped off by their labels -- not by the stream companies. (That said, the major labels own a big part of Spotify and have used their stake to disadvantage others and to drive pay rates down, making spotify the worst-paying of the on-demand services. Meet the new boss, not just same-as, but actually same, in many cases. )

[Anderton]

As suggested above, burn the MP3s to a DVD-ROM just in case...

 

Streaming is the implementation of the "celestial jukebox" I was wishing for decades ago. But now that it's here, I must admit I miss the "extras" that come with physical ownership - with CDs, the artwork (even though it's not as good as vinyl), the shiny object, the ability to skip around to different cuts, the act of going out and shopping at CD stores and seeing what's new and what's on special...the iTunes page may think it's a record store, but it has no soul.

[blue2blue]

The industry DESPERATELY needs to get together cooperatively and establish a meta-info standard for downloads/streams that can at the very least link to credits, liner notes, images, or other ancillary info/materials that were sometimes part of the traditional or value-add collector's packages.

 

HOWEVER, I recently ripped a Coltrane box someone gifted me [keeping the box set, of course!] a while back into my digital collection -- on paper, it looks like quite the package, 5 or 6 CDs and a think book of pictures and liners, essays, etc. But none of the CD's are labeled except for disk number -- no track listings at all -- you have to take out the book and fight your way through the tall, narrow, very stiffly bound paperback book to a section midway through where the track lists are to even see what you're playing! No other listing anywhere. Plus, the discs are put in the 'attractive' package in such a way that to get to three of them you have to remove at least one other disk, if not two. And THEN, they have 'conveniences' like back to back versions of the same song. I'm a pretty big 'Trane fan -- and there are, indeed, times when I want to compare his very different versions of tracks he did multiple times -- but NOT every single, stinkin' time I hear the damn record!

 

And then there are those idiotic bonus tracks. There's a REASON they weren't included originally. Put them on a separate disk or give us a link to them -- but don't make them LISTEN every time we put on the stupid disk.

 

Really, the labels just don't seem to care or even understand how people listen. In general, my contempt for the labels has only increased as their position has weakened.

[Geoff Grace]

Most serious stream companies now offer 320 kbps; Apple Music only offers 256 kbps' date=' presumably because that's what the iTunes store has sold for years and they don't want to further erode profitable iTunes outright sales any more than they have to claim their place in the stream-o-sphere. We can only assume that, down the road, Apple will up the quality from the just-barely-noticeably inferior 256 kbps files to keep up with the rest of the industry. I suspect they're counting on consumer ignorance of 'twiddly bits' like stream quality to ease them past that competitive hurdle.[/quote']

It's worth pointing out that Apple uses AAC, not MP3, encoding, which at 256 VBR reportedly sounds better than 320 VBR MP3s.

 

More here:

 

AAC vs. MP3

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[AlamoJoe]

I didn't have broadband when Napster was in it's heyday, although I doubt I'd have ripped much. While I've never made a dime off music, I felt and feel very strongly that people should be paid for their efforts. I've bought hours and hours of mp3's off Amazon. What I like is the ability to pick tracks I like instead of buying an album with a couple of cuts I like and several I don't.

But I pay for the music. I've downloaded music off of Soundcloud where the artists have specifically said it was free for download. My crap is free for download there..sadly, few takers.Lol.

 

I ripped my entire cd collection years ago, and back it and all my mp3's onto a external hard drive as I make additions. Also, I have two drives in my main computer and the entire collection is on both drives.

 

So barring being targeted by someone with a EMP, or a Gamma Ray burst..I should be good.

 

[blue2blue]

It's worth pointing out that Apple uses AAC, not MP3, encoding, which at 256 VBR reportedly sounds better than 320 VBR MP3s.

 

More here:

 

AAC vs. MP3

 

Best,

 

Geoff

 

To be sure. And AAC does tend to test better than mp3, particularly at certain bitrates for certain material -- although I'm not sure I'd go along with all of the assertions in the article you linked. But, that's moot, as I understand it, the other services use Vorbis or other advanced codec, not mp3, since mp3 doesn't offer any DRM management. (The exception, AIUI, was MOG which used Flash servers to DRM Flash-wrapped mp3. Always been a bit hazy on how the Flash server DRM thing worked. But, of course, it's pretty much dead tech at this point. MOG used iOS and Android to handle DRM in their apps, of course. Beats, switched to Vorbis.)

[MikeRivers]

I got to think about this the other day, thinking about the total cost of listening to streaming music. I heard that some wireless provider offers free streaming from some service without counting against the data allowance for whatever monthly plan they have with this offer (if not all). But doesn't streaming eat up a lot of "data?" If you're paying $100/month for your phone, what's another $10 for more music than you can eat? But if you weren't streaming music, could you do all you want to do on line with a $40/month phone plan?

 

I still prefer to get my "streaming" from the radio and pay AT&T $5 for 50 MB of data when I'm going away and might want to check my e-mail from home. But that'll barely buy half a dozen songs at 256 kbps. If you stream 8 hours a day (and why not???) that's close to a gigabyte a day.

[blue2blue]

I got to think about this the other day, thinking about the total cost of listening to streaming music. I heard that some wireless provider offers free streaming from some service without counting against the data allowance for whatever monthly plan they have with this offer (if not all). But doesn't streaming eat up a lot of "data?" If you're paying $100/month for your phone, what's another $10 for more music than you can eat? But if you weren't streaming music, could you do all you want to do on line with a $40/month phone plan?

 

I still prefer to get my "streaming" from the radio and pay AT&T $5 for 50 MB of data when I'm going away and might want to check my e-mail from home. But that'll barely buy half a dozen songs at 256 kbps. If you stream 8 hours a day (and why not???) that's close to a gigabyte a day.

 

That's why the stream services began offering the ability to temporarily store media files on your portable device (or, in some cases, your desktop computer). DRM remains in place and the app checks to make sure you're paid up before giving you access to them, but that way you can load up your phone while you're on WiFi and then listen out of the 'music larder' while you're out in the world. (That's why the download-via-WiFi-only checkbox is so important. )

 

I, too, have a very inexpensive variable-tier phone plan that stays super-cheap because they (somewhat similarly) sell voice, text, and data service in tier blocs. If you use less than 100 MB, you pay $3, 101-500 MB is $12, etc. So while voice (and text) is relatively cheap, data is not. [Me and my mom split it; my phone is my primary and she uses hers a fair amount. Our bill is often below $40 for both and has only been over $60 once or maybe twice.]

 

I think Rhapsody was the first service I used that had a mobile app. At that point I had unlimited data -- but a 3G connection meant that even low bitrate (and I mean low) .3gp streams were balky. So storing to the phone was crucial. When MOG fielded an Android app, they had the same thing. Unfortunately, when I switched to Google's Play Music All Access, the Play Music App -- like all Google apps -- has to be installed in the device's internal memory. (At least it will put the music on the SD -- but it insists on using INTERNAL storage for music art image storage -- which clogs my phone quickly, since my large favorites library apparently requires 400-500 MB of album art!)

 

My phone has 32 GB of SD storage -- but relatively little internal storage, making many current Google apps all but impossible to run. And that means my otherwise-beloved GPMAA is app-non-grata on my phone. Now, I'm not all that on-the-go, so it's mostly not a big deal. I found a pretty good ($2 I think) player app and just store my own mp3s on it and play them. The app isn't as good as GPM -- but it runs on my truly beloved Android 2.3 phone.

[gubu]

As suggested above, burn the MP3s to a DVD-ROM just in case...

 

Streaming is the implementation of the "celestial jukebox" I was wishing for decades ago. But now that it's here, I must admit I miss the "extras" that come with physical ownership - with CDs, the artwork (even though it's not as good as vinyl), the shiny object, the ability to skip around to different cuts, the act of going out and shopping at CD stores and seeing what's new and what's on special...the iTunes page may think it's a record store, but it has no soul.

 

If you hear a new track that you like on the radio, you can hit the Google button on your phone, point your phone at the speakers, and Google will almost instantly give you track and artist info, and the opportunity to explore the artist's bio, other work, and streaming/download catalogue.

 

Our fetish (in the academic sense) was for beautiful physical packages of our favourite artists' catalogue. Today's fetish is the mobile handset. We can't fight it.

 

And let's face it, if someone had told us 20 or 30 years ago that we would someday have a device that was smaller and lighter than a CD Walkman, that could access and playback nearly every recording ever made (among a million and one other functions), with better actual sound quality (the headphone amps on a lot of those old portable devices were not so great a lot of the time), we'd hardly have believed it possible.

[Anderton]

If you hear a new track that you like on the radio, you can hit the Google button on your phone, point your phone at the speakers, and Google will almost instantly give you track and artist info, and the opportunity to explore the artist's bio, other work, and streaming/download catalogue.

 

Can you give more details? I've had good luck with Shazam identifying songs, but am not aware of how to connect deeper.

 

 

[blue2blue]

 

If you hear a new track that you like on the radio, you can hit the Google button on your phone, point your phone at the speakers, and Google will almost instantly give you track and artist info, and the opportunity to explore the artist's bio, other work, and streaming/download catalogue.

 

Our fetish (in the academic sense) was for beautiful physical packages of our favourite artists' catalogue. Today's fetish is the mobile handset. We can't fight it.

 

And let's face it, if someone had told us 20 or 30 years ago that we would someday have a device that was smaller and lighter than a CD Walkman, that could access and playback nearly every recording ever made (among a million and one other functions), with better actual sound quality (the headphone amps on a lot of those old portable devices were not so great a lot of the time), we'd hardly have believed it possible.

"If you hear a new track that you like on the radio..." Pretty much the last time that happened was in the 1990s.

 

I wasn't aware they'd built that into Google Now. My phone is Android 2.3 so no new features. But my Google Nexus 7 tablet updates itself and has that feature. Doesn't seem to work for stuff I listen to. Maybe if I was listening to Coldplay and Taylor Swift.

 

With regard to the 'perfect little device' -- when I was the loneliest teen audiophile in Orange County, CA in the early-mid 60s I had a dream one night when I was just getting into audiophilia, probably around 12 to 14 and I met this 'kid' on the street a house or two down the street from my own. He had this little portable device, palm-sized, just a little bit bigger than a shirtpocket transistor radio. He pushed a small (~3-1/2") silvery disk in the side and I heard amazing, full-fidelity. I remember thinking, how could this be?!? I'd just been studying up on how speaker baffling works and I knew there was pretty much no way in hell to get full range sound out of a tiny speaker... 15 or 20 years later when the first Walkman cassette portables came out, I thought to myself, Damn... pretty close -- too bad you need headphones. When the CD walkman came out, I thought, Wow, now it's getting eery. (I made special note of the mini-CD form factor when it briefly showed up.)

 

Of course, the big problem is still getting decent sound out of small devices (unless we're willing to go the headphone route, of course).

 

That said, if we were to surround ourselves with full range WiFi [i'm assuming no new revolutions in BT audio in the last year or two and that BT audio protocols still suck eggs] speakers everywhere, we could set it up so our portables would broadcast to them as we got in ear reach...

[gubu]

 

Can you give more details? I've had good luck with Shazam identifying songs, but am not aware of how to connect deeper.

 

 

Sony makes a free Android app called Track ID that runs off the Gracenote database, and does all of the above, including links to Youtube and Spotify, and a full discography of the artist. It's a tiny app, well worth installing.

 

The Google app for Android has a 'speak to search' function. You hit the mic button, then the music button, and it takes you straight to the Google Play listing. From there, the artist Wikipedia page, and streaming catalogue are only a dozen or so keystrokes away.

 

Granted, it's not quite as simple as I described, but you should still have all the info you could ever want before the track finishes.

[gubu]

"If you hear a new track that you like on the radio..." Pretty much the last time that happened was in the 1990s.

 

I wasn't aware they'd built that into Google Now. My phone is Android 2.3 so no new features. But my Google Nexus 7 tablet updates itself and has that feature. Doesn't seem to work for stuff I listen to. Maybe if I was listening to Coldplay and Taylor Swift.

 

With regard to the 'perfect little device' -- when I was the loneliest teen audiophile in Orange County, CA in the early-mid 60s I had a dream one night when I was just getting into audiophilia, probably around 12 to 14 and I met this 'kid' on the street a house or two down the street from my own. He had this little portable device, palm-sized, just a little bit bigger than a shirtpocket transistor radio. He pushed a small (~3-1/2") silvery disk in the side and I heard amazing, full-fidelity. I remember thinking, how could this be?!? I'd just been studying up on how speaker baffling works and I knew there was pretty much no way in hell to get full range sound out of a tiny speaker... 15 or 20 years later when the first Walkman cassette portables came out, I thought to myself, Damn... pretty close -- too bad you need headphones. When the CD walkman came out, I thought, Wow, now it's getting eery. (I made special note of the mini-CD form factor when it briefly showed up.)

 

Of course, the big problem is still getting decent sound out of small devices (unless we're willing to go the headphone route, of course).

 

That said, if we were to surround ourselves with full range WiFi [i'm assuming no new revolutions in BT audio in the last year or two and that BT audio protocols still suck eggs] speakers everywhere, we could set it up so our portables would broadcast to them as we got in ear reach...

 

Dang, what was that device? Please tell me it was a tiny gramophone!

[MikeRivers]

 

If you hear a new track that you like on the radio, you can hit the Google button on your phone, point your phone at the speakers, and Google will almost instantly give you track and artist info, and the opportunity to explore the artist's bio, other work, and streaming/download catalogue.

 

Mine doesn't work that way. Guess either me or the phone isn't smart enough. Scary, though.

 

[gubu]

 

Mine doesn't work that way. Guess either me or the phone isn't smart enough. Scary, though.

 

If you've got the 'speak to search' function in the Google app, it should work

[MikeRivers]

"If you hear a new track that you like on the radio..." Pretty much the last time that happened was in the 1990s.

 

I wasn't aware they'd built that into Google Now. My phone is Android 2.3 so no new features. But my Google Nexus 7 tablet updates itself and has that feature. Doesn't seem to work for stuff I listen to. Maybe if I was listening to Coldplay and Taylor Swift.

 

I supsect that would be the same for me no matter what phone I had.

 

[gubu]

 

I supsect that would be the same for me no matter what phone I had.

 

Try the Sony Track ID app that I mentioned earlier in the thread.

 

I use it to ID obscure jazzbo stuff from a local FM station. Hasn't missed a track yet

[blue2blue]

 

Dang, what was that device? Please tell me it was a tiny gramophone!

 

No -- but it (the dream, that is) was right around the time I was recorded (ever so very faintly) talking into a very ancient cylinder recorder. It really needed some fresh beeswax cylinders. But we sort of faintly heard a scratchy cadence that matched what I'd said. And it was the time I was really getting caught up in audiophilia.

 

When I got my first portable mp3 player, I was thinking about that dream a lot. But, just as I'd figured at the top, because of the physics of speakers, full fidelity without resort to external speakers or headphones is just about as far away as ever...

[gubu]

 

No -- but it (the dream, that is) was right around the time I was recorded (ever so very faintly) talking into a very ancient cylinder recorder. It really needed some fresh beeswax cylinders. But we sort of faintly heard a scratchy cadence that matched what I'd said. And it was the time I was really getting caught up in audiophilia.

 

When I got my first portable mp3 player, I was thinking about that dream a lot. But, just as I'd figured at the top, because of the physics of speakers, full fidelity without resort to external speakers or headphones is just about as far away as ever...

 

DAC->auditory nerve interface?