Posts
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How to build the new music library
Having decided that it’s the right time to rebuild my music library (see the previous post), I’m now starting to scratch my head over how to do it.
There are a few areas I clearly need to get my head around and consider the option available to me. These include:
- Software: how am I going to organise my library? What will I use to manage tagging files? How will I add files?
- Data: how visible will my library data be? How easily can I query it, explore it, check it? This is going to get important when it comes to considering quality control, missing releases, spotting duplicates and so on.
- Process: how am I actually going to work through the process of building this library? Where do I start? What do I prioritise?
- Goals: What do I actually want to be able to do, other than listen to the music (obviously!). Am I looking to build themed (sub)collections? To explore genres over time? To listen to specific record labels?
Some of these are easier to answer than others.
Goals
I’m trying not to overcomplicate this, but I think there are quite a lot of exciting opportunities here. I want to be able to:
- Listen to a specific album (obviously)
- Listen to a specific artist
- Listen to a specific genre
- Listen to a specific label
I’d like to be able to build and amend ad-hoc collections with ease (“music for driving”, “cooking music”, “ambient-ish-stuff-to-listen-to-while-reading”).
I’d like to be able to visualise all of the above. I love a graph.
A lesser goal - perhaps more of a nice-to-have - would be to have linking between artists, records, labels, genres. Something where you can get to similar things and explore your collection. I have no idea how feasible this is, and it’s by no means essential.
Data
I want full access to my data. I’m taking it for granted that whatever software I end up using is going to add some sort of data layer on top of file metadata tags - otherwise any query would have to read the whole library! This data must be easily accessible. I don’t mind if its a simple database written to disk or a JSON API that I can query, I just need to be able to get hold of the data independently of the library software.
The simpler, the better.
Software
I think I’m confident in my choices here. I’m sticking with Beets.
Beets has served me well for many, many years. It’s a solid bit of open source software built by music nerds for music nerds. It slurps in new files, tags them according to rules and organises them on disk. It’s backed by a Sqlite database file, which makes querying the data yourself really easy (apart from Sqlite being a pig about concurrent access…).
Process
I think I need to get the basic technical elements set up first. Something along the lines of:
- Decide where the files live
- Create a new beets library
- Build a sufficiently comprehensive beets config (consider tagging, file paths, album art, etc)
- Consider how I access the library (web ui, db export, MPD, etc)
- Import an initial batch of albums to see the process in action
After that, I think the fun really starts. It doesn’t actually matter how I approach it, I just need to keep adding to the library. I plan to do weeks where I explore a specific genre, the back catalog of a specific artist, revisit records I’ve not listened to in a while, explore something brand new. It’s all welcome.
Key decisions that need making:
- What are the tagging rules?
- What’s the filepath structure?
- What do I do with album art?
Other things to explore:
- Are there nice beets plugins for browsing a library?
- Has anyone worked on mapping MusicBrainz IDs to Spotify URNs?
- Should I commit the configs to a GitHub repo somewhere to go alongside these 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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