Digital Music Collectors

[prince_huggy]

The Obsessive World of Digital Music Collectors

Just read the above article. One of the very few articles I read from start to finish. It describes me and my fascination with keeping my digital library. Currently, my collection is set at 23,544 tracks. I started my digital collection almost 20 years ago when I won an iPod and thought I best start filling it up.

Is anyone else like me? What's your digital collection and when did you start it?

[iLoveLasagne]

In the early days before broadband I was obsessed. Downloading via Audio Galaxy, Kazaa and then Limewire. You had to be a bit obessed really. Waiting hours, days or even weeks sometimes. Thinking you have managed to successfully download 50 Cent's album and pressing play to find it is a porno or Rick Astley instead. But the feeling of being one of the first to acquire the newest album or rare remix and then burning it to CD, blasting it out loud from my (mum's) Fiesta in the summer was such a great feeling. Real Jukebox was how I stored my MP3s. But I didn't back them up and the PC inevitably died as they often did those days with the amount of viruses around. I then started to burn everything to CD and was buying spindles of blank CDs each month.

I listened to a few of my own 'mixtape' CDs several years ago comprised mostly of hip hop but also your Limp Bizkit, Acrtic Monkeys, RHCPs etc. UK garage was my big thing though. Apart from buying mixtape CDs or getting these handed out by promoters after going clubbing, there weren't many other ways to get many songs.

It is safe to say that most of it was all rubbish and I wouldn't listen to any of it now.

[Kludgehammer]

There is definitely a bit of collector mania about it - I recognise the obsession in myself after previously collecting book series, comics, LPs and would be collecting guitars if my level of skill could justify it.

I went fully digital about 5-8 years ago, I can't remember exactly - finally bit the bullet after accepting that MP3s had improved quality to an extent that Minidisk just wasn't ever going to survive. I currently have just short of 100K tracks

[Up the Junction]

My digital library began with Napster during the days of dial-up, when it were cheaper to use t'internet between 6pm and 6am.

It used to take 15-20 minutes to download a single 128kbps (192kbps if you were lucky) track.

I've never paid for a music streaming service and probably never will.

My current music library - which I keep on a portable drive - currently stands at 44,712 files.

[Korea Hammer]

This is me. I very occasionally use Spotify, primarily to share playlists with friends, but I sold off my physical collection when I came back from Korea in 2006, and since then I've built up a fairly whopping digital collection (83,000 tracks). I probably bought 5-10% of it (although another sizeable chunk is stuff I'd previously bought on vinyl or CD).

I have about 20 folders (Repetitive Beats, Early 80s, C86, Reggae and Dub, Ambient and Drone, Piano and Strings, Pre-War Blues, Noughties Indie, Noise and Psych etc. etc.) and label everything very carefully within those. It's an outlet for my more obsessive tendencies.

[Rio]

When I moved in with missus I had to start getting rid of stuff.

Sadly she stayed..

The whole ‘home taping is killing music’ collection I had amassed was a start.

Some 25 years later I have around 55,000 tracks stored on a portable hard drive and NAS drive. Sonos last update has taken away (temporarily I believe) the ability to play the NAS drive. So I’m currently rather miffed

Spotify is killing the music industry. Don’t do it people

[bunk]

Looking back now, I have disregarding some holidays and whatnot listened to music everyday from my iTunes collection for the past... 18-20 years, perhaps? Love it, my knowledge and appreciation of music wouldn't be anywhere without a regular database of my tunes, something i can fall back on when my memory fails me.

I've had 3 different iterations, with two failures having taken place many moons ago. It's probably for the best, what i was listening to as a 14 year old is well... far different to my musical life now. The current version is around 25,000, backed up in the old cloud, so i can listen everything whenever i have an internet connection on phone, laptops etc.

Don't go too overboard with the data, but record label, release year, genre, artwork of course, all very well sorted. Wouldn't go down the rabbit hole of catalogue number and things like that though. Used to download a lot more, now it's more what can i realistically listen to in the near future, otherwise it just gets lost, there's about 2,000 songs that remain unplayed, so i should probably give them a whirl also.

[neathiron]

Not for me, I'd rather have the physical product in my hand. Mostly CD's these last 20 or so more years, haven't bought vinyl for years, probably Brave New World by Iron Maiden would have been the last. Don't knock anyone for doing it though. I'd just rather have something with a lyric sheet or sleeve notes.

[Dizzyuk]

I am Rave Archive UK
I have a huge digital collection of rave audio I share to the world.

rave-archive.com
Mixcloud.com/dizzyuk

I want to know who from the admin is an old raver and posted the tribute to DJ Randall on the KUMB Twitter.

[Up the Junction]

I want to know who from the admin is an old raver and posted the tribute to DJ Randall on the KUMB Twitter.

(For the record...)

Also been mentioned in this thread.

[prince_huggy]

Good to see I'm not the only digital head around. I do hope you all back your files up. For those that back them up on the cloud, which site do you use, please? I have three copies of all my music but you can never be to safe

[prince_huggy]

Spotify is killing the music industry. Don’t do it people

Agreed on this Rio. Hate streaming. The music just gets lost

[Kludgehammer]

Some 25 years later I have around 55,000 tracks stored on a portable hard drive and NAS drive. Sonos last update has taken away (temporarily I believe) the ability to play the NAS drive. So I’m currently rather miffed

Watch out for the hard limit on track numbers on Sonos - you're getting close to the 64K tracks maximum. I jumped ship to Bluesound mostly because of this (and Sonos' crappy handling of cutting loose the owners of earlier models didn't exactly help either)

[bunk]

Any recommendations for building up a cloud-based FLAC equivalent quality database? In the future ideally i'd like to up the quality of whatever i'm listening to in the digital realms, but stuff that I would download, as opposed to streaming (e.g., Tidal).

[OFT]

I don't understand any of it and don't want to
Before I had a computer of any sort, so a good few years back, i delivered a table I'd made to a local lad. When I got to his house he'd got 2 computers old school with fairly big monitors and they were continually downloading music files(I think) said they ran 24/7. he did explain it all to me but it was just beyond my wit as to how or even why..
He said it was illegal and that he'd got fak knows how many songs/ albums all stored on his whatever it's all stored on and I remember thinking...what's the point? are you collecting it because you can, are you ever going to listen to any of it.

A mate has just stumped up for a relatively high end streamer, I suppose i'll go and have a listen but I'm never going down that route.

[WCpete]

A decade ago it was me until the external drive that contained my library corrupted and the data could not be rescued.

I don't want to talk about it. Still.

[Up the Junction]

A decade ago it was me until the external drive that contained my library corrupted and the data could not be rescued.

There is little worse, Pete - especially when you've not made any backups...

I've a large pile of busted HHDs I've collected over the last 20 years waiting for me to do I don't really know what with one day.

[dasnutnock3]

Long since stopped bothering with collections of mp3s and suchlike. I don’t own an expensive hifi any more and rarely listen to music at home - only when I’m running or in the car, both through my phone. I’m happy to use the free Amazon music service or the other free streaming services.

In fact I don’t think I own any physical media of any type - all my movies are downloaded off torrents and stuck on a 10TB hdd, video games are all downloaded off game pass or crack sites, and music’s all off streamers.

[Cockneyboy311]

I am Rave Archive UK
I have a huge digital collection of rave audio I share to the world.

rave-archive.com
Mixcloud.com/dizzyuk

Nice one Dizzy. Come on over and join us on the 'Early 90's Yoof Culture' thread.

[Cockneyboy311]

Agreed on this Rio. Hate streaming. The music just gets lost

I do both. Stream from Spotify and also buy vinyl. Sometimes the Spotify algorithm will turn me to something I'll end up buying. A band called Royal Headache being a recent example.