How unique – a LiveJournal entry that isn’t a meticulous chronicle of my daily life 🙂
We’re in the middle of attempting to combine and sort through our MP3 library on a single server in takaza‘s office. Happily, it’s hooked into the network so it’s accessible from anywhere in the house. As we’ve combined stuff down, a nasty by-product is the discovery of duplicate files – mostly stuff that was on different computers. In some, but not all, the more recent files have been fed through MusicBrainz and properly tagged. Were that the case universally, it would be much earier to sort through the 2,500+ duplicates (out of around 17,000 tracks). It’s looking like I’m going to have to sort through manually and remove either mis-tagged or, in some cases, lower bitrate files (how the heck did that happen?). Fortunately, MediaMonkey is excellent for identifying duplicates, and the interface seems to be good for comparing the files and deciding what to keep. I expect that once we ahev everything in place I’ll set up a local library and a network library in iTunes so I can keep stuff locally on my laptop to sync with my iPod, and also have tunes on hand when I’m mobile.
It’ll be interesting to see if we have the network throughput to play MP3’s from the remote server and pipe it to the Airport Express once everything is up and running. Speaking of which, some of you may recall we were getting a nasty ground loop hum from the conection beteen the Airport Express and our stereo. After doing some research it turns out this is not a unique problem, but the solution was simple: go digital! I got an inexpensive TOSlink cable from Amazon ($4.95 with free two-day shipping!) and now everything seems to be running flawlessly there.
Dan is looking at possibly building a new desktop for use as a server, since the one we have now is a P3 500 MHz oldster he picked up from work. After skimming through the listings on Newegg I can officially say my technical know-how of desktops and motherboards and such is so far out of date it’s not funny – circa 2000 or so. This is what happens when you switch to 100% laptops, I guess. Anyway, it looks like he can build something reasonably cheaply, and it should be an interesting project.
Thanks for the Media Monkey referral. As a DJ, I have alot of dupes that just take up extra space.
I haven’t sorted out my MP3 collection in years. Thanks for the links to the software; I might look into using it to deal with mine.
I highly recommend MusicBrainz for autotagging files with the proper ID3 information. They identify the file using a “AudioFingerprint” and cross-reference it with their surprisingly complete user-entered database. I’ve fed pretty much all of our files through their system and it works about 95% of the time, which is pretty darned good for a system like that.
Wow. Ditto what everyone else said. Thanks for the links. Like I have time to worry about my music though. 🙂 If I want to splurge for Mac OS X Server, I could actually run a server, but that’s prohibitively expensive. I’ll just play my tunes through my XtremeMac Luna Speakers that Brophey and Karwood got for me.
And the icon is just one that I’ve been dying to use recently and I’ve had no reason to. I rarely go all Dorothy Parker in public anymore.
I’ve got somewhere around 4-5gb of music out on my server, which I’ve tried to keep cleaned up. I’d be up for trading MP3’s sometime if you wanted to.
I also use mp3gain, which sets all the audio-gain on the MP3’s to the same level, so you don’t get annoying volume changes.
The volume normalizer would be fantastic! Could I get a copy of that? Does it work on other audio? Could I normalize levels on, for instance, theatre pre-show music?
Did we already talk about that?
I don’t think we talked about it before. It’s a small little freeware app … http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/
The nice thing, is the gain adjust is lossless.
I think it’s mp3 only, hence the name. But you could encode the source audio as high-rate Mp3’s without much trouble.
The P3 will work fine as a server. And I’ve been running media, video photo and mp3, from my home system for years without a problem. MP3 serving is easy and the files are only a couple Meg long. Even a 802.11b network can handle that.
oof. This is Shockwave, btw.
*nodnod* Yeah, the bottleneck is going to be bandwidth, not processor speed. I would think that would hold true even for most streaming video. I guess it depends on the resolution though. Were it my hardware, I’d probably sit on for three months saying I don’t have the time, then set it up and try it out and do some testing to see what, if any, is the limiting reactant.
Well, part of it is that I want to build a new system as it has been ages since I have had that luxury.
That way we can have a central box for files and also have some power for either publications stuff or maybe try my hand at some of the nicer games out there (not that I usually game so much).
Ah, indeed, indeed. That’s a fine reason for putting together a new machine! *smiles*
I’m kind of the same way with games. I have machine that will at least run most things out there, but so very seldom actually sit down and play any of them. Even the lat two games that I found myself really obsessed with at first (Civilization Four and City of Heroes/Villains) haven’t managed to get more than foot in the door to my schedule. Ah well….
I just did a full backup of my mp3 folder, took up 3 dvd’s, 10.2gb. Remind me and Ill bring you a set of the dvd’s next time I see you.
I recently topped out 19K mp3 files, most of them as part of whole album rips, and many of which I still have yet to listen to. A couple of months ago I discovered MusicIP mixer, which is great for creating a mix of songs and exporting it to Winamp – I get to hear a lot of stuff I didn’t realize I had – I mean, I realize I have a lot of good stuff I haven’t had a chance to listen to it, and this is a good way to discover it.
I also recommend a ReplayGain program – someone mentioned mp3gain, which is supposed to be pretty good. I use the ReplayGain feature in foobar myself.
i generally go with the ars technica budget box when building a new system. inexpensive, quality goodness…