Music as big data. Why, instead of sound quality, you need to think about convenience

Never before has the music industry been so technically developed. Range, availability, simplicity, low cost: in general, a paradise for a music lover. Or hell. Never before has the music industry annoyed so much those who bring it the most money. Why is that? Many different people and companies, pursuing their own, sometimes diametrically opposite interests, reduced music to the status of background noise, in which there is almost no useful signal. Having a smart phone with cheap, unlimited, instant access to tens of millions of songs, we stopped to appreciate music. Or not stopped?



The main idea of ​​my previous post on pro quality and the buzz was that I was not an audiophile. I am a music lover. I love music, I spend a lot of time and money on it, both on the songs themselves, and on the devices and programs for listening to them. For me, this is not a background. I study the history of my favorite artists, I try to replenish my collection with new albums, I draw inspiration and strength from my music for work and life. So, in the modern world, filled to the eyeball with various technologies, it is difficult to be a music lover.



I touched on the topic of this “complexity” in the previous post, but very superficially. Despite this, the discussion in the comments came out very interesting and useful. And so - let's continue! What if you put out of brackets and sound quality and cost? What if you evaluate the player, headphones, speakers and amplifier solely by how convenient it is to use them, and how well do they comply with the Basic Principles of my music? This approach is very interesting and, alas, rarely found. At once I will say that “convenience” is not a topic for one post, but it’s necessary to start with something. I'll start with those very principles.



Principles

Most people who have a maximum of a hundred albums bought on iTunes on an iPhone do not have any problems at all. Indeed, music is not a problem of a universal scale, it is a rather narrow task. Actually because none of the manufacturers of devices, the creators of music services and labels, she seriously and is not engaged. If your music library fits into a hundred or a thousand songs, you really are fine and you can stop reading . If you, like me, have more than 10,000 tracks, then you are my colleague.

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And the basic principles I have are:



• Music should always be available. That is, at home and at work, and on business trips. Where there is Internet, and where there is none. And even where there is no electricity. Everywhere.

• Ability to quickly search for any album or track. Even if you have 20k tracks. Even if you don't remember the name very well.

• Ability to create playlists on a variety of criteria: the year of release of the album or track, genre, mood, pleasant memories, anything. These playlists should also be available anytime and anywhere.

• Unified format for storing music in digital form. Understanding how to transfer music to this format from any other source.

• Conscious replenishment of the library. There should be no questions "what is it, where is it from me and how did it get to me."

• The quality of the collection. No, I'm not talking about sound. There should be no glitches, clicks, missing tracks in the album, wrong covers, etc. The ability to instrumentally evaluate the quality of the collection.

• Protect your library from loss. Backup. Ability to restore the album from the original format. Protection against accidental damage.



Looks like a plan? It remains to apply these Principles to the three practical tasks:



1) Playback devices: for home, for the road and other listening scenarios, based on the requirements of convenience.

a. Players, laptops and DACs (where the digit turns into electrical signals)

b. Headphones, speakers, etc. (where signals are converted into sound waves).

2) Creating a digital collection. Select the storage format, software for playback, file processing software.

3) Manage your music library, transfer between stationary and mobile devices, backup, etc.



The easiest way to solve these problems, if you treat the record library, like any large set of diverse data. The data must be cataloged, protected from loss and accidental damage (that is, to separate the test environment and production), to ensure their availability on the end devices. But these are topics for the next posts. And now let's talk about why the principles turned out to be like this. NB: the content part of the post is over, further the lyrics and memories of the past.



Do you remember how it all started?

1996, I am 14 years old, I stand in the central market of a small Russian city in front of a stall with cassettes. I have been standing for an hour, painfully trying to choose one cassette and not miscalculate. The range is huge, under a thousand items. This is a ritual: once a month I go to a stall, for some time I choose hard, and buy one tape. A maximum of two, for more pocket money is not enough. Finally the choice is made, I insert the cassette into the player and listen to it without a break for two weeks. Or three. And then I solemnly put on the shelf to other cassettes and listen to the new album along with the rest of the music. In very rare cases - I don’t put on the shelf, and this is a real misfortune: I didn’t like the album, this month money was wasted, and we need to prepare even better for the next approach to the stall.







Usually, this story is served on a “heavy childhood, wooden toys” sauce. But in actual fact, this model of music lovers was the simplest and most understandable. One format (cassette), at home you can listen to the tape recorder, for everything else there is a player. Extremely limited (by a budget) set of music, which is obviously narrower even than the contents of a stall in a province. As a result, the hundred tapes that I have available are heard to the holes, and I know the albums by heart. And I still remember in which places of some songs I have jammed the tape or there is a hole from the accidental and untimely pressed record button. It will only be more difficult.



"All albums in a new digital format"

Having stayed on tapes, I somehow missed the CD and immediately jumped to MP3. 2002, a brave new world: there is already Internet and file-sharing networks, CD burners and discs, and you can record 10 music for each of them. But the Internet is still slow, the hard disk is small, and you can’t take a lot of disks with you, and changing them along the way is generally inconvenient.



There is more music, but more mess. “The Best” compilations appeared - a CD-R with a hundred tracks, which was usually inserted into a portable CD-MP3 player and could not be removed before burning the next disc. Music has become much more, but it has become more difficult to manage it: something at home on a computer, something only on discs. Something on CD-RW, and this is something I accidentally erase, forgetting to rewrite. Almost all without tags. Mostly the name is one, and the content is different, and there are a lot of broken files.



No, it was a great time when I met many new music trends. This era of primary accumulation of capital: a mess, massive violations of the law and broad, but dim prospects.



All music in your pocket

In 2004, I got the first 40GB iPod, and it was incredible. For the first time I was given the opportunity to carry with me in general all the music that is. Naturally, I tried to feed the ipod accumulated at the previous stage and ran into a lot of problems. At that moment I began to buy music on a CD, studied all the nuances of ripping music from disks and compressing to MP3, even tried to keep a digital copy of the disks in a lossless format, but there was not enough hard drive capacity.







At the same time, just then I asked all sorts of audiophile questions. Is MP3 quality worse? And what about vinyl? There are some other Super Audio CDs, but what is this? Do they sound inhumanly beautiful? And if so, how can you possibly touch the world of the sound hi-end not only at home with a CD player and 700-ruble headphones ? In general, here, due to a slight increase in the budget, my hobby for music has acquired a scale. But part of the effort went the wrong way.



Spinning wheels

At some point I finally believed (without any particular reason) in the musical advantages of vinyl, and in three years I collected a collection of a thousand records. Immediately it turned out some interesting facts. Vinyl is very heavy and takes up a lot of space, and finding the right disc sometimes takes half an hour. Vinyl requires a special relationship: you need to find the right album, get it out of the envelope, put it, then turn it over, then remove it, then find a new one. Not always there is time and desire for it, as a result of which, at rather high costs for the collection (fortunately, it was mostly replenished for free from people who wanted to get rid of the rubbish) I listened to records a maximum of 3-4 times a month.





I still go to the vinyl stores until now, and even specifically look for them before traveling to other cities. I buy vinyl very rarely, more often I choose old CDs.



In parallel, a collection of CD and music from the network. I have been experimenting with digitizing vinyl, SACD and DVD-Audio formats, digital audio compression formats. At some point, the frustration of all this variety began to prevail over the pleasure of the new album. Increasingly, it turned out that you don’t have this particular album that you want to listen to right now. But he is somewhere there. Perhaps you accidentally erased it when moving from Apple Lossless to MP3 and back. Or maybe he wrote it down and lost it. Or forgot to digitize. Or bought and forgot to listen. The situation is tense.



Clouds

We are gradually getting to this time. At first it seemed that services such as iTunes Match and Google Play Music would solve absolutely all my problems. Imagine: you upload your diverse digital collection to the cloud and everything, all these gigabytes of poorly sorted wealth can be deleted. Then buy new music only in iTunes, it costs less than a CD or vinyl, and is available on all devices, always! A subscription model of Google Play does not require anything to buy: pay once a month a lot of money and listen to everything your heart desires. Cool?



It quickly became clear that no. And it all started with an embarrassment in iTunes Match, which I call The Case of the Missing DDT Album. I had this album on my hard drive, and of course it booted into the Apple cloud. But it turned out that there it is absolutely impossible to reproduce it. I do not know why, it did not work out. Removing an album from the cloud did not help. Nothing helped. Frustration was coming back.



Then it turned out that “all the music in your smartphone” is also not a completely true statement. The situation has long been familiar: there is your favorite album, but it is not in the cloud service. No, not at all, either by subscription or by money. So you need to download to buy the disc, digitize it, fill it in iTunes or Google Play, and on large volumes (I had more than 20 thousand tracks by that time), this whole infrastructure is incredibly buggy. At all stages, from downloading songs to trying to open a list of all the tracks on the iPad, which takes about three minutes and usually ends with the fall of the application.





I’ve met with discarded albums many times, but with this glitch - only once. In the screenshot is Kate Bush's album, and everything is correct here - both the name of the album and the names of the tracks. But in some incomprehensible way, when I try to play this album through Match, I get Kate Bush's _drug_ album. How??! That is, iTunes Match seriously complicates the infrastructure, which leads to an increase in the number of errors. And the benefits of it are not so obvious.



Naturally, the clouds did not help make music accessible on the road. The rule of modern technology: just when your favorite song begins, somewhere in the cellular operator or further on the Internet there is a traffic jam, and you cannot listen to it. You can not imagine how it infuriates. You can download music to your device. But not all. And you never really know what you have available offline, and that - only when the Internet is working. In general, I have placed the greatest hopes on cloud technologies, and perhaps that is why I experienced the most sincere hatred for them.



2015

As a result, last year, the entire digital music library was removed to the far corner of the hard drive, and I started from scratch. I digitized about 1000 CDs, wrote tags for each album, uploaded a cover: this became the basis of my new collection. I also buy new music on a CD (most often in stores with used records or discs), but I rarely and really need the most important records from vinyl (remembering to prescribe tags). Another ten percent of the music library fall to music in its originally digital form: I try to buy and download in lossless format.



Yes, first of all, I spend money on new music (and not download from torrents). But not only because I want to be friends with the RIAA and recording studios. This formulation of the problem allows me to meticulously evaluate each candidate to be added to my record library. Is this new album worthy? Maybe you should choose something else? New or well-known old? Do I have to buy the thirty third reprint of the first Led Zeppelin album? Is there something for me? That is, in part, I returned to the state of 20 years ago, and because of this I get much more pleasure from music. Unless I buy not one tape per month, but 3-5 CDs or digital albums. I carefully bring all the source formats to one common one, prescribe tags, check the correctness of all entered data from open sources. It takes a lot of time, but also adds value to my entire music collection.



Has it become convenient? On the one hand, I now spend much more time on processing the library. On the other hand, I do this precisely in order to make it convenient for me to listen to music. I will write about what iron I chose to listen to, and how it meets the criterion of convenience.