This weekend I started a little project that has been

on my todo-list for ages: sorting and cleaning up my

digital music collection. Over the years I've ended up

with several copies of my music library on several

machines with various levels of completeness. Some

parts were rips of my CDs in ogg format which I made in

the late 90s and early 2000s. Others were in MP3

format, also ripped from my CD collection, some MP3

files were bought from 7digital.com[1] and a couple of

albums were copied from some of my collegues. I've

always resisted to copy tons of music files from the

internet, especially when Napster & co. where at its

top. Though I seldom play a CD these days (except from

a few in my car), I like having the cover with lyrics

and physical box available.

The metadata of my collection was questionable at best,

mostly without coverart, lyrics, and the song naming

was inconsistent. I've played the the excellent beets

utility [2] before, but never came about to organize my

whole collection. Until this weekend.

I'm still not finished, but so far everything is

looking good, so I guess in a couple of hours (okay, to

be honest, it might be days) I will have a completly

tagged music library on my FreeNAS box. From there, I

can sync the collection to my various devices. One of

my challenges is that many CDs in my collection are

rare Jazz records where music metadata is not always

available, so I might end up contributing some data to

musicbrainz.org.

I still like the OGG format, and luckily my litte MP3

player, a SanDisk Sansa Clip 8GB [3] supports this

filetype, so does the player in my car. I like the

Sansa Clip a lot, especially when going for a walk and

I don't want to carry my phone with me. It's super

lightweight and the battery lifetime if quite

good. More than enough for a weekend of music

listening. I also have an old 1st generation iPod nano,

but unfortunately, it does not play OGG files. I'd like

to write a little script to copy a random selection of

files given a genre to my Sansa Clip, but this has to

wait for another time.

Occationally, I also stream music. After years with

Spotify, I wanted to try something new and a little

while ago I switched to Deezer, which has an excellent

choice of jazz-records. I mostly use Deezer for

discovery of new albums. After a while I usually end up

buying DRM-free digital files from 7digital.com.

I'd like to (re-)jump on the Vinyl bandwagon, but space

in my home is limited and most of my music listening

happens on the road. Besides, I already have enogh

stuff to look after.

[1] https://7digital.com

[2] https://beets.io/

[3] Sansa clip review

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