This post helps me to think through all aspects of enhancing your digital music experience, since that experience is very important to me personally as well. Music has always been central to many aspects of my life, including playing a musical instrument, playing in bands and aggressively looking for the next best thing in music in general.
After amassing a large library of physical media (Vinyl LPs and CDs) numbering 1000+, I spent a considerable amount of time transitioning into the digital realm, in addition to holding on to a majority of my favorite vinyl collection.
Listening to music in the digital realm can be convenient and near instantaneous, but might come with compromises in quality and overall aural experience. If convenience is paramount, and one has a “this is good enough for me” approach, then most streaming services and rips from analog sources are, in fact, good enough. And of course, the whole “good”, “better”, “best” approach here works perfectly well. If something works for you, that’s great.
I have a hybrid approach to digital music appreciation. If you think through it, there is a supply chain associated with music from its production to its eventual consumption. On the consumption side, the quality of the overall music experience is limited by the weakest link. If the source is of poor quality, no amount of investment or modification between the source and your ears is going to improve the quality. On the other hand, if the source quality is ideal, then you hope that the processing between the source and your ears doesn’t get in the way by lowering the quality.
Given that I started with over 1,000 physical LP’s and CD’s, I needed to get these into a digital format. Working on a Mac for this, I used XLD, which is a Lossless Decoder / Encoder. This product helped me convert my extensive CD collection to its “lossless” equivalent as a digital file. The “lossless” aspect reflects the fact that if you change physical formats, you can either convert it like-for-like, or convert it and change it in some way. Like-for-like, or lossless in the case of this media maintains its integrity at 100%. The alternative, is “lossy”. You may trade off quality for disc space or some other parameter. Either way, if it is “lossy”, some information is in fact taken out of the source and it is gone forever in the new object. Modern technology in music compression seeks to “lose” parts of the original music that you won’t perceive having been there in the first place. This is the subjective aspect of music compression; at the end, you aren’t listening to music the way it was intended, but does it make a difference?
Where I could, I converted to and use digital music in a FLAC format. FLAC is a Free Lossless Audio Codec. There are other options available, but FLAC is non-proprietary option. Of course, technology keeps moving forward and there are continually evolving options, so the best choice yesterday may not be the best tomorrow.
Once you have digital media files, you have to manage them in some way. Again, there are many options, including native solutions such as Music on the Mac and Windows Media Player on Windows PCs. I’ve chosen to use a premium solution, MediaMonkey. I have used MediaMonkey since 2007 (yes, 2007), so I’m a true fan. I have found the product to be extremely powerful, with a robust user interface and great database management capabilities. This is the product I use for almost all of my tag management needs. Tag management needs? The beauty (and headache) of using digital files, such a s FLAC or MP3s, is that there are standard ways of attaching attributes to the media, called tags. Song Title, Artist, Album, Music Genre, Release Date and a myriad of other attributes can attached to a file to identify it and therefore categorize and use it. Attaching the correct tags to files is facilitated by media management tools such as MediaMonkey, which is why these tools are necessary. Tags are ways to facilitate creation of playlists to organize your music and perhaps discover tunes you didn’t know you had. “Play songs released in 1967” or “Play all songs in the Blues Genre” are ways to access music that s organized with tags.
Even though MediaMonkey can be used to stream content to various devices, I’ve chosen to invest in and use Sonos devices throughout my house. Sonos really helps simplify the streaming of music throughout rooms by providing its own network and also its own application to help manage the process of distributing music throughout your environment.
In addition to the MediaMonkey and Sonos user management tools, I’m a big Plex fan. I use both Plex Media Server and Plexamp, the Plex Player. The biggest reason I use Plex is to take advantage of their Sonic Analysis capabilities and the ability to find music with similar characteristics which is an invaluable way to find more good music in a large audio library. In addition, Plex can be streamed through the Sonos network, so it’s all good.
