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Moving to Digital: Converting, organizing and managing your music collection

By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of January 6, 2006.

Over the holidays, I finally moved our entire home music collection to a digital system. Like almost anything to do with audio equipment (not to mention technology in general), the transition cost many times more dollars and time than budgeted. For anyone who is interested, I'll describe a summary of what I did. Every step was based on hours of research, mostly digging through discussion forums of unbelievably detail-oriented and knowledgeable audio geeks.

The exercise has also given me an opportunity to explore a few issues that are relevant to arenas beyond music. Because there is such a massive overlap between technology enthusiasts and music enthusiasts, music is an area where you can see the future of technology. It's a case of what von Hippel calls 'lead users' - fanatical and demanding users push the limits of existing technology and should be studied to develop innovations for the broader market.

In particular, even non-music lovers may be interested in bittorrents and social organization, as well as the problems in managing and retrieving information once you scale up the amount you're dealing with.

MOVING TO DIGITAL

Here are the steps I took:

1. Copying all of my CDs onto a big hard drive.

I bought a 250 gigabyte external hard drive to hold all of my music. That includes space for data backup as well. Of course, I will need yet another huge drive to backup the music files themselves unless I want to risk the horrible process of ripping them all again when the drive fails. To copy the music into digital format, I chose a lossless compression format.

Lossless compression means that audio files are squeezed into smaller sizes, which is better for storing on a hard drive, but no audio information is lost. A lossless song on the hard drive has exactly the same information as the same song on the original CD drive - there is no difference once you uncompress the file. It's like a zip file. MP3, on the other hand, is a 'lossy compression format' - it makes audio files smaller by eliminating 'unnecessary information'. As you can imagine, there is lots of controversy about what is unnecessary. The better your sound system and the more precise your music (e.g., classical or jazz), the more you will be bothered by compression. It's completely ridiculous that most online music services sell songs at only 128 kilobytes per second, calling it 'CD quality'. That may be okay for popular music on little headphones, but not for serious listening or archiving.

I used FLAC, an open source audio compression program, rather than Windows Media Lossless, which is the other main option. Both are good choices. Windows Media Lossless is more convenient because it is integrated into the regular Windows Media Player, available on all recent Windows PCs. FLAC has better support from some software, and Windows Media has better support from others, so it's an individual choice. The great thing about lossless compression is that if you change your mind later and decide to convert all of your files to the other format, or if one of the format you selected becomes obsolete, you can convert the files with absolutely no quality loss. And you can keep copying them into new, up to date formats every few years.

You can safely assume that any audio format you use now will be obsolete later, and the files you have carefully copied or bought will be unusable in the future. If the files are compressed and you convert them into another compressed format, you will inevitably lose some quality each time you 'transcode' from one format to another. Over time, the songs will become less and less accurate copies. As storage becomes cheaper, it makes sense to archive your music in a lossless format and compress it as needed so that you can fit more songs onto portable devices. You can always re-compress them into a new format when the old format becomes obsolete.

Some serious audiophiles recommend playing a new CD only once - to copy it into digital format. Then, they say, you should store the CD in some safe place in case you need it. A good copying program such as Exact Audio Copy has error correction, so the digital format will actually be higher quality than the original CD. (Any minor scratches or dirt will be corrected by EAC.) EAC is highly recommended by audiophiles, and it's essentially free, but a lot more complicated than Windows Media. For most people, I would suggest Windows Media Lossless, with error correction, and without volume levelling. That results in the highest quality files.

Hydrogenaudio forums are particularly valuable if you want to get details on audio compression or comparisons between different audio software.

To rip the CDs onto digital format, I used a Canadian music ripping service, Rippit, which picked up my CD boxes at my house and delivered them a few days later along with the digital copies. I did this after spending several days copying CDs and running out of time and patience. Most people use MP3 or a similar 'lossy compression format' to rip their CDs. If you do decide to use a 'lossy' compression format in order to save space or to be compatible with portable players, you have to decide between MP3 and one of the other compression formats such as WMA, AAC, OGG and so on. MP3 doesn't compress as efficiently as some of the other formats, but if you use an MP3 LAME format at 192 kilobytes per second, you probably won't be able to notice any difference between your digital files and your CDs. MP3 is the most commonly used format, and can be played on any portable device. I prefer using MP3 LAME extreme pre-sets which end up at about 240 kps using Variable Bit Rate. See hyrogenaudio forums for details, kids.

2. Dealing with copy protection.

Many of my CDs have various types of copy protection that, among other objectives, prevent owners from making backup copies. Most of the time, you can get around it by tricks like pressing the shift key as you insert the CD, or by using Slysoft's AnyDVD or CloneCD software.

In one case, I still couldn't copy one of my new CDs, so I had to download the identical CD from the internet in FLAC format using Bittorrent (with free Azareus software). Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer downloading program that allows groups of people to share their internet bandwidth for popular files. For example, it has been used to distribute massive open source software files that would otherwise require costly web fees. 'Bittorrent swarms' are the tiny pieces of data that are flying between groups of people who are all uploading and downloading the same file at the same time. While I download a file, I am also uploading it to people who don't yet have the pieces that I do, while I am downloading pieces from others. People who download files without allowing the bittorrent program to upload files to the swarm are called 'leechers' or freeloaders. They are frowned upon.

There are hundreds of different bittorrent groups, and many offer public files - some of poor quality or with viruses - that can be located through bittorrent search engines. I joined a private bittorrent group that ensures high quality files and requires each member to upload at least 80% of the bandwidth that they download. If members of the group do not contribute a minimum amount of uploading ('seeding') to the group, they are prevented from downloading any further files, and are eventually dropped from membership. New members get an initial allowance of 1 gigabyte, but have to earn more by uploading files to other members. It's an interesting social economy. Only invited members called VIPs are allowed to upload new files, and they are bound by several rules: The files must follow strict standards regarding format (e.g., only FLAC, and with cue sheets and copies of the album cover), and the uploaders must be legitimate owners of the original CDs. All members sign an online agreement that they are only downloading copies of CDs that they already own. The site is hosted in an (I think) eastern European country to prevent legal retaliation by record companies. Given the strict rules against leechers and the clear elitism among members, it's an interesting combination of anarchy at one level (re. music copying) and social/economic hierarchy at another level. It's like an exercise in political game theory.

I don't have any music files with copy protection on my system. I deleted all of the ones I had and bought songs without DRM (digital rights management). I change my computer system frequently and back up files in a few different places, and found that I couldn't copy songs that I had bought a couple of years ago. Besides, online stores limit songs to highly compressed versions (see previous section) and aren't worth the money as far as I'm concerned.

There are services that sell non-copy protected songs, such as Mp3tunes.com. Mp3tunes offers over 31,000 albums without Digital Rights Management, many of them sold directly by the artists. Artists can set their own prices, and can sell their music through an independent distributor called CD Baby. There is also a controversial Russian music service called allofmp3.com that sells whole albums for about a dollar. (Allofmp3 claims that it pays license fees and complies with Russian law...whatever that may be.) Many aspects about online music are controversial, which makes it interesting.

Copy protection is, as you've probably heard, a big issue for the music industry. The music and film industries have spent a huge amount of money trying to convince people that copying is illegal, and for the most part the public media have gone along with the industry position. If you have any interest in the issue of intellectual property, copyright and digital rights management, you may want to read these key postings:

• A speech by Cory Doctorow on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation given to Microsoft in 2004. The speech has been circulated broadly on the Internet and is available in multiple formats;
  
• Articles by legal experts that challenge the "recording industry's misinformation campaign," cited in earlier blog postings here and here;
  
• Results of a survey of musicians by Pew Trust, asking them what they thought about copying and sharing music files.

3. Playing the music

Now that the music is digitized, I can play it anywhere without lugging around CDs. I have hundreds of albums in my MP3 player which I can plug into my office speakers or headphones. I have also bought a Squeezebox which streams music on my wireless network into our wonderful new sound system. Remember that the CDs are in a lossless format, so the quality of the music is identical to the original CD. The Squeezebox has a pretty good Digital to Analog Converter (also called a DAC - every CD player has one, and some are higher quality than others) that transforms the digital data into a format that can be fed into the high-fidelity amplifier. A remote control allows me to browse through all of the albums in the collection, create playlists, or mix the music by genre, artist, year or style.

4. Organizing and managing the music

I now have about 10,000 songs digitized. This presents a problem with the management of information. With CDs, most people end up having their favourite CDs on the top of the pile, and the least favourite in the back of the drawer. Now I have to scroll through the dreck I bought in a moment of madness 10 years ago while looking for something I want to hear now. On the other hand, I don't want to throw away the music.

This is a problem of organization, archiving and information management that emerges when you have more information than you can easily remember, and when it's in a form that you can't just conveniently forget or ignore. After a few weeks of thinking about it, I've decided to have two libraries of music: my personal collection that I know I like, and another library that acts as an archive. I can pull albums from the archive or deposit albums into it.

I'm also rating songs and albums to be able to find favourites quickly, and creating playlists. This requires a good management program. MediaMonkey is fantastic - free, powerful, and way easier to use than Windows Media Player and Winamp. It edits tags, organizes music, plays it, copies CDs, moves files...it's wonderful.

In addition, I'm experimenting with MusicMagic, a free program that creates mixes based on 'seeds' that you identify. For example, if I select any song in my collection and then click the 'Mix' button, it creates a playlist of songs that are like that song. I can select a group of songs as seeds, and modify the instructions for the mix to select more variety or less variety. It's a great way to explore your collection.

So that's what I did over my holiday.

Happy New Year

**********
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems

gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net

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