Car Music Collection Download
Linda Fetter
I've stopped paying for music streaming services in favour of going back tobuying albums and building my own digital music collection. This article isabout some of the modern tools I'm applying to this endeavour, includingupdating my choice in audio codecs for storing the collection.
When I was small, this meant cassette tapes, or later CDs. I even had someadventurous dives into my parents' vinyl collection. As someone who grew upinterested in computers, digital music was of course my medium of choice, and Istarted up a collection of MP3 files.
At some point in the last decade, internet access became omnipresent. I stoppedcollecting new music, because it was convenient enough to open up a musicstreaming site and search for the music I wanted to listen to.
But something was lost with music streaming. My music library didn't grow tosuit my tastes anymore. I'd sometimes find that particular songs or artists weredelisted, or just not available in my country anymore. Streaming sites seemed tobecome increasingly interested in trying to get me to listen the songs they werepromoting, rather than the songs I was interested in. The "recommended for you"sections filled up with popular artists who I didn't want anything to dowith. The amount of adverts went up, and with them the value of music streamingsites dropped.
I've decided to go back to curating a big directory of music files. Not to brag,but I know a lot more about managing directories of files now than I did when Iwas in school. This article is going to look at two aspects of this musicmanagement problem:
The underlying technical challenge to with keeping your own music collection ismanaging a big directory of files. I want it to be easy to sync that directorybetween various computers and players. I care about it having a backup so Idon't lose it when things inevitably go wrong. Long time readers of this blogwill not be surprised at all to discover that my solution for this is to put itall in a Git repo. Then I can easily commit, push, pull, and all the othernormal Git actions to keep my work computer and personal computer in sync. Also,my Git server runs a daily backup, so anything I push to it is backed upautomatically!
Your music repo might be too big for your Git hosting provider. I didn't run into this because I run my own Git server (although I did need to ask my cloud provider for a bigger hard drive). You can probably also get around this by using an extension to Git called Git LFS (Large File Storage), which many Git servers support. If you're not as invested in Git as I am, you can also use other file syncing products (I don't know which are the "good" ones these days).
Over time, Git doesn't automatically store the changes to your music efficiently. I found that regularly running git gc on the server helped to keep the repo's overall size closer to just the size of the music in it. I also found that Pijul (a different version control system) keeps the file sizes under control better than Git. Unfortunately I also found that making new commits in Pijul got slow as the repo got big. I see a lot of promise in Pijul and I hope that this improves in future releases.
When you're looking at the air pressure measurements that make up an audiosignal, they aren't just random numbers. Audio follows a whole bunch of patternsjust because it was created by and moved through the real corporeal world. Audioalso has some common use cases like talking or music which have their ownpatterns. Audio codecs can take advantage of these patterns when compressingaudio.
Many codecs have different settings, where you can decrease the audio quality toget smaller files. The term "bitrate" refers to how many kilobits of file areneeded for each second of audio. Ideally, we'd like to have a really low bitratewhile the music still sounds the same.
It's really difficult to say what a good quality level to choose is, since the"quality" of sound it fairly subjective. Researchers have asked people to listento music encoded using a variety of codecs and a variety of bitrates and ratethem.
MP3 files were so ubiquitous when I was growing up that I hardly feel like Ineed to explain what they are. But with the rise of music streaming services,and people not really managing their own music files anymore, maybe it isn't aswell known anymore.
MP3 is a lossy codec which was developed in the 90s. When music started beingdownloaded on the internet (both legally and questionably legally), MP3 was thecodec people generally used. It was also the codec generally supported by earlyportable players.
This script is called to-opus.sh, and I use find to bulk run it on all thefiles that match a pattern in a directory. Be careful when trying this out. Itdeletes the input files after doing the conversion, so maybe try this on abackup of your collection at first!
It's easier than ever to download a lot of music and end up with a massivecollection. Some of it bought, some of it is just freely put on the internet fordownload by its artists. It's very easy for a collection to get out of hand overtime.
I have a regular routine on my calendar to do a little bit of curation of my collection. Every few days, I look at an album or two in my collection that I haven't listened to in a while. It's also really nice to have some dedicated time just to listen to music.
I use Picard to make sure that my file metadata and folder structure are as I like it. I don't necessarily sort things the same way now as I did ten years ago, so it's useful to have a nice tool for bulk updating things. I do this as part of the regular routine, so I don't try to look through the metadata of my whole collection at once.
I've been enjoying how once again the music that I play when I open up mycomputer is evolving to match my particular taste. I like that if I don't like asong or genre I can just not have it in my collection and it will never beauto-played next.
I like that this is a collection that I control. That I can keep backups andsync it between my computers as I see fit, even if that way is unusual likeusing a Git repo. I really appreciate having found Opus as an alternative toMP3, which can basically get my file sizes down with no noticeable loss ofquality!
You may request a title in person at the California Room on the 5th Floor of the King Library during open hours. You may call the California Room at (408) 808-2167 to have the music paged from the archives ahead of your visit.
NOTE: San José Public Library does NOT lend music nor scan, mail, or fax copies to individuals from these collections. You can also find additional sheet music to borrow through the Library Catalog.
The Music Collection, one of the largest in Oregon, brings together all the resources music scholars need in one location. The collection consists of over 40,000 music scores and parts (including instrumental methods books), 225 bound and unbound periodicals (serials, magazines, annuals, etc.), and 30,000 books on music. The Music Reference Collection supplies the tools of bibliographic and performance research, including scholarly dictionaries and encyclopedias on all types of music, published research bibliographies and repertoire guides for various instruments and ensembles, published discographies, critical score editions (including numerous complete works editions for individual composers and many collected works/Monuments of Music editions focusing on specific regions, style periods, or genres), and guides to writing about music. Areas of special collecting focus in the Music Collection include music by women and music by Oregon musicians.
In addition to the print resources described above, the Music Collection also comprises a variety of electronic resources, including e-books and e-journals, research databases for locating published music scholarship and digitized primary sources, and databases of streaming audio and video content. Digital resources currently available through the UO Libraries' web site that are relative to listeners and musicians include the Digitized Historic Sheet Music Collection site, which provides digitized copies of sheet music from our collection, including the Oregon Sheet Music Collection and the Women Composers Collection.
The Douglass Room houses over the Knight Library audio collection, comprising 19,000 compact discs, nearly 30,000 LP records, and about 2,500 cassette tapes. In addition, this room houses the library's Historic Sheet Music Collection. Other features include 4 audio listening stations, 5 Creative Musicians' Workstations computers, the Music Reference desk, a 20-seat reservable seminar classroom, a study lounge area, and 2 recording and audio production studios.
The Music Collection is home to one archival collection, the Historic Sheet Music Collection, comprising roughly 26,000 pieces of commercial popular and light classical sheet music published between 1830 and 1960. Approximately 1200 of these pieces have been digitized and are free to view and download from the Digital Sheet Music Collection.
All other archives of musicians and music-related primary sources are housed in the Knight Library's Special Collections and University Archives Department. A selected list of UO's music manuscript collections may be found in the research guide to Arts, Architecture & Literature in Special Collections Collections of particular note include:
Although Pierpont Morgan is not on record as evincing any notable interest in music, he did make two important purchases: the two earliest dated letters of the thirteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the manuscript of Ludwig van Beethoven's Violin Sonata no. 10, op. 96, in G Major.
The Morgan's music collection is the result of the generosity of several donors and lenders. In 1962 the Dannie and Hettie Heineman Collection, a small but exceedingly well-chosen selection of music manuscripts, was placed on deposit and then formally given to the Morgan in 1977. In 1968 the institution became a major repository of music manuscripts with the donation of Mary Flagler Cary's extraordinary collection of manuscripts, letters, and printed scores. In 1972 Robert Owen Lehman put on deposit his collection of manuscript scores, the greatest private collection of its kind. In 2008 the Morgan acquired the James Fuld Collection, by all accounts the finest private collection of printed music in the world.
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