How big is your library? How do you listen to your library?

[6b6561]

I just got curious, how much music are you people carrying around? I have close to 1000 albums, 14000 tracks in .mp3 format that consumes 110GB of storage. In addition to that I have 80 of my favorite albums as duplicates in flac format. My collection is "legal", mostly CD's collected and ripped over the years.

I mostly listen to albums, either by directly picking the album that I want to listen to or by running @flyingdutchmans Playlist manager as a launcher, that allows me to quickly randomize the album list and then choose one of the albums to listen to.

In addition to this I have two playlists for individual tracks, Favorites with ~200 tracks and then my Maybe list. New tracks are added to Maybe, and after a while they might be promoted to Favorites or dropped.

[VaiMalaviya1233]

In my current phone I have about 980 tracks, my library was about I think 2000-3000 tracks 3 years ago but after update I received for my phone It causes bootloop so every once in a while(6-9 months) I have to factory reset phone which made me lose so many data as bootloop happens unexpectedly leaving no time to backup so I just get it through seal or most of the time I don't now use local music because of this issue instead use ViMusic.

[ihaspei]

i got like 10k songs, some complete discographys of artists that i like, and the test are albums and just songs that i like.

my daily listen it's based on playlists, but sometimes i listen by genre. i listen to albums when i add them to my library and choose which song goes to what playlist.

i got more songs and albums to add to my library but i don't do it yet 'cause i like have all the tags correctly, if there's a single on the album i need the single cover art and the album cover for the header on hi-res (1500x1500 max and 1000x1000 min) on Poweramp and scan them for the replay gain, so it takes time and i don't have it so much lately.

[Bencherished]

13 hours ago, 6b6561 said:

In addition to that I have 80 of my favorite albums as duplicates in flac format. @flyingdutchman

Why duplicates? I think the duplicates will be taking up space, if you can hear the difference between flac and any other file formats you have, why not delete the worst? After all, Poweramp can play both. 

Bencherished. 

[6b6561]

11 hours ago, ihaspei said:

i got more songs and albums to add to my library but i don't do it yet 'cause i like have all the tags correctly

I always have a backlog of albums to add, as I like to dig through thrift stores, flea markets... It takes time to add albums, but I have a good workflow but takes easily 20-30 albums for a single disc, find a good cover, check the tags, rip as mp3 and flac, add BPM, normalize, add to discogs, import into iTunes and PA. Some synergy can be achieved by ripping a couple of albums in the same go.
Why rip out only a single as most of the work is anyway done at that point and you could rip the rest in the same go?

[6b6561]

9 hours ago, Bencherished said:

Why duplicates? I think the duplicates will be taking up space, if you can hear the difference between flac and any other file formats you have, why not delete the worst? After all, Poweramp can play both. 

I'm nowadays always ripping in both mp3 and single file flac images with embedded cue sheet and album cover, just so that I don't have to spend the time on physically re-ripping in case the future brings a new format. I wish I would have done this from the start. Today I have around 100GB of mp3 files and 270GB of flac on my NAS.

I'm carrying around both iDevices and Android, so the easiest is to have all the mp3's imported in iTunes and synchronized with Foldersync to my Androids as mp3 is fine for 99% of my listening on the road. This makes it also easier to share playlists between the devices as I always have all tracks available and in the same path. But occasionally I have the luxury to sit down somewhere quiet, lean back and just listen and that's when I pull out some favorite album as flac.

Do I hear a difference between a VBR (-V0) mp3 and flac, probably not, guess it's more of a placebo effect.

Flacs are also used at home if I want to listen to an album, I'm using hifi-cast to cast to my stereo where the digital to analog is handled by the receiver, this is basically the same as playing a CD digitally connected to the stereo.

[andrewilley]

I have about 70GB of audio files, almost all of them MP3, on my 256GB SC Card. 367 folders, 8814 files. No CUE files (other than for testing purposes). I have a few playlists for specific tasks, such as shortlists of favourite songs by specific artists, ambient music for night-time listening, overall favourite songs, etc. 

Andre

[6b6561]

Meme borrowed from somewhere...

 

[ChildOfTheMoon]

I recently got a 128 GB micro SD card for my phone (android) and now I currently have 3,500 exactly songs. Mix of lossy and lossless (16bit and 24bit)

[groose]

Usually rotate the stuff on my phone from my library stored on a harddrive, using a 1tb one now but its gonna be full soon

[RagingBuddhist]

I am roughly 4/5ths through ripping 3000+ CDs to wav files, all of which will easily fit on a 1tb microsd card on my phone. I haven't bothered with a home stereo system in years (picture is OLD!) because I'm well past the years where I needed to blast out the windows. My phone and a pair of Anker Motion X600s sound just fine to me (for now). At some point in the near future I'll be buying a high end DAP, probably a FiiO.

It's because of how poorly MediaMonkey handled the file sorting and the tags on the wav files that I stumbled onto Poweramp when looking for something better. And I will say, in the week that I've had it, Poweramp has been a joy to use. The settings options are incredible!

Edited September 13 by RagingBuddhist

[6b6561]

Quick math, so that's roughly 30 shelf meters, divided by 5, shelf is around 6m... I have 650 CD's in boxes at the moment, trying to find a good shelf for it but I guess it will be down to building something.

My home "stereo" is also a quite simple thing, Jamo P404 active speakers paired with an Chromecast Audio, the good thing with this is that the CCA allows me to keep the signal digital all the way to the Jamo which will handle the DA conversion.

I'm also every now and then looking at getting a DAP, but honestly I don't think that would improved the audio quality over what my phones provides as the source is anyway a ripped CD and it would be just another device to keep synchronized... so I guess it would end up sitting on a shelf.

I rip to flac which is also lossless, benefits as I see with flac is that the files are a little bit smaller and supports tagging and folder art.

[andrewilley]

4 hours ago, RagingBuddhist said:

I am roughly 4/5ths through ripping 3000+ CDs to wav files

Wow, that's some task! But I agree there's little point in having CDs that just sit on the shelf if you don't also have digital versions for listening.

I would question the use of WAV as a playback format though, as it's more of an editing format rather than a listening one. I think I'd batch-convert those WAVs into FLACs (also a lossless format) which are more suited to listening and in which tagging is better supported. Definitely a task to set going and leave running in the background for a few days though!

Andre

[MotleyG]

6 hours ago, RagingBuddhist said:

I am roughly 4/5ths through ripping 3000+ CDs to wav files, all of which will easily fit on a 1tb microsd card on my phone

That math sounds about right. I'm currently using a 1TB card for my library of 2250 albums and the current size is almost 750GB. However I am using ALAC for mine as I have both Android and iOS devices.

As was already suggested by @andrewilley you may want to consider converting your WAV files to a lossless format such as FLAC or similar. Besides saving some space to ensure your 3k+ albums actually fit on the planned 1TB drive, you will also be able to use more of the metadata options for tags like Artist, Album, Title, etc. While WAV does allow for some basic tags, there is far more support in the lossless formats and more devices will be compatible too.

[RagingBuddhist]

4 hours ago, andrewilley said:

I would question the use of WAV as a playback format though, as it's more of an editing format rather than a listening one.

TBH, I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that WAVs are for editing and FLAC is for listening but I decided to use wav files for just that reason - in case files needed editing down the road. That's already become apparent as I've already had to boost the db level on a couple of discs.

1 hour ago, MotleyG said:

...you will also be able to use more of the metadata options for tags like Artist, Album, Title, etc. While WAV does allow for some basic tags, there is far more support in the lossless formats and more devices will be compatible too.

Somehow that surprised me. I use mp3tag and it does just fine with the metadata and album art. Everything is being sorted and categorized just as I need it. A big shout out to albumartexhange.com for helping me avoid having to scan every cover. Device compatibility isn't a concern with me. I doubt anyone is going to make WAV files obsolete any time soon and as long as something as relatively simple as a phone will play them, I'm good.

[6b6561]

Adding Replay Gain to a wav file will change the audio data and is not lossless, while adding RG information to mp3 or flac files is done by adding the information to the meta data of the file.
 

[andrewilley]

I know FLAC, MP3, etc can have an overall pre-gain value within the header data, which does not change anything about the actual bytes of encoded audio data at all, it just tells the final player to apply an extra boost (or reduction) to the whole file (can also be applied per frame if you wish). It works in very much the same way that ReplayGain tags do, but with less end-user adjustment control. I don't think WAV offers that facility (it's a more basic format) so if you increase the gain of a WAV file then every sample of audio data on the file gets changed by the relevant percentage and is then saved back into a completely updated file.

The WAV format goes back to the very earliest days of digital audio files, and is just a sequential set of bytes (well, words for 16-bit audio) of audio data, one value for every audio sample as per a CD's contents if it is a rip - e.g. two bytes per channel times the sampling rate. It was never designed to contain niceties like tag data, cover artwork, etc, but that has been bolted on later and mostly seems to work.

FLAC is a more sophisticated format, somewhat compressed in terms of storage space but still completely lossless as far as the audio data is concerned. The original signal can be 100% restored if you want to edit it later, although it might be a slower process than when dealing with WAVs due to the decompressing overhead. It uses the Vorbis tagging system which is very versatile.  

Andre