How do you share digital music?

[JeremyFife]

Hi all,
I'd be interested to know what you think about this.
Prompted by my increasing switch to digital (streaming, some purchasing) from physical media and following two cathartic events; getting rid of my CDs (kept the vinyl) and inheriting my father's record collection.

My music collection describes one aspect of me, and who I was over time - my adolescent tastes differ from where I'm at now, but picking out e.g. Marillion's first album brings back a headrush of memories. Similarly, digging through Dad's crackly vinyl brings me closer to him, and leads me down entirely new musical avenues.

How do you do that with digital? How do you share this very personal archive? I'm wondering what my kids will discover about the music that matters/mattered to me.

I listen mostly to streamed music, a lot of new stuff, but I find myself buying 'placeholders' - a record or a FLAC download - just to remind me of key moments.
In a few years I may forget how awesome that Pharoe Sanders / Floating Point is, but I'd kick myself if it wasn't there for me (or my kids) to stumble over again and to re-experience the beauty.

Rambling, but serious too. How do you approach this, or is music just a personal discovery?

 

[Andretti60]

Music is personal, like all hobbies and interests. My wife and I are both avid readers and music listeners, but we have different tastes. If your kids like music they will be interested on what you were listening maybe out of curiosity, maybe they will start listening to Karma (I like Pharoe Sanders as well) and then forget about it. Like in Blade Runner, memories will be lost like tears in the rain. Enjoy your music.

 

[freemansteve]

Us coffin-dodgers ponder this for all our digitized photos, films, fave TV shows, DVDs, household records (not vinyl!), manuals, books and so on, as well as music, prior to our clog-popping event.

In my case I have everything on a RAID/NAS unit, but with triple backups, all extremely well organized.

When the day comes, my son can take the box (8" x 7" x 5") and plug it into his LAN. And at some point, there will be faster/cheaper/smaller ways to store the stuff, transferred from that box and he can chuck the old hardware.

I have some cloud storage as well. It's just photos that if ever lost, would mean I'd be hacked to pieces!

The problem is 6+ TB of stuff in total. It turns out that spinning rust is still the cheapest option and with enough redundancy is pretty safe. All up I have about 16 HDDs and 8 SSDs, excluding all the ones in various PCs (I used to work in the business, and I know storage well, albeit on peta-byte scale systems, hahaha!), and I'd say that maybe one a year in my set needs replacing. I also get the single-point-of failure problems, so I'm looking at a cheap, old PC case to use as a new RAID box in my son's flat, so I can sync my data "off-prem" to him.

Commercial cloud storage is not yet there for me, based on price, privacy and guaranteed internet availability.

 

[freemansteve]

At risk of being boring, I would add that my wife and I lived for 5.5 years on a caravan+pickup truck, travelling between Durness and Southern Iberia, summer to winter, with no house to live in. That was only 2.5 years ago, and we now have a modest house. The same RAID unit served on that caravan, especially when there was no internet, but my point here is that we massively downsized to live like that -from a massive 6 bed house, selling at least 2,500 things on eBay. It makes you think about not leaving piles of junk for your offspring to sort out - it's a big headache, so make the decisions easy for them!

 

[JeremyFife]

At risk of being boring, I would add that my wife and I lived for 5.5 years on a caravan+pickup truck, travelling between Durness and Southern Iberia, summer to winter, with no house to live in. That was only 2.5 years ago, and we now have a modest house. The same RAID unit served on that caravan, especially when there was no internet, but my point here is that we massively downsized to live like that -from a massive 6 bed house, selling at least 2,500 things on eBay. It makes you think about not leaving piles of junk for your offspring to sort out - it's a big headache, so make the decisions easy for them!

That's a good approach ... I did something similar by getting divorced twice but your way is better!

 

[Keened]

FLAC encoded music + Photos = ~2TB of data at most. That's small enough that you could just buy some enclosed SSDs, make a few copies and toss one in your safe deposit box/leave with your family lawyer, keep one on hand as a backup, and then keep 1 as the live collection.

The real issue with digital storage is bit rot. The only cure for bit rot is a file system that actively fights it (so BTRFS, ZFS, etc), making sure the read/write isn't subject to environmental interference (ECC RAM), and using copy software that checksums (rsync works, but the ZFS volume copies also do so).

3 copies of the data, 2 different locations, 1 offline.

 

[Jmudrick]

400GB micro SD cards are cheap, I copy FLAC for my friends

 

[ZolaIII]

I use old Pentium J laptop which I equped with 2 TB Samsung 860 Pro SATA SSD drive. Disc will survive at least next 15 years (probably much longer as those used to come with 10 years warranty later demoted to five) and I don't backup it. It serves me as player - DSP and WiFi streamer. Not very convenient but stand alone system and portable. When the laptop dies disc is going to another one.
I tried couple of streaming services (Spotify, Google, Amazon, Dazer...) they mostly don't have what I need (neither local music I like or comprehensive DSP tool chain - player integration) and probably never will so it's up to me and my private colectin which I tend to improve (music, pictures, articles, tags...).
Kids will remember only what you preserve and present to them, so far little whose done regarding this.

 

[RayDunzl]

"How do you share digital music?"

I invite Audio Buddy over, and we have a beer et al, then I play it loudly enough so we both can hear it.

These digits are waiting for his next visit, still unopened:

 

[Chrispy]

For me my vinyl collection as well as optical disc collections are definitely indicative of my music timeline and general favorites....and my subscription streaming is mostly about adding to my collection so they're somewhat different areas as to content to begin with. Am single, no kids and my younger brother and sister don't really care, doubt either of them have any interest in my physical media collections at least from past conversations.

 

[olderman]

"How do you share digital music?"

I invite Audio Buddy over, and we have a beer et al, then I play it loudly enough so we both can hear it.

These digits are waiting for his next visit, still unopened:

Well, when are you going to invite me?

 

[RayDunzl]

Well, when are you going to invite me?

I'm still trying to figure out how to operate the new telephones.

Does it matter that this waste of time is what makes a life for you, hmm?

Maybe I could use your help.

Sunday? Wow!
Sunday, Saturday,
Tuesday through Monday,
Monday,
Sunday, Saturday!

You know it's tough now that I have embraced a new time wasting trend...

Life is so much better
When there's some little something to do!

Not always.

This week is a bit taxing.

 

[Prana Ferox]

Hi all,
I'd be interested to know what you think about this.
Prompted by my increasing switch to digital (streaming, some purchasing) from physical media and following two cathartic events; getting rid of my CDs (kept the vinyl) and inheriting my father's record collection.

My music collection describes one aspect of me, and who I was over time - my adolescent tastes differ from where I'm at now, but picking out e.g. Marillion's first album brings back a headrush of memories. Similarly, digging through Dad's crackly vinyl brings me closer to him, and leads me down entirely new musical avenues.

How do you do that with digital? How do you share this very personal archive? I'm wondering what my kids will discover about the music that matters/mattered to me.

I listen mostly to streamed music, a lot of new stuff, but I find myself buying 'placeholders' - a record or a FLAC download - just to remind me of key moments.
In a few years I may forget how awesome that Pharoe Sanders / Floating Point is, but I'd kick myself if it wasn't there for me (or my kids) to stumble over again and to re-experience the beauty.

Rambling, but serious too. How do you approach this, or is music just a personal discovery?

This is one reason I stick with physical media. Leafing through someone's record or CD collection feels like an adventure. I just can't see any romance in navigating around someone's hard drive.

(I'd also take this opportunity to note even as I age and appreciate avant-garde jazz more, Sanders's "The Creator Has A Master Plan", genius as it is, remains a real struggle to sit through and appreciate.)

 

[olderman]

I'm still trying to figure out how to operate the new telephones.

Does it matter that this waste of time is what makes a life for you, hmm?

Maybe I could use your help.

Sunday? Wow!
Sunday, Saturday,
Tuesday through Monday,
Monday,
Sunday, Saturday!

You know it's tough now that I have embraced a new time wasting trend...

Life is so much better
When there's some little something to do!

Not always.

This week is a bit taxing.

Well done Sir!

 

[RayDunzl]

(I'd also take this opportunity to note even as I age and appreciate avant-garde jazz more, Sanders's "The Creator Has A Master Plan", genius as it is, remains a real struggle to sit through and appreciate.)

Pharoah Sanders.

The first saxophone to which I attached the adjective heinous, and could be described as exhibiting heinousness. Then I wondered if there was another word with the letters "nousness" in it. Wait! Could there be a word ending in nousnessness? Heinousnessness? Others?

Being pre-Google, I soon called it a day.

heinousness: the quality of being shockingly cruel and inhumane. synonyms: atrociousness, atrocity, barbarity, barbarousness. type of: inhumaneness, inhumanity. the quality of lacking compassion or consideration for others.

Contained in the Hotel Overture a little past seven and a half minutes into it, on Escalator over the Hill, available on Spotify for your listening torture.

Listening to the whole album would be a nice project. if you haven't. At least play the whole tune, as it is an intro to the rest, composed by Carla Bley, a personal favorite, introduced to me by @olderman.

 

[freemansteve]

"Bit rot" is is only really a problem for disks tucked away unattended for many years. You have to have a means of rotating disks in and out of your backup chain, even if they are off-site.

On individual drives you can also run something like "DriveFresh" which reads and rewrites every sector, and on a RAID system, simply schedule a regular RAID scan which repairs any stripe that contains flakey data.

 

[Deleted member 46664]

Hi all,
How do you do that with digital? How do you share this very personal archive? I'm wondering what my kids will discover about the music that matters/mattered to me.

I can't direct you to the software, right now, but there are Phono to USB adaptors and software to allow you to import your vinyl to digital formats (usually MP3). Years ago I transcoded my vinyl collection and passed it on to a friend. I now have the collection on my hard disk and enjoy it very much.

How to share it with friends? Easy ... I set up a small server and let them download it from there.

 

[JeremyFife]

Thanks all. Consensus is archive and backup of the media I own, which is fair. I do use a combination of Cloud storage and my own NAS / RAID ... that's straightforward.

I was more wondering about my streaming choices and playlists etc. Makes sense though that, as I'm essentially just renting these, it's not feasible to share them in the way I was thinking.

If something matters to me, I'll just buy a copy ( or write a memoir )

Cheers

 

[Axo1989]

We usually share links to albums or tracks, or just refer to names and titles. Everyone can stream from whichever platforms they use. Looking at someone’s 'recently played/added' etc is more appealing than flipping through physical media tbh.