1000 Albums

Today I hit a minor bragging point milestone, I have now copied 1000 of my audio albums (that I have purchased) to my hard drive for playback with Roon.

 I wasn't thinking this was a lot, but some might.  I know audiophiles with 4000 or more albums on their hard drives.  And lots of audiophiles, me included, have over 1000 commercial albums in some combination of formats such as LP's, CD's, tapes, MP3 files, etc.  But it takes some work even to get CD's copied to the hard drive correctly   (though I now have a fairly streamlined and decent process using XLD), with the metadata correct, in the best folder, and checked for errors and avoiding duplication.  (I'm figuring 20 minutes median average time when there are no issues, but sometimes it can literally take days of cleaning and stuff to get a good copy.  This is especially true of digital copies of vinyl albums.  But even plain old CD's can be a lot of work.  Recently I tried to get around the strong buzz made when I was reading a particular CD.  So I copied at 4x onto a CD-R using my SmartAndFriendly CD copier.  Bu when I read that copy onto my computer with XLD, it had lots of Accurip errors, only one track was copied correctly.  So I went back to the original CD and copied it using my computer DVD+R drive.  Even with the loud buzz it copied correctly.  I'm now a bit worried about the SmartAndFriendly copier which I thought was perfect.  This isn't the first time I've made an "inter-copy" and in previous cases it was the best solution.  To make sure my backup disc wasn't harmed in this process, I removed the backup hard drive from on top of the DVD+R drive, after turning off backup and shutting it down.  Etc.  But usually it's the metadata which causes the most grief with CD's.)

Large numbers of audiophiles have access to millions of albums online through services such as Tidal, QOBuz, Apple, Google, Youtube, and others.

But somehow "my" albums are much more important.  If I go randomly searching through catalogues such as Tidal, I may have to listen to quite a few albums before I find one I like, or even tolerate, even in categories I think are good.

Sadly, this might even be true of a few "my" albums.

And this got me thinking of back in the early days of my audio hobby.

It has seemed to me like other people always knew exactly what albums to buy, and which to play, but this was never true for me.  I struggled at record stores.  How did anyone ever know what to buy?  More than once I had a friend pick out good albums for me at a record store.

Now my tastes were broad, but also very peculiar.  Never much listening to AM radio (which was BIG when I was a kid) and avoiding commercial rock and pop stations on FM, I was not tuned-in to any stream of recommendations like cool kids were.

I mostly liked classical music, always touted by my mother.  Though it seemed like most of our records were show tune albums, beloved by my older sister.  I only started listening to the radio in 7th grade (after buying a clock radio, I quickly progressed audiophile fashion to having my growing "hifi" turned on by a timer) but didn't do much until 1969 or so, when I bought a reel to reel tape recorder from a friend who was leaving state.

THAT was when I really got into listening to FM radio, at least for awhile.  It always helps to have "something to do."  But the radio I listened to was almost entirely non-commercial stations like KPFK and KCRW.  So I still wasn't getting tuned into ongoing popular music (or even "classical" music).  The tape recorder had a foot pedal to turn pause on and off.  So I'd have it set up in "record pause" and press the footpedal, by the side of my bed, when I heard something really good, and I created tapes of the best "songs" and "episodes."  But as would be true with VCR's and DVR's decades later, it's very likely I spent more time lovingly creating these tapes, than actually listening to them.

I only learned of the Beatles because that same friend who sold me the reel to reel tape recorder, and then he was gone, and my next friend was more into Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, which I didn't much care for.

So I really didn't get connected to popular music in high school.  Only classical music, which I was performing as a student cellist in the High School Orchestra.  And whatever I happened to hear otherwise casually.

But I had two different sets of friends introduce me to Pink Floyd when I was in College.  I heard Dark Side of the Moon in December 1973 while getting high on marijuana for the first time in a friend's dorm room.  Later some really cool girl invited me to a party when Wish You Were Here was being rolled out.

In the late 70's one friend of mine really loved "The Wall."  And yet another got me into Steely Dan.  A very nice (but way out) guy I only saw a few times got me into Eno.  Also some were into Progressive and Electronic Rock (King Crimson, ELO).

So that's about it, about all I knew, in popular music, by the time I was 24 (1980).  You couldn't just look up endless articles about any band online like you can today.  You either kept up with radio, relevant magazines, or had lots of cool friends.

I met an elderly Jazz Musician in the 1980's, and he helped me pick out some albums.  And some girl I danced with did likewise.  Finally I was liking New Age Jazz generally, which featured prominently on a San Diego radio station.  I might have bought a Windham Hill record or two, but somehow it wasn't as catchy as the radio.  (Only about 10 years ago, I rediscovered what I'd been missing all along.  Shadowfax and Pat Metheny.)

Now I know a lot more, obviously.  But still it's hard to find new things, and I simply hate all the recommendations given to me by streaming services.  They don't know my taste at all, or actually it seems like they know exactly what I like and then insist on giving me the exact opposite.

Firstly, for more of the time, I'm looking for music without words, and that's virtually impossible to find on streaming services.  There is No Such Category, since any kind of music can come with words, especially when you venture beyond known classical composers.  I myself create Electronic Music (including my latest album, Mythic Rocks, now on all streaming services) with no words, but if I try the category of Electronic Music on any particular streaming service, nearly every song recommended will come with words...  I've even come up with several conspiracy theories to explain this.  They need the words for subliminal brainwashing of some kind.

Anyway, that's one reason why it's good to have your own personal collection of music, though nowadays you could just have use the "playlist" or "favorites" or "My Album" features of whatever streaming service(s) or music manager(s) you are using, and accomplish the vital "pre-selection" of music without actually "owning" anything.

But then there may be things that are hard or impossible to do.  Right now I mostly listen using my mplay playlist generator (which now features splay and tplay for even better play management) and it's easy to make playlists for music on my hard drive, but not so easy to make textfile playlists of albums on streaming services...if it's even possible I haven't yet figured out how to do it and they might never make it possible).  So right now I need lots of "owned" music to keep my all-waking-hours automatic jukebox working.

And there are other things.  Often there are individual tracks which are duds and I really want to remove them.  That's much easier to do (or even uniquely possible again) when you own the music files.

HDCD recordings need to be properly decoded, which is not possible on my system (or most nowadays) without doing it in advance on the files.

Finally, I have even gone to the point of editing tracks of music when they have peculiar misfeatures but are otherwise indispensible.

But the "automated" (scripted) playlist generation is the big thing for me now.  I'd get much more use from the streaming services I use if they let me create and use text playlists.  As it is, I'm thinking of cancelling Tidal and keeping just one paid service, QOBuz.

Anyway, back in the day when I was struggling all by myself to pick out new records at the record store I'd end up with a variety of conundrums.

In generally they'd be pushing "the latest thing."  But "the latest" album of some band you knew little about might well be their worst.  What you'd really like would be the "best" album by that band.  To find that, you'd have to get away from the end-caps and other displays and into the long aisles of recordings.  Even then you'd have a hard time figuring out which album of some band would be the best one to buy.  If you asked the sales person, likely it would be "the latest" which would be recommended.

I loved reading the recommended lists in The Absolute Sound and Stereophile.  But I could never remember what had been recommended when I got to the record store.  (And at most record stores such things would be impossible to find anyway...).

Somehow there was always a huge mental gap between the "independent" recommendation of albums and the purchasing process.  And even in our hypercommercialized online world, it seems there still is.

Then back in the Vinyl days, whatever I bought, after some long protracted selection process, would invariable be warped or have some skip or something.  And I'd never get back to the store on time to exchange.  Or if I did, the next copy (preselected by the store staff) would have an even worse problem.

So it's not surprising that when I get down to the never-before-copied parts of my collection, I could be running into a lot of "clunkers" I really don't want to listen to that much.

OTOH, it may just as well be, and actually is most of the time, more like re-discovery.  Things that sounded awful in days back when they were put at the bottom of the pile are now sounding amazingly good.  At various times in the past, my system of the day could make some things, and perhaps a lot of things, sound awful.

I didn't myself get a decent handle on this until I started doing acoustical measurements, around 1998.

But even then, there were endless issues, including amplifier bias problems, and even the discovery of the requirement for a down tilted response on electrostatic systems which was only my discovery last year, when I applied a slight boost at 1kHz to make everything fit this curve better (and sound much nicer).  I've made the most progress in the actual "sound" since I've been retired, now nearly 4 years.

Anyway, gems are turning up as I get to the bottom of my bedroom rack.  Such as Laura Marie, a musician I heard at a San Antonio Luminaria.

There's still much work to do on this pile, and there are many other piles.

One thing that this copying work does is create a new opportunity to listen to things as if they were new, again.

And I also benefit from my mplay playlists which ensure I ultimately hear everything.

In addition to decoding (or transcribing...which might be slightly better in some ways) HDCD's, I try to make transcriptions of all DVD-Audios and SACD's  too.  Since my system runs on 24/96 and 24/48 anyway, there is no benefit from preserving DSD from SACD's or other sources.  (I personally don't believe there is any benefit anyway, all the important characteristics of DSD are captured by 24/96, nothing better than 24/96 is needed for anything except possibly production.)  And vinyl too.  I prefer to transcribe vinyl whenever I'm playing it at all.  And those transcriptions become part of my collection too.  Perhaps even multiple transcriptions, comparing different players, turntables, or techniques.  (I put some redundant copies in a different folder so they don't get auto-selected for playlists.)  Actually despite thinking about it a lot, I don't have that many LP transcriptions (and many I do have are ready to be upgraded with better recordings on better systems).