Reply To: Let’s talk collections and listening habits!
Yes, that sounds like an easier and modern and convenient way of doing it.
Alas, I’m rather cumbersome and old-fashioned when it comes to my digital curation (weird to speak of old-fashionedness when it comes to such a new thing as digital files, but there you go).
I have all my music files (i.e. all my mp3s) on the C: drive. All of them. All 350 GB. A third of the entire laptop’s hard drive. When my laptop or hard drive crashes (which it just did), I lose everything. Of course, I have them backed up on an external 1TB drive (as well as my dad’s NAS, but that takes forever). And it’s from there that I must import all the music again. With more than 50.000 mp3 files, that takes a long time. Even if I do it in installments. Dependent on whatever speed the drive and the laptop allows.
Once I’ve imported them to the laptop’s C: drive, I must then import them to iTunes as well. I open the freshly installed iTunes, click “add folder”, select the folders I want to import, and it starts importing. Installment by installment, letter by letter. That takes a long time too.
‘Custom tags’ was perhaps the wrong word to use. I mean all the changes I’ve done to the album – creating playlists (which are not independent of the album, they are the albums with tracks taken out or in a different order), editing the covers, correcting the track names and so on. All of this is lost, too, when my hard drive crashes. And it’s not information that’s on the external backup either. It must all be added back manually when I re-import.
So yes — extremely old-fashioned and laborous.
As for iTunes, it’s been my preferred music player for decades. But when streaming took off, and the people who just listen to their own collection of digital files became a niche, it fell. iTunes 12 was terrible, and after that they disbanded it altogether. So I have to use iTunes 11 from 2014. At least for the time being, after all the hassle. While I was in the middle of the process, I was alerted to MusicBee, which sounds like iTunes was in the good old days, and which drains less power. That’s something I’m definitely going to try at some point, once I’ve gone off iTunes.