(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.