How to maintain familiarity and control over a ever growing music library

My digital music library now consists of nearly 1,000 albums, accessed through foobar. Because of this size, some good albums fall through memory's cracks and are unlistened to for long periods. Others are over-listened to because of chance or over-worn memory grooves. While in the past I could create playlists to suit moods or situations in real time based on memory, I've now lost this familiarity with my collection and struggle to spontaneously assemble my music in a meaningful way.

I also suspect that switching from CDs to digital accelerate the estrangement with my collection. I'm no expert in cognition but surely having a physical object to associate with music aids memory retention?

Obviously much of this loss of familiarity is inevitable with a growing collection. But there must be some ways to offset it and maintain control over ones music library.

How have you managed?

 

Roon....

 

Some of this comes down to how you curate and display your library. With physical media, do you have dedicated shelves sorted by genre/alphabetically, or a collection of shoeboxes and miscellaneous piles strewn about? If digital, do you have album art and all metadata in a database for easy viewing, or are all your filenames and folders crammed haphazardly ala Napster days? (or perhaps you stream now and the world's music is already sorted for you and you just need to learn how to use the search engine... edit: nevermind that, let the internal spybots and heuristics give you recommendations instead)

 

My collection started physical and so I ripped it and organized it neatly by album. I've got album art for everything too. I've continued to be diligent above organizing my collection while moving to buying 99% of my music digitally.

The one thing that could be improved in my metadata is genre. However I listen to so much genre-bending music that the task of cleaning that all up seems impossible. For example I've got some music that's Cuban-Jewish Jazz. Do I create that genre? If I have 100 genre tags is is the tag really that useful?

 

Agreed, Roon is great. I organized a couple group buys and was able to get the 10% off the lifetime cost. Still expensive but now that I have it again, so glad I do.

 

How does Roon get around this problem?

 

Best bet is to sign up for two weeks and see how it automatically sorts your library how you want it. Metadata is where Roon does exceptionally well. I can't or won't guarantee you'll be satisified but if something is going to do it well, it's Roon.

 

I use Roon and for the most part like it, but I face the same problem. Roon's "Discover" feature helps a bit but I wish it drew some juice from Roon's much improved recommendation algorithm (which powers "Roon Radio").

 

Two things I've tried are 1) browsing by album art rather than just words and 2) shuffling by album rather than song.

1) Is nice but the problem is you can only see a couple of albums on a screen at one time. A better way to go through albums visually on a screen would be helpful.
2) I've just started. I hope this will help uncover great but forgotten albums.

 

I like MusicBee. Foobar is the old standby, but as you have noticed, the organization is less than stellar.

MusicBee, for the most part, will scan your entire library, organize by artist, then automatically create thumbnails of all of the album art. The interface can show you all of the artist thumbnails and by clicking on one, displays all the albums you have by that artist.

It becomes very easy to scan throughout the artists, pick one you're not familiar with, and then sample the albums that show up. The listening experience is enhanced with a "Now Playing" tab that shows random cycling of the artist's images and the lyrics of the current selection playing. A right-click gives a pop-up menu that lets you select links for the artist from Wikipedia, lastFM, or YouTube to almost instantly give you additional info and works by the artist.

Best of all, MusicBee is free and incorporates good drivers like WASAPI. It also has an exclusive mode that will minimized dropouts on your PC.

I fiddled with it for a year or two before finally deciding it was a better choice for my own listening. This was because the music stream is as accurate as Foobar, but also because it was so easy to find artists in my collection that I'd been over-looking or forgot.

 

My problem with Roon storing is with foreign albums. I have a major collection of 80s/90s Video Game soundtracks from Japan. The Roon metadata will not find any info on those albums, so it makes sorting them by name hard.

Personally I sort my digital music collection by making folders and group them as such. So for example, if I want to look up any albums by Chris Isaak on my hard drive, I do this:

I love Foobar due to how low-weight the program is. I don't want all the fluffy features of album art and stuff, just something that plays my songs in bit-perfect settings.

 

I hear you, I'm in exactly the same boat. Somewhere north of 1000 albums something switched, almost like my brain gave up trying to catalog it mentally. Like a limit was exceeded above which it decided the old strategy wouldn't work.

I have release date, genre, source (where I got it) album art for everything. I find looking at source , say Qobuz, helps remind me of newer downloaded stuff that tends to slip out of mind.

Sometimes I also randomize the entire collection to see what pops up.

Genre is less helpful. Not useless, but not the killer browsing attribute I thought it would be.

Roon didn't work for me way back when and now I have no more trial left. I must say I resent their pricing model so I'm not all thrilled about it. Maybe I need to give it another fair shake but I'm not convinced I can't solve the problem with JRiver.

I'll get a bit intentional about it and see what I come up with. It's been a sort of side issue that I've been avoiding.

 

I've installed this and will use it for awhile. At the very least it will change up my music playing algorithms for a little bit. Thanks.

 

I find "Random Album Selection" is very helpful to rediscover gems in my 800-odd albums.
That's certainly something you couldn't really do when collections were only physical.

 

Folder view. I don't even bother tagging anymore. I organize by folders: Genre/Artist - Album using AIMP.

I used Roon for awhile and it's really nice but ultimately, had the same issue as the OP with it. Folder view fixed that for me with over 10k albums.

 

I'll second the vote for Musicbee... I demo'd various applications extensively a few years ago when I went digital (~800 albums) and found it the easiest/most complete of the non-Roon options.

I liked Roon a lot when I demo'd it, but I just couldn't bring myself to spring for the $500 when MusicBee was free and well supported by the developer. I also don't like the fact that Roon has to be local, rather than accessible via the interweb like I can do with MusicBee and Plex.

However, now that I'm thinking about going with Raspberry Pi's in a couple locations in the house, I'm probably going to revisit roon...

 

Do you search or scroll?

 

I have always disliked using folders to organize music. No matter how I did it it lead me to listening to the same music over and over again. With Roon, I can look at albums, tracks, artists, genres, what I have played the most, or what I have played the least. I can look at albums or tracks that a particular person has credits. Then there is the music discovery I get with Tidal/Qobuz. Plus, Roon lets me play music all over my house , garage, and outdoors on all kinds of devices. Roon is not perfect but it is the best I have found for me.

I am mostly listening to full albums now and rarely listen to play lists. This has expanded my appreciation for artists that don't have a lot of top 40 hits but do have incredible music that makes the most sense and impact when full albums are played.

I often go through my Library based on what has been played the least and build album play lists based on what I find near the front of the list.

 

Every once and a while, play something random from your collection.

It helps...

 

I have used artist folders for years and got up to a little over 2 TB of lossless music. For the last few months though I have been pruning my music quite a bit. If I have not listened to an artist in a year or two, I dump an album or two from an artist onto my phone and play the album on a walk. If I can get through it and I think I might play it again, I keep it. Otherwise it is gone.

I find that I have bought lots of music over the years and my tastes have changed a bit, so lots of stuff may never get played in my lifetime. So I figure why keep it, just streamline things. I still like discovering new music though via Tidal and other services, but like that I have pruned my owned music back to a bit over 1 TB now.