Digital Music Collections: An Introduction

I love music (mostly of the insane fast aggressive kind). I need music everywhere: in the house, in the office, on my commute. I love the packaging, the artwork, the liner notes, the whole "physical product" side of things, I even love the OCD-but-necessary alphabetical storage. However, I'm very lazy, and I hate the actual process of having to go to the shelf, grab a disc, put it in the player, then put it away (or more likely not) when done. For day-to-day use, CDs are a pain.

I'm not really into sacrificing sound quality. I grew up with vynyl, tape and CD (initially played on cheap systems, upgrading to proper separates was both desirable and an achievement), and I'm not willing to compromise and make do with MP3. And neither should you. For we are now in the age of the digital music streamer. Wonderful devices that can basically "turn your house into an iPod", but without the quality drop that usually happens when people replace their stereos with an iPod dock.

I Used To Be A Physical Format Junkie But I'm OK Now, Honest

I'd been buying music on disc for years, and just listening to the CDs. Not such a big problem - I'm a whole-albums kinda guy - but it still involved finding and loading a little plastic disc. With successive MP3 player purchases, each with a different "best" format (Rio Karma and Ogg, Sony and ATRAC, iPod and MP3/AAC), re-ripping became unfeasable, and I learned that having a lossless master you could go back to was a really smart move. It also sets you up for playing back those digital files instead of CDs.

I've seen way too many people go for the short-term option of ripping their CDs to MP3 using iTunes. If you're going to go to all the hassle of feeding little plastic discs to your computer, why settle for low-quality rips in a format/bitrate that works for you today, when with a little planning, you could get higher quality, totally future-proofed digital copies of your music? It took me ages to realise the value of having the collection saved to disk in an instantly-streamable, future-proofed library played back via a system I was years away from buying when I started ripping CDs.

Building And Managing Your Digital Music Collection

So I'm going to dump a whole set of posts outlining how I set up an awesome Sonos-based multi-room CD-quality music system in my house, and managed to also have a large chunk of that music travelling around on my iPod. If it all looks like too much work, don't be scared. Most of this is about downloading a few applications (should be free versions of everything), setting them up, setting aside a couple of working directories on your PC, then following a simple process for each album/purchase (I'll assume that you consider music to be something worth paying for).

My setup is based on a couple of Sonos zones for home streaming (top quality lossless), and an iPod touch for the portable version, but the same strategies work whatever kit you end up with (and if you do it right, you can future-proof yourself against the hardware you're going to buy in a few years' time).