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Post by drtrey3 on Jan 19, 2015 9:58:29 GMT -5
I had lots of trouble with iTunes as well. As my kids are listening to their iPods more, I have spent more time working on iTunes, and this time, the database seems to be holding up better. Crossing fingers that it stays that way because I am not up for another rebuild. I am in the H's by now.
Trey
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Post by Boomzilla on Jan 19, 2015 10:04:41 GMT -5
So apparently, my library was NOT the only one that needed grooming... I'm not surprised. What I am seeing, though, is that my 4TB external USB isn't going to be sufficient to the data. I may need to look into RAID types again to see if I can (safely) get more storage out of my RAID array. I'm currently running RAID-10, but that limits me to ½ the total capacity of the four drives. I still want hot-swap redundancy without data loss, but other options allow more storage with (almost) the same security.
iTunes wasn't good to me either. The 30% of discs in the shelves that I'm having to re-rip were deleted via iTunes with no input from me whatsoever. It was eerie - one day I'd listen to a song, the next day the song didn't exist either in the iTunes database OR on the storage drive - it just disappeared to iTunes purgatory never to return... I never could figure it out (nor could the Genius bars I tried), so I eventually went to JRiver.
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Post by Priapulus on Jan 19, 2015 11:37:29 GMT -5
Disc space may be inexpensive, but the limits are in the robustness and integrity of the software's database. The more music in the database, the more likely corruption is to occur (in my experience). On the other hand, some of us (I'm thinking of Mr. DYohn here) have endless titles in iTunes without even a hint of trouble. So it isn't assured that database corruption will occur just because you have lots of music. But my data has become corrupt (repeatedly). Not to get back into that - JRiver so far hasn't lost or deleted music (although it occasionally scrambles the cover art).
I have 3.65 Tb of music files and have never had a problem with the integrity of the software's database. But if I did, it is very easy to delete and rebuild the database; it only takes a few minutes. Indeed, I delete and rebuild occasionally to ensure it has updates and additions correct.
I'm using JRiver.
JRiver allows multiple libraries. I have libraries for Jazz, Classical, Choral, Organ, Country, Rock and Pop, Blues; and my music is organized into respective directories.
I presume you're saving your cover art and data as tags in the music files. If you're still using your player's database for that, you're going to be screwed again...
Sincerely /blair
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Post by Boomzilla on Jan 19, 2015 11:58:19 GMT -5
Yes, it's easy to let the software rebuild the database if the files still exist on the hard drive. In my case, iTunes seemed to be (randomly) deleting files without any user input. Not only was the music no longer in the iTunes database, the source file no longer existed on the library drive.
I agree that JRiver doesn't seem to be doing that, but I've lots and lots of CDs that are missing random tracks from my time with iTunes. Those I'm having to delete & re-rip.
Is there any advantage to having multiple libraries for different types of music? It would seem to me that it'd be just one more thing to do to find the music you're searching for. With all the music in a single library, I can listen to a classical wind ensemble, a jazz band, a pop song, and a country song without having to switch libraries.
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Post by Priapulus on Jan 19, 2015 12:14:22 GMT -5
Is there any advantage to having multiple libraries for different types of music? It would seem to me that it'd be just one more thing to do to find the music you're searching for. With all the music in a single library, I can listen to a classical wind ensemble, a jazz band, a pop song, and a country song without having to switch libraries. It depends how eclectic your listening is. I'm usually in a classical mood, or a Jazz mood, or a Rock mood. I find it disconcerting to find Bach next to the Beatles. It only takes about three mouse clicks to change libraries. But mainly, I have so much music, that if I didn't break it down somehow, I'd never find anything. I hate country, but am too anal-retentive to delete it. So I sequester it in a Country library.
Perhaps you might fine two libraries useful; "Classical" and "not Classical"...
Sincerely /b
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hemster
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Post by hemster on Jan 19, 2015 12:21:46 GMT -5
Is there any advantage to having multiple libraries for different types of music? It would seem to me that it'd be just one more thing to do to find the music you're searching for. With all the music in a single library, I can listen to a classical wind ensemble, a jazz band, a pop song, and a country song without having to switch libraries. It depends how eclectic your listening is. I'm usually in a classical mood, or a Jazz mood, or a Rock mood. I find it disconcerting to find Bach next to the Beatles. It only takes about three mouse clicks to change libraries. But mainly, I have so much music, that if I didn't break it down somehow, I'd never find anything. I hate country, but am too anal-retentive to delete it. So I sequester it in a Country library.
Perhaps you might fine two libraries useful; "Classical" and "not Classical"...
Sincerely /b
I'm not sure I understand... all my stuff is in one huge library but categorized appropriately according to genre. This way I can queue up classical or jazz or whatever any time I like. There are other things that also help: I use the comments tag to hold "mood" attributes. For example, I may have Enya's music categorized as "Relaxing" or "Meditation". So I can then queue up music to suite my mood. Using mp3tag I can create playlists for any genre, or any mix. This can be stored permanently in my Playlists folder or can be temporary (usually stored in the TEMP folder) for things like a party etc. which can be a mix of tracks ranging from (i.e. tagged as) Dance to Disco to Rock to Slow Dance etc.. So what I missing? Why would I need multiple libraries?  Edit: Although I'm not using iTunes, I think the above can apply to any media software. Also, I do not store albumart in the metadata tags. I simply have 1 album-art file and name it "folder.jpg", store it in the same folder as the tracks. This saves storage space and all media players use the file to display as album-art when playing either the entire album or any track. |
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Post by flatpicker on Jan 19, 2015 12:46:10 GMT -5
The "defect rate" that I have probably indicates the source of my CDs - yard sales. Apparently, many don't take care of their discs as they should. To date, I've found only one album in the library that I didn't have the source CD for, and I deleted that one. I'm finding LOTS of discs that I have more than one physical copy of, though. I'll put the spares out at the next yard sale. I'm also finding a surprising number where the title and track info is not available on the the internet. If it's a disc I really want, I'll enter the data manually - the rest are discards. I'm also finding issues where some of the albums in the library are missing tracks. Where that happens, I delete the album from the database (and from the drive) and just re-rip. Maybe this is worth all the time & maybe not... I know I have had that "time sink" feeling as I've stuffed my media library, over the years, usually in spurts... but it is so nice to be able to find just the right piece of music and also to play randomly and discover cool stuff I'd forgotten or never actually heard... a fair amount of mine is from live recordings, but many of them still get hits on the cddb. I've got about 15 discs yet to be done and then I'll be up-to-date. So far the music side just amounts to 112 gig. I have 6 backups, spread around... I even carry one on a wd passport in my suv, some backups are more current though than others.... I get them all sync-ed about 3 times a year. I have stubbornly stuck with iTunes, even though it annoys me more and more... tried JRiver, but the sound was muted compared to iTunes and bit perfect, so I endure iTunes till I can find something better. I'm glad I did it... I would never do it again from scratch and couldn't anyway, because so many sources are gone... but, it's been worth it for me... and should pay dividends into the future... |
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Post by Priapulus on Jan 19, 2015 12:46:26 GMT -5
It depends how eclectic your listening is. I'm usually in a classical mood, or a Jazz mood, or a Rock mood. I find it disconcerting to find Bach next to the Beatles. It only takes about three mouse clicks to change libraries. But mainly, I have so much music, that if I didn't break it down somehow, I'd never find anything. I hate country, but am too anal-retentive to delete it. So I sequester it in a Country library.
Perhaps you might fine two libraries useful; "Classical" and "not Classical"...
Sincerely /b
I'm not sure I understand... all my stuff is in one huge library but categorized appropriately according to genre. This way I can queue up classical or jazz or whatever any time I like. So what I missing? Why would I need multiple libraries? Yes, I know you can sort on tags, and create playlists; and that is very useful. For the "Genre" tag I've added a bunch more, like Sonata-harpsichord, Sonata-violin, Sonata-quartet, Sonata-halluciphone. If you can find your music, then Libraries is a tool that you don't need. But I have a lot of music. If I want to find a recording of Handel's Water music, it is easier to search thru 1,713 albums in the Classical library, than it is to search thru perhaps 9,000 album total.
I started out with everything in one library, but after I figured out how libraries worked, I started breaking up my music into sub-categories, with their own directories. Then its easy: to make a library you just tell JRiver to make the "Classical" library using the /music/classical music files.
Sincerely
/b
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Post by Priapulus on Jan 19, 2015 13:08:50 GMT -5
I keep each album in its own directory, named with the Album name; song files, folder, artwork, scans of brochure. One problem is my Album naming convention; I use:
Artist year - album name
The Beatles 1966 - Revolver
Which allows windows files explorer to conveniently sort my music. This doesn't work so well for classical music. Classical music file name probably should start with the composer, instead of the artist. But for consistency, I stuck with Artist. Which makes it hard to find "Handel's Water Music".
Sincerely
/b
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Post by strindl on Jan 19, 2015 13:22:48 GMT -5
So apparently, my library was NOT the only one that needed grooming... I'm not surprised. What I am seeing, though, is that my 4TB external USB isn't going to be sufficient to the data. I may need to look into RAID types again to see if I can (safely) get more storage out of my RAID array. I'm currently running RAID-10, but that limits me to ½ the total capacity of the four drives. I still want hot-swap redundancy without data loss, but other options allow more storage with (almost) the same security. iTunes wasn't good to me either. The 30% of discs in the shelves that I'm having to re-rip were deleted via iTunes with no input from me whatsoever. It was eerie - one day I'd listen to a song, the next day the song didn't exist either in the iTunes database OR on the storage drive - it just disappeared to iTunes purgatory never to return... I never could figure it out (nor could the Genius bars I tried), so I eventually went to JRiver. I made the switch to a music server with ripped CD's in 2009. I spent a few weeks ripping over a thousand CD's in lossless format onto a mirrored hard drive setup, and I haven't lost any of those tracks since. I use Logitech Squeezebox Touch streamers, with Duet remotes, and the Logitech Media server software. All of my music files are in one library, including the album art which is contained in the directory of each individual CD. The Logitech media server takes care of sorting the genres of music if I want to say, just see a listing of folk or classical music. It can also select by the year of the music. That seems to be a far more convenient way than keeping music in separate libraries. I'm also a fanatic about backing up that music collection. The complete library is first, on a mirrored pair of drives on my main PC. Anytime I add anything or make any change to that library, I back the entire thing up on four other totally separate drives, some external, some on other networked PC's. I also have the logitech media server running on two PC's on my network, each pointing at a different physical copy of the music database...although they are identical. The system has worked without a hiccup since 2009...although I have upgraded PC's since then. |
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Post by klinemj on Jan 19, 2015 14:52:57 GMT -5
Yes, it's easy to let the software rebuild the database if the files still exist on the hard drive. In my case, iTunes seemed to be (randomly) deleting files without any user input. Not only was the music no longer in the iTunes database, the source file no longer existed on the library drive. I agree that JRiver doesn't seem to be doing that, but I've lots and lots of CDs that are missing random tracks from my time with iTunes. Those I'm having to delete & re-rip. I have to say - I am at a loss for why you continue to have music losses with iTunes. I don't use it and never will. You have had this happen multiple times, right? So, I presume when you re-rip this time, you are not involving iTunes in some way. Right? I don't know iTunes well enough to know if you can rip to it or not, but based on your experience - I would not. I have no/zero/zip/nada issues with ripping tunes to my HD and having either Sonos or JRiver (or both) read them all. The closest my digital collection has needed relative to a "grooming" is when I told one of my two systems to look to too broad of a directory and as a result it included both FLAC and WAV versions of some rips. But, that was "my bad" and there were no deleted tunes at all. There were just duplicates with all in WAV and some in FLAC. Fixing it was easy - I went into Sonos, deleted its library, and had it reconnect to the proper directory that only included the FLAC files. I would not call that "Grooming". I would call it "Fixing Mark's boo-boo" Mark |
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Post by Boomzilla on Jan 19, 2015 16:50:31 GMT -5
Hi klinemj - I was also at a loss for why I continued to have music losses with iTunes (as was Apple). Yes, it has happened multiple times; and you are correct - I am NOT letting iTunes touch this library in any way, shape, or form. To date, I've had no issues with JRiver at all (except for the minor annoyance that it wants both the album title AND artist to be the same before it recognizes the various cuts as from the same album). Nevertheless, until I get the JRiver library back to snuff (repairing the deletions from iTunes), the "grooming" will be necessary. After this, I don't expect any further problems. |
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Post by Boomzilla on Jan 24, 2015 18:00:37 GMT -5
Down to the final wire now. I'm re-ripping the final big box set (Harmonia Mundi 50-year anniversary box), and I've got one milk-carton of yard-sale discs to sort, and THEN I'll finally be through bringing the media library back to what it once was. It's taken most of the Month of January at about 4 hours per day to get to this point. No sense crying over spilt milk, but programs that mangle your music are NOT your friends.
You never count your free-space till the ripping's done (with apologies to Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler").
Next on the "to-do" list is to hook up, calibrate, and listen to the DSPeaker room-treatment bass box.
Boom
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Post by broncsrule21 on Jan 25, 2015 13:19:09 GMT -5
Great to hear! I just started my ripping process. Only through the "A"s but my collection is only about 200 cds. (I'm guessing, I haven't actullay counted them)  |
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Post by Boomzilla on Jan 25, 2015 21:48:44 GMT -5
Grooming is done! Pre iTunes, I had almost 5 TB of music. After iTunes, I was down to 2 TB. After re-adding what was downstairs in the shelves, I'm back to 3.8 TB. The rest of the CDs are in the attic where they can stay until I have the energy and desire to go get them. I also have several hundred CDs that were duplicates, lesser performances, or music I just didn't want. These go out next yard sale.
Now, I'm backing up my data (should take a day or two). Since I have to reformat the RAID anyway for use with EXFAT, should I change from RAID-10 to RAID-6?
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Post by wilburthegoose on Dec 4, 2016 15:04:24 GMT -5
Here's how I keep groomed
* I have an ancient Sony VGP-XL1B. This is a 200 disc change that connects to a Windows PC via Firewire. It was originally meant to play a DVD collection, but it can be controlled by dbPoweramp's Batch Ripper
* I re-ripped all 2300 CDs I own to FLAC using dbPoweramp's Batch Ripper. I did have to pay for the metadata because I was ripping SO many CDs. But it was a small price to pay for quality metadata.
* I had been using JRiver, but now use Roon.
I still buy CDs for the audio quality, and when I get a new one, I'll rip to FLAC right away.
I don't ever use iTunes - for such a wonderful company, Apple produced a clunker here.
Boom - I'd try out the free trial Roon software for your awesome collection now that you've groomed it.
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Post by Boomzilla on Dec 4, 2016 15:11:46 GMT -5
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Post by hosko on Dec 4, 2016 19:36:50 GMT -5
I still think EAC is the best ripping software, grooming isn't necessary if you pay close attention during the ripping stage. ie rip, check, add metadata and store.
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Post by Loop 7 on Dec 4, 2016 21:41:34 GMT -5
I was quite happy with iTunes and very loyal to it for managing 100% of my library from the month version 1 was launched until this summer when I tried TIDAL and realized it was perfect for my ongoing desire to discover new music and hear it uncompressed.
However, this presented a dilemma because I then wanted my local and streaming content in one searchable interface. Unfortunately, Roon seemed to be the only elegant option; I'm still torn on the pricing.
I always defended Apple's lack of FLAC support and bought into their various vague reasons but, looking back, it seems childish on their part.
I now use either dbpoweramp or XLD for ripping CDs.
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Post by bluemeanies on Dec 4, 2016 22:32:47 GMT -5
My grooming if that's the term being used here is all handled by TIDAL.
I will admit that when I first signed up for TIDAL there was an issue of material stop playing and then coming on again but apparently that issue has stopped several months ago so I believe they fixed that bug.
I have not had a drop off for at least six months and although the drop-offs were rare and short lived while playing they were annoying.
The one thing I wish TIDALwould improve upon is their classical.
I also had before TIDAL iTunes Match and enjoy all my cds that I had burned to iTunes.
The sound quality of TIDAL compared to Itunes is far better at Hi-Fi standard. I will also admit that the price of $20.00 per month is a bit pricey BUT when I consider all the genres of music and the numbers of albums and videos in addition to storage...$20.00 a month is worth it. Not to mention biographies of the artist. The format display is wonderful.
Of course this is MO.
TIDAL...streaming is all a matter of opinion like everything else revolving around this hobby.
I prefer TIDAL more, especially when I read about problems with iTunes, jriver or any other software.
To each his own. Everyone make choices and I in no way trying to offend or persuade people to sign up to TIDAL.
However TIDAL does have a 30day trial and if you are a Veteran that $20.00 a month drops significantly.
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