I had one of those really nice 100GB music libraries that I had been ripping from CDs since 1998. (and Napster/WinMX/Kazaa/Limewire-ing because... I was young, stupid and poor) I had meticulously been fixing ID3 tags, and putting them into the folder structure that made me happy. Then one day, I did a new Mac setup, and forgot to tick the box that said, "let me manage my library layout" and BAM. iTunes moved everything around. 10 years of collating, and sorting, etc, GONE. It's my fault for not backing it up... but wow. I basically just stopped listening to that library. I now do Spotify.
Surely that music library is important and cost you money? Why would you give your money to another service to listen to the same music again, that you already own?
I ask this because I have about 900 albums on CD that I ripped and then stored away in the loft/under the stairs and could never envisage actually paying a streaming service to listen to stuff I actually have already bought.
I mean, I have an iPod Classic that has all this music on it, and my MacBook too.
It seems odd the general acceptance of streaming services and rent-everything approach these days. Seems very odd to me (but yes I do have a Netflix account, just don't rent everything else under the sun - the worst is Grammarly - why subscribe to a spell check???? Mind blown).
Unless I'm mistaken, they're not talking about some cloud/streaming service, just exposing their music folder to iTunes.app so that iTunes can give them a GUI over it (like search/sorting).
Without the checkbox, iTunes employs its own local folder organization strategy and will update id3 tags and album art from fingerprint lookups.
This is correct. For quite awhile after I ticked that box, and "lost" everything. (I still had all the files, they were just put together in an awkward way. I could use iTunes to create playlists that mimicked my preferences... but that took a lot of time) Once I started using Spotify, it just made sense. Yes there's a ton of overlap in music that I own (some I don't "own" as I had snagged it from the napsters of the day) and what I listen to on Spotify. But, there's also quite a bit more that I never owned... or is brand new to me.
Because it's a lot less work to spend $10 a month than to manually re-categorize tens of thousands of mp3s?
I'm on a spotify family plan, so it's $15/mo. I was thinking the other day, 1992 me would have been absolutely blown away that, for $6.30something a month, I can listen to virtually anything I want. Yes, I'm "renting" it, but I'll take that over being able to only buy 3 CDs a year.
The more frustrating problem, is that when I moved across country, I threw out my CD collection. A huge box full. I will always regret not just packing it with everything else. My thinking at the time was, "when am I ever going to put a disc in a CD-player ever again. I have all the 192~ish VBR rips!"
I have this dark suspicion that that this is a perfectly acceptable outcome to music steaming concerns.
I'm not saying that Apple or anyone else is intentionally trashing libraries to encourage streaming. Just that they have no good reason to care about your carefully curated library, and in fact have something to gain if it went away.
I’ve recently moved away from Spotify and back to my own music library. I’m using beets[1] to manage my messy metadata and it does a pretty good job. You can probably tell it to leave your metadata alone and just sort things into folders for you.
Even Apple's sorting did weird things though. I have an artist folder and then 3 folders underneath that one with the same album. Sometimes I have multiple artist folders. It's just a big mess. I do have an old 300GB drive with an earlier iteration of my music library on it. Sometimes I consider plugging that in and augmenting it. At least the folder structure was more palatable.
How not to mention Jaikoz? This small expensive horrible yet useful java software does organize MP3s for you - it even connect to online DBs. I use it since those times...
