Adulting my 30 year Music Library

[RumorConsumer]

Hey all. I’ve got around 600GB of music I’ve been collecting since the late ‘90s and early 2000s, back when Napster, Hotline, Carracho, Limewire (lamewire) was the thing. A lot of the singles and one offs are random tracks I grabbed as a teenager, plenty of it stuff I’d never know to track down again. And I don’t want to lose any of it.

The thing is, my listening has changed. These days I’m mostly doing full albums in lossless (which by volume is about 50% of the library or more), and I keep my main library curated for that kind of serious listening. All these old one-off tracks dilute it. But I still love them and want them on call when the mood hits. So it’s all mixed together-the singles and weird tracks and the albums.

I was thinking about what to do. It would be nice to have a kind of two tier system. I’ve considered dumping the single material into a Spotify playlist or something similar so they’re separate but still reachable. Has anybody else dealt with this, or is there a smarter way to handle a big personal archive like this? Curious how people keep a “serious” library and a nostalgia stash without the two bleeding into each other.

 

[Allyance]

I like iTunes, but this is one of my main gripes too. It would be sooo nice to have a top tier for Classical, one for Jazz, and one for popular and the rest. I don't like browsing all the classical titles to find a popular song. Wow, 600GB, I only have 36GB.

 

[bzgnyc2]

Hey all. I’ve got around 600GB of music I’ve been collecting since the late ‘90s and early 2000s, back when Napster, Hotline, Carracho, Limewire (lamewire) was the thing. A lot of the singles and one offs are random tracks I grabbed as a teenager, plenty of it stuff I’d never know to track down again. And I don’t want to lose any of it.

The thing is, my listening has changed. These days I’m mostly doing full albums in lossless (which by volume is about 50% of the library or more), and I keep my main library curated for that kind of serious listening. All these old one-off tracks dilute it. But I still love them and want them on call when the mood hits. So it’s all mixed together-the singles and weird tracks and the albums.

I was thinking about what to do. It would be nice to have a kind of two tier system. I’ve considered dumping the single material into a Spotify playlist or something similar so they’re separate but still reachable. Has anybody else dealt with this, or is there a smarter way to handle a big personal archive like this? Curious how people keep a “serious” library and a nostalgia stash without the two bleeding into each other.

Is there a reason why moving them all under a set of playlists that are themselves under a playlist folder wouldn't work? Do you need a deeper hierarchy of playlists?

Not sure I have your exact situation, but I've been reasonably happy with organizing my library using a combination of manual playlists, smart playlists, stars, kind & genre, and Checked. Granted I'm ~ 6K songs and open to jumping across genres in the same listening session.

 

[RumorConsumer]

Is there a reason why moving them all under a set of playlists that are themselves under a playlist folder wouldn't work? Do you need a deeper hierarchy of playlists?

Not sure I have your exact situation, but I've been reasonably happy with organizing my library using a combination of manual playlists, smart playlists, stars, kind & genre, and Checked. Granted I'm ~ 6K songs and open to jumping across genres in the same listening session.

Sorry - one of my agenda items is reducing my library's data footprint. 600gb is a lot to be lugging around. I care about what I care about and the rest I just dont. This is why Im leaning towards some kind of Spotify solution.

 

[bzgnyc2]

Sorry - one of my agenda items is reducing my library's data footprint. 600gb is a lot to be lugging around. I care about what I care about and the rest I just dont. This is why Im leaning towards some kind of Spotify solution.

Okay I thought the issue was libraries bleeding into each other. As most of your library is the "serious" stuff (you say >50% and not surprised since the latter are full albums @ lossless), you'll still be at 300+ GB which doesn't seem dramatically better. Are you experiencing performance issues? Is this all on a laptop with a limited internal drive?

Not a big fan of switching to Spotify, etc if you already have the music given they can always drop a song from their formulary and/or raise prices.

 

[Arctic Moose]

Sorry - one of my agenda items is reducing my library's data footprint. 600gb is a lot to be lugging around.

But how much of this consists of material you’d choose to offload?

EDIT: You estimated about 50% or more, but is this true also for the amount of data? Napster offerings were often low-bitrate.

I have sort of the same situation (although it doesn’t bother me) but the sort-of-randomly collected part of it from the 90s is almost irrelevant footprint-wise.

 

[NoBoMac]

I was thinking about what to do. It would be nice to have a kind of two tier system. I’ve considered dumping the single material into a Spotify playlist or something similar so they’re separate but still reachable.

I'll be the first to say I'm maybe missing something here, but why not separate Music libraries? Put them on external to not clog things up on the internal drive and organize the libraries how ever you want.

<Option>+<double click> to go to the library you want to use. Just like Photos.



(Me, I've been using iTunes Match since day one of the product to hold my library so that can access on other iDevices without having to deal with syncing; high-def rips are kept on a couple of external drives for "just in case", organized by albums)

 

[benwiggy]

Apart from the issue of disk space, simply tagging the files in some way would keep them separate, and a Smart Playlist that includes/excludes files with a particular Genre, Grouping, or Comment, would sort things automatically.

 

[Slix]

Apart from the issue of disk space, simply tagging the files in some way would keep them separate, and a Smart Playlist that includes/excludes files with a particular Genre, Grouping, or Comment, would sort things automatically.

This is what I do, and my library is about 7000 songs at about 64GB right now. I rate 1 star songs things I want to keep, but don't want to end up being shuffled in any of my smart playlists I make, and have labeled the comments for things like "Live", and "Acoustic" so I can strip those out of smart playlists easily too. Honestly, if you're already curating your music library, it should be fairly easy to make some of these adjustments so you can more easily see what you really want to keep and what you want to listen to regularly. Smart playlists to show the last time you played something, or songs under a certain play count are helpful too.

 

[MisterSavage]

Mine is just one giant collection. I don't trust Apple Music enough to do serious organization. I've been burned more than once by it.

 

[aaplconvert]

I'm actually curious how you go about doing something like this because I have around around 300 CDs I wish to put into AAPL format. I know it won't be straightforward or easy. is it really as easy as doing a couple of CDs per day and syncing it to an iPod/iPhone?

 

[Arctic Moose]

I'm actually curious how you go about doing something like this because I have around around 300 CDs I wish to put into AAPL format. I know it won't be straightforward or easy. is it really as easy as doing a couple of CDs per day and syncing it to an iPod/iPhone?

It used to be that easy. I did my 200+ CD collection in about a week, just swapping disks as I did other work. I'm sure it isn't any more complicated now.

 

[benwiggy]

I know it won't be straightforward or easy. is it really as easy as doing a couple of CDs per day

It could hardly be easier. You can do a whole audio CD in under 5 minutes. Music.app checks a database to get the album and track titles.

 

[SalisburySam]

Sorry - one of my agenda items is reducing my library's data footprint. 600gb is a lot to be lugging around.

But is it really? USB SSDs today are in multiples of terabytes with very fast reads. 600GB of data to carry around just doesn’t seem to be much of a curse today. While smaller than yours I have identical SSDs of my music collection in each of our vehicles…size of the data is pretty immaterial.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

I'm actually curious how you go about doing something like this because I have around around 300 CDs I wish to put into AAPL format. I know it won't be straightforward or easy. is it really as easy as doing a couple of CDs per day and syncing it to an iPod/iPhone?

It has been extremely easy since iTunes 1.0, so 24 years ago.

 

[Abydos]

ever present problem, cataloguing, evaluating, and preserving items of value (at least in terms of memories) - I can't see a perfect solution but one bit of advice archive all of them (600 mb is a trifle these days) so you have the option of reevaluating your choices later (free advice has the value of zero per common usage)