Posts
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(Re)building a music library
It’s coming up to the end of the year, a time for making plans, resolutions, projects and so on and so forth. How many of them will survive contact with 2025? Who knows. But here’s the tentative start of a new project: I’m going to rebuild my music library. And I’m going to document the process on here.
But why though?
The project? Well… I have librarian blood. It goes deep into who I am. Stuff’s got to be organised! And it really, really isn’t. I’ll get into the detail of the problem further down this post but it’s got to the point where it makes me twitch. Something must be done!
There are also loads of sensible, pragmatic reasons. Not least:
- Spotify (and equivalents) are fragile, capricious and temporary: Your favourite album might disappear next week. Your playlist might be missing key tracks. You don’t own this. It can be taken away.
- Size and space: I’m quite good at backing things up and keeping spare copies of digital information. Storage is cheap, but it’s not that cheap. It makes sense to keep only the stuff you want in your library if you’re paying to keep 3+ copies of it!
- Rediscovering old gems. A large part of this project was spurred on by the simple game of listening to every one of my vinyl records. We moved house, I got my record player set up, I got my records out of storage, and I began to work my way through relistening to each one. I found so much stuff that I’d forgotten about. Half of the point of this project isn’t really about the organisation, it’s about the increased engagement with the music.
How did we get here?
I was lucky enough to be really getting into music right at the tipping point from physical to digital media. All my first albums were on CD but we were busy ripping them to MP3 to write to a new disk, title scrawled on in marker. We were grabbing the early Arctic Monkeys demos from MySpace. I was posting on music forums, with mailing lists where we forwarded whole albums to each other (RIP AudioJunkies - much missed). I was testing how well iTunes’s windows app worked on a sprawling library (not well, it turns out, prompting a swap to FooBar2000).
Music was something to be explored and studied, and in doing so acquired. Before we had (semi-)reliable digital libraries, you had no idea if you’d ever hear that track again if it didn’t get added to your library. Right-click. Save-as.
So the library grew and grew.
How bad is the problem?
It’s really quite bad. My music library (heap?) appears to be 1TB in size, with roughly 76,000 files in it. This breaks down as 46k MP3s and 26k FLACs. That’s a lot of stuff. And I suspect that the vast majority of it isn’t stuff that I actually really want.
What can we do about it?
Start over. Sort of.
The plan from here is to build a new library. I’m going to curate it carefully from the ground-up, adding artists I like, labels I like, filling gaps where I find then. It’s going to be immaculately tagged and indexed, making exploring it a pleasure, not a chore.
It’s going to lossless (predominantly? totally?). It’s going to be organised. It’s going to be beautiful.
Quite how I do this will need some thinking about and another blog post.
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Coniston: Tarn Hows and Yew Tree Tarn
A loop walk taking in two lakes, with nice views of Coniston Water too.
Set off from Coniston and follow the Cumbria way uphill. A fork in the path leads you up into the woods, still climbing uphill, with good views back over Coniston water once you emerge.
Snake back and forth up the hillside and then follow the ridge along. We leave footpaths and follow a single-track road up through the ferns to the National Trust car park at Tarn Hows. Get coffee. It’s good.
Tarn Hows has an accessible loop path, so its easy walking for a while. Loop around very nearly the whole lake. Stop to say hello to the ducks.
Just before completing the loop, turn off and follow the water downhill (Tom Gill). There’s some good waterfalls here.
Just before hitting the road, turn and walk parallel to it. Soon there’s a crossing, follow through and emerge by Yew Tree tarn. We follow alongside it for nearly its whole length before turning to walk uphill. Skirt the edges of the woodland, looking up at the imposing Long Crag above.
From here it’s all fairly easy. Nice wide path that meanders through the valley, eventually being joined by the Cumbria way. We follow it up and over the hill, meeting the place we forked off from it at the start and then dropping down into Coniston.
Time for a beer.
Parking
We were staying in Coniston so no need, but there’s a public car park in the middle too.
Walking
14k. Quite a lot of ascent but never too much in one go. Terrain was mostly very easy.
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Skelwith Bridge and Elterwater
This is a lovely lake district loop walk that takes in a good bit of variety.
We start off riverside, walking through a close canopy of trees, making our way slowly up a hill. Eventually this gives us a good view of Skelwith Force waterfall.
Coming out of the woods, the walk cuts along the edges of hillsides, drops down to cross the valley and then works its way up to Little Langdale. There’s a nice looking pub here (The Three Shires Inn) but it was a bit early in the walk for us to stop.
We cross over into the next valley and drop down into Elterwater. Here we do stop. The Britannia serves up cool, pale beer on a hot day. And scampi fries.
From here it’s a simple, gentle stroll along Great Langdale Beck, passing Elter Water lake and then on to Skelwith bridge.
Parking
Skelwith Bridge. All the off-road parking was for customers of the various places to stay, but we had no problem parking on the side of the road.
Walking
10k over some hilly ground but never particularly steep or challenging.
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Cinema 2024 Roundup: part I
2024 has started and there are lots of good films to watch! Here’s a bunch we’ve seen at the cinema this year…
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Malton to Westow
A nice round trip from the middle of Malton down to Westow and back. The first good stretch follows the course of the river Derwent Southwards. We’ve had some miserably wet weather and then some very cold weather afterwards. It’s a good thing we did - if the lakes of mud weren’t frozen this might have been really difficult.
Eventually we part from the river and cross a couple of fields to go past St Mary’s, which is a fascinating little church in the absolute middle of nowhere. It’s sadly kept locked, but we had a look at the graveyard, which had stones dating back to the 18th century.
We stopped for a pint in the Blacksmith’s Arms in Westow (Ossett Blonde). It looks a nice pub, but was more restaurant focussed than we were going for.
The walk back was fairly straightforward - we climbed up the hill and just took a fairly straight line back to Malton. It crosses a farm or two, some fields of (very excitable!) horses and through the middle of a golf course.
Parking
Not sure! We stayed in Malton so didn’t need to park
Walking
It’s a good long way, with a lot of it along a muddy riverbank.
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