Being a collector in the digital era
by David Barker
This is an account of my journey as a classical music collector from the safe
world of the CD into the new one of digital music. It’s not intended
to be a comprehensive coverage of all aspects of digital music, but rather
a commentary on the issues that I encountered and how I dealt with them. I
don't claim for a moment that my “answers” are the best ones,
but they work for me. Perhaps if you are setting out on this road, they might
help you get to the end more quickly than me.
A problem
A CD collection that has long since gone beyond orderly and ordered storage;
a problem that only becomes worse each month as various enterprising labels
continue to mine the archive of little-known composers and music - I daresay
that this predicament strikes a chord with many of you reading this.
In my case, the tipping point was reached when the purpose-built cabinet reached
capacity, at least as far as the neat and ordered arrangement of discs stacked
vertically was concerned. The immediate solution was to implement a “horizontal
piles in front of the vertical lines” strategy, at which point any semblance
of order went out the window.
Given that there was limited space for the horizontal stacks, this solution
was a very short term one. So, the next approach was to identify the “less
essential” discs, remove them from their cases and store them in good
quality sleeves. A true collector would suggest that there is no such thing
as a less essential item in a collection, but that wasn't the most significant
problem with this method of storage.
Where do I store the sleeves? The sleeves that I could readily purchase
came in boxes akin to miniature filing cabinets. These were good for keeping
the sleeves under control, but where could I put the boxes? I don't have an
attic or cellar, and the garage reaches 40 degree Celsius in summer.
Where do the booklets go? In many cases, this meant the back covers
as well, because many booklets don't contain the tracklist. The filing boxes
had no space for the booklets.
Why can't I even buy the sleeves anymore? They and the accompanying
boxes seemed to disappear from the market here in Australia not long after
I began buying them.
So, these unsatisfactory “solutions” led me to grasp the nettle
of digital music. I found, and will describe below (at length) that this raised
as many issues as it solved.
The first tentative steps
These actually happened a few years earlier, when the belt on my turntable
perished and stretched to the point where it was useless, and was not able
to be replaced. This necessitated the purchase of a cheap player which plugged
into the sound card of my PC. My LP collection of mainly modern (rock) music
was culled, with the best material converted to mp3, and the discs sold (or
thrown out).
The crisis point in the classical CD collection described above fortuitously
happened to coincide with the introduction of the Naxos Music Library (NML),
which even in those early days was remarkable value at not much more than
the price of one Naxos CD per month. Given that I frequently purchased more
than one Naxos disc each month, it seemed, and remains, a very good answer.
In those early days, the NML was essentially limited to the Naxos stable,
so I looked around at what else was available. Rhapsody was not available
outside the US, while iTunes seemed to have limited classical content or perhaps
it was simply difficult to find (not to mention that I had taken a dislike
to it which has mostly, but not entirely, faded).
For a year or so, I subscribed to emusic, a download service with a set number
of tracks per month, which allowed access to some extra labels, such as Lyrita.
What was very good about it was that a 30 minute movement from a Mahler symphony
and a 3 minute pop song each counted as one track! Unfortunately, emusic changed
its rules, introducing album-only tracks, and increased prices, so I dropped
out. As it stands at the current time, I couldn't re-join even if I wanted
to, because it is no longer available to Australia.
A long and winding road
From those early steps into the digital music world to the present day has
been a slow process. Some of you reading this, who have reached the promised
land much more quickly without the side roads, U-turns and meandering, may
wonder why I took so long.
Early on, I made the decision not to purchase anything that I could access
through my subscription to the NML. This seemed an eminently sensible idea
at the time, and I daresay still does. There was one exception to this: I
continued to purchase the Bach cantata series from BIS (initially on CD and
now as download) to demonstrate my support for such a wonderful project.
My purchase of CDs did not entirely cease, as a few labels have not made their
recordings available online - MDG comes to mind as the most obvious example.
Nevertheless, the flow has rather dried to a trickle, to the point where a
forty year tradition of receiving recorded music for my birthday was broken
this year.
My CD storage problems thus addressed (though the untidy horizontal piles
remain), I found myself confronted by new questions, posed by this new era.
No longer is it just a matter of “I have to buy a new piece of kit to
play this new media”. The range of options is so much more than “how
much money do I want to spend”.
To download or to stream
The NML is, of course, a streaming service, and while the 64 Kb/s rate standard
quality level at which I subscribe is perfectly adequate, it is hardly hi-fi.
It is possible to pay more to get a “premium” quality service,
though this seems to be only 128 Kb/s, which is decidedly still not CD quality.
It is, however, not the issue of audio quality that has led me to change my
mind about streaming versus downloading. As I mentioned above, my decision
not to purchase what I could stream seemed a sensible one, but as time went
on, I found myself not listening to new recordings properly. I tended to “channel
surf”, listening to a track (or part of one) and then move on to another
recording. The realisation dawned on me that while I would listen to a CD
off the shelf or a downloaded work in full, it was rare that I would do so
for a streamed one.
I have given a deal of thought as to why this should be the case. While I
would like to think that it might be that the huge number of recordings means
that I am always on the look for something even more interesting, I have come
to the conclusion that it is “collectoritis”. In the same way
that I prefer to buy books, rather than borrow them from the local council
library, the NML became a browsing service, because the recordings weren't
really mine.
As a consequence, I resumed purchasing recordings in download format. Basically,
it boils down to anything that I would have bought in the past as a CD is
a candidate for being bought as a download. Now of course, I get a chance
to thoroughly road test them first, so the chance of a dud should be somewhere
between very little and none at all.
Lo and behold, I listen to the new purchases in full - not necessarily straight
away - but I do listen. Yes, I know this says more about me than it does about
the merits or otherwise of streaming, but I did warn you that this was a personal
account.
Does this reversal mean I have allowed my subscription to the NML to lapse?
Absolutely not. It is a wonderful resource for exploring the highways and
byways of music. How else could I access 85000+ recordings for such a reasonable
price?
There are a few other matters which are probably self-evident, but I will
mention them anyway:
• even in this 3G/wifi-intensive era, we aren't always connected.
I'm writing this particular sentence whilst on a flight from Paris to Singapore,
returning from an overseas holiday, and listening to a downloaded album. Not
much chance of streaming at 36,000 feet! Likewise, a number of the places
we stayed in had very dodgy wifi, which didn't allow for streaming
• if you intend to listen to a lot of streamed music, especially
in good quality, then you need to make sure that your download quota is up
to it (especially on mobile devices through 3G)
• if your circumstances change, and subscribing to a streaming
service becomes a problem, then it is all gone, as though it never existed
Where to buy the downloads
Having made the decision to buy downloads of recordings I wanted to own, I
looked at the various options. The evolution of the digital media industry
has meant that many more providers are available. The all-genre ones, such
as iTunes, aren't really set up to cater for the classical genre because of
the complexity of multiple versions of the same work and similar naming of
different works. Try finding a particular version of Beethoven 5 on iTunes!
I don't blame them for this - the revenue stream from the classical area must
be trivial compared to pop music, TV and movies.
The label-owned specialist providers, particularly Naxos's ClassicsOnline
(the download version of the NML), Chandos's Classical Shop and BIS's eclassical,
understand the genre and are where 95% of my purchases are made. I am an inveterate
checker of The Classical Shop's hourly and now daily discounts; ditto for
eclassical. I should also mention Linn, Hyperion and Dacapo as excellent sources,
though principally offering their own labels.
I have had mixed success with the Universal online store, principally because
of seemingly inconsistent rules about which countries can be sold to. Eugen
Jochum's classic recording of Carmina Burana on DG - not a problem, Mr Barker,
your download has commenced. Herbert Blomstedt's San Francisco recordings
of the Nielsen symphonies on Decca - we are very sorry, Mr Barker, but we
are unable to fulfil your request as you are in Australia. Go figure!
I do use iTunes - the store that is, not the music manager - but only as a
last resort, because the Australian store, which I am limited to, is very
expensive (generally more than 50% above other providers), and as I have already
said, not necessarily the easiest to find recordings in. It’s the only
place you can buy Sony/RCA recordings, as the Ariama store has closed.
And then there is Amazon! In principle, it should be the ideal supplier, having
access to basically every label, but for me, it is not an option at all, because
I am in Australia. If someone can provide me with an explanation of why Amazon
US & UK can sell me CDs, posted to an Australian address, but not downloads
of the same music because my credit card has that same Australian address,
I would most interested to hear it.
Which file format?
In the early days when bandwidth and download quotas were rather limited,
there was very little choice and it was compressed and lossy (a horrid word,
meaning the sound quality is compromised): the Apple format if you bought
from iTunes, and mp3 from anywhere else.
With improvements in internet capacity and the low cost of hard drive storage
have come lossless downloads, in a variety of formats, but each offering substantially
better sound quality than mp3.
The other advantage of lossless is that the transition between tracks is seamless
- there have been issues with mp3 and some media players causing discernible
clicks between tracks, and the inability to play tracks continuously (rather
important for operas, you would agree).
If you choose either the FLAC or WMA format, you get full CD quality and a
file size less than the uncompressed WAV. I have opted for the FLAC file format,
simply because I didn't want the Windows format. I doubt there is much difference;
it's just my antipathy to massive corporations coming to the surface (again).
The label-run sites all offer lossless downloads, though ClassicsOnline is
only just starting to do so on a limited basis, having only offered 320 kb/s
mp3 until fairly recently. This leads me to a gripe about the FLAC format
offered by ClassicsOnline: why is the entire “album” provided
as a single file? No other provider finds it necessary to do this, and it
makes listening to a particular track annoying inconvenient. Of course, it
can be got round by cutting the file in an audio editor into individual tracks,
but why should I have to do this in the first place?
iTunes still sells its music in its own compressed format, though there are
signs that the giant is stirring with a very small number of lossless downloads
able to be purchased.
Storage
The decision to download means that it becomes your responsibility to work
out how and where to store the files, rather than the streaming service provider.
The simple answer is “on a hard drive” but where that hard drive
is or what it is connected to, presents a range of options:
• dedicated media server computer
• hifi component media server
• internal HD in desktop computer
• external HD connected to desktop computer
Media servers are becoming relatively common these days, and are either dedicated
PCs or hifi components. They provide a single box solution, which will appeal
to many. In either case, you need to have a mechanism by which the downloaded
files end up on the server, either directly because the device is connected
to the internet, or from your desktop computer. In each case, you need to
have some knowledge about networks, or pay someone who does.
The PC ones seem to be more aimed at the video end of the market (i.e. home
theatre) and audio is rather secondary. The supplied control software won’t
be up to the task of managing a large classical collection. If you can override
that software, and install your own (see below) then it becomes a possibility.
The hifi components, such as those made by Naim, Brennan and Linn, are another
matter, being aimed squarely at the serious music collector, but you will
need deep pockets. I looked at one in a specialist hifi store recently that
cost $A15000 (more than £9000).
When it comes down to it, any computer, including your desktop one, that stores
and distributes music to other devices is a media server. I decided that because
I spend a lot of time at my desk, that was the best place for my music library.
It seemed rather a waste of effort to transport the music files downloaded
to my desktop computer to some other device in another room, and then “beam”
them back into my study.
If you have a relatively new computer, then the internal hard drive is probably
at least one terabyte, which does allow a quite decent amount of space for
your music. A typical album of sixty minutes duration in lossless format comes
in at about 250 Mb, so that makes about four to a Gb, and three to four thousand
to a terabyte.
However, your music collection is a permanent and ongoing “object”
unlike your computer. Having to transfer your music collection every time
you buy a new computer doesn't bear thinking about, assuming that it is even
possible - hard drives do fail, after all.
A far better option is an external drive, since it can be simply transferred
to your new computer, carrying your music with it. There are two distinct
types of hard drives that live outside your system box, both connecting via
USB (usually), which are generally referred to as external and portable. It
is the former that you are after. They are intended to sit on your desk top,
stay connected to your computer permanently and provide extra storage. They
have their own power supply (and power lead) as well as a fan and ventilation
holes. The portable drives aren’t intended for continuous usage as they
have no cooling.
These do fail as well - two of my Musicweb International colleagues have reported
a disaster of this type with their music collection drive, but in each case,
that was a few years ago, which raises the issue of backup. At least with
CDs, barring fires, floods or thieves, you could be fairly confident that
having bought the album, you would have it always. Not so with a download
(or any file, of course). Accidental deletion or hardware failure can mean
that it is gone.
Some providers allow you to download your purchases again and again - The
Classical Shop and eclassical, for example. When you think about it, allowing
you to go back and re-download something bought a considerable time before
and then lost by some misadventure, is rather generous on the part of the
companies that do allow it. If you bought the same music on a CD and then
lost it, you wouldn't expect to be able to get a replacement for free.
One thing - if you decide to get a PC-based server, either a commercial one
or one based on a normal desktop computer, make sure that it is as quiet as
possible. The last thing you want is a box in the room that is doing an impression
of a vacuum cleaner as you try to listen.
Thus far, things have been fairly straightforward, the options available well
defined. That is all about to change, and what remains is much more problematic.
Unfortunately, it is the part where you actually have the music and want to
listen to it!
Organising your downloads
This starts with the actual step of where on your chosen storage device to
save the downloaded files. If you are a committed music lover (and let's face
it, you wouldn't have got this far in this article if you weren't) the number
of files will be considerable, and the potential for filename overlap considerable.
One way or another, you need to organise your files.
A folder structure system is absolutely essential, and it is worthwhile spending
some time on deciding exactly what suits you best before you get too far down
the line. Rearranging the structure once you have a hundred albums or more
is not a pleasure. There speaks the voice of experience.
At the start, I decided to store the files by composer, so had a folder structure
that started with the letters of the alphabet and branched from there by name,
for example, B → Beethoven. Where there were multiple albums of the one
composer, I put them in individual sub-folders.
When a multi-composer album presented itself, the files were divided accordingly,
leading to tracks form a single album being spread across possibly ten or
more sub-folders, and almost impossible to put back together. You can see
where this is going, can’t you? I can only assume that I made this choice
because the majority of the albums at that point were single composer.
When I made the decision to download, not stream, and the number of files
began to increase rapidly, I quickly realised that this system was not a good
one. I made the tough decision to do a full rearrange, this time by label
and then album, for example Chandos/8507 Hummel PCs. Recombining the multi-composer
albums was somewhat of a chore, but worth it in the end.
So this method of organisation works for me. A friend stores his by composer
and then by composition. It obviously works for him. You need to find something
that works for you.
Tagging
This is the second stage of organisation and refers to the information that
is stored with the audio file, beyond the basic filename. This can be as minimal
or extensive as you like. It is essentially a database, with fields such as
title, composer, performers, genre and label.
How much time you want to spend on the tags depends on how you intend playing
the music. If you simply want to play an album and know where to find, tags
are of limited value. However, what if you want to play a particular work
and you can’t remember which album it was on, or you want to compare
a number of different performances of the same work? Tags will make your life
easier, since music library software is set up to work best with tags, allowing
you to filter your collection down by whichever tag you care to choose.
Most downloads come with the provider's collection of tags, and unfortunately,
they vary from one provider to another, and even from one album to another.
Thus, under the key tag of composer, you might get albums showing:
• Beethoven, Ludwig van
• BEETHOVEN, Ludwig (1770-1827)
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Ludwig van Beethven
• Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection (yes, really)
Your music library software will unfortunately recognise these as being from
different composers, and separate them accordingly.
The only way to deal with this is to decide on the tags that are important
to you and your software. The question you need to ask is “how do I
choose a piece of music?” Those which you might want to consider are
(I’ve marked the ones I consider “essential”, with an asterisk):
• album *
• composer *
• conductor
• ensemble
• soloist
• label
• genre * (because I also access my modern music, jazz, world
and spoken word files through the same management software)
• sub-genre * (one I created for classical only: orchestral,
chamber etc)
Many of you will be thinking that this is “over the top” and far
too much effort, but it does allow very efficient access to a particular piece
of music; more about this in the next section.
Playing the music
This is the most important part, of course. Getting everything else right
and this wrong would be like spending all your time cataloguing your book
collection and never reading anything.
The internet is awash with software that plays your digital music, much of
it free or inexpensive. If you have a Windows machine, you will have Windows
Media Player, if you have a Mac, then you will have iTunes.
Getting music to happen is simple enough: go to Windows Explorer (or equivalent),
find the required file, double-click on it and music will happen. At the end
of the track, music will stop happening. It's clearly not satisfactory if
you want to listen to a multi-movement work (Götterdämmerung, anyone).
All media players, simple or sophisticated, will allow you to select multiple
files through the Open Files dialog box, but that’s a pain, because
you have to wade through the folder structure every time. They may not even
play in the right order because of some strange aspect of the player, or because
the filenames start with the track numbers, and 11 comes before 2!
What you want from your software is not just a player, but far more importantly,
a library manager that already knows where all your music is, and can display
it or a chosen subset, e.g. concertos by Beethoven, a particular album. That
allows you with a few clicks to select what you want, and then sit back and
enjoy.
This means that you need to “import” your collection into the
software: it stores the location of the files; it doesn’t involve creation
of an extra copy or moving the file. It is an absolute necessity of the software
that it can be set up to automatically import new files - if you are using
one that can’t, look elsewhere.
Let's start with the programs that you get with your operating system. I can’t
remember the last time I used Windows Media Player for anything, because I
find it so unintuitive, slow and clumsy (and it doesn’t recognise the
flac format). Nor could I make iTunes (for Windows) work for me as a music
management program. If you only have popular music, where the only important
criteria (tags) are performer and album, I'm sure it is fine, but not for
the more complex area of classical. It may be that my reservations are less
valid on a Mac, or that I didn’t try hard to enough to work it out.
Musicweb International reviewer and expert on all things Apple, Kirk McElhearn,
has written a number of articles about using iTunes for classical music on
his blog Kirkville.
I do think that it is significant that in a post
from last year on the newly released iTunes version 11, he lamented about
how it had become much less useable for classical music collections.
My first trial run was Winamp, probably the longest-lived of the non-OS
media players, but I very quickly discarded it as being totally unsuited to
classical music (see Footnote). After
that, I decided to be a bit more scientific and do some forum reading.
This led me to MediaMonkey, which seemed promising enough from the
trial version to pay the relatively small sum for a full license, and begin
importing my music. Unfortunately, my trialling of it can’t have been
sufficiently thorough as I encountered a problem, the specifics of which I
now can’t remember, but serious enough to make me give up on it.
Back to the forums, and the next trial was the program I have settled on,
and am extremely satisfied with: JRiver Media Centre. I was able to
see enough in its user forum to know that it was so thoroughly customisable
that I could make it do what I wanted.
“What I wanted” is hardly unique to me - find a particular piece
of music/album as quickly as possible. For me, this means mouse clicks, not
typing in search terms, hence the need for filters based on key tags. The
tags I chose, which in the Pane view I use for classical, JRiver displays
as columns across the screen, were:
• album
• composer
• sub-genre
• label
This system will allow me to find a particular work or album with two clicks
in most cases, and a third to start playing it. You might be surprised by
the absence of performer or composition from this list. This is because my
collection doesn’t involve significant numbers of different recordings
of the same work. If I had fifty versions of Beethoven 5, then they would
become important.
What impressed me even more with JRiver was its ability to incorporate my
other audio collections - modern, jazz, world, spoken word - in the same window
as classical, but with the versatility to allow totally individual viewing/filtering
for each genre. You can see them listed it in the top left corner. It will
also manage your video and photo collections if you allow it - I don’t.
You do have to invest a significant chunk of time and patience into any of
these programs to become familiar with how they work, but with JRiver, I found
that I was making continual progress, and after more than 12 months of use,
I have found nothing that I really want it to do that it is unable to.
Transferring your CDs
If you are like me, you'll want your music library not just to include what
you've downloaded, but all your CDs as well. Assuming you've answered the
matters above, all you need is time, and a good quality ripping program.
While JRiver includes a ripping function, I don’t use it. My research
indicates that Exact Audio Copy (freeware with no limitations or ads)
is the one that produces the best quality output. Like most ripping programs,
it accesses a free online database which in most cases recognises the CD and
fills in at least some of the tags.
Getting the music away from the computer
I spend a lot of time at my desk in my study, for Musicweb International as
well as my day job. As a consequence, I listen to music more there than through
the hifi in the loungeroom. Therefore, the first step was improve the speakers
connected to my computer. I did find some quite decent Logitech speakers which
sit on my desk, and do a perfectly reasonable job for what they are.
I already had a good quality sound card in the computer - something that if
you are going to take digital music seriously, and sound quality is important
to you, you need to look at (especially if you only have the one built into
the motherboard of your computer).
However, it is a bit anti-social to have all this music and hide myself and
it away in my study, so I needed to find a way to get the music from the computer
to the hifi in the lounge room. This means dealing with the analog-digital
divide somewhere in the chain. If sound quality is important to you, don’t
leave it to the computer to do the conversion. Buy a DAC (digital to analog
converter) and connect it to your amplifier.
It then becomes a matter of how you get the data to it: hard-wired or wifi.
I chose the latter to avoid yet more cables, and bought a NAD USB DAC1, which
brought back pleasant memories of the first quality amplifier I bought as
a teenager - the NAD 3020. The sound quality provided by the DAC1 may not
be the ultimate in hifi, but is more than good enough for my less than perfect
hearing these days.
In effect, the stereo becomes an alternative set of speakers for the computer.
To swap between desktop and stereo meant going to the Control Panel and switching
from one to the other - not especially convenient, but hardly a chore. As
it happened, I found a very simple program called Sound Shortcut, which
is included in the startup of the computer, and allows me to switch output
with a keystroke.
The final matter to consider was the selection of a piece of music to play
through the stereo. As it stood, that had to be done from my desk because
that is where the media server and software are located. In my house, that
wasn’t really a problem because the my lounge room is next to my office.
It wouldn’t be so good if it had been downstairs. However, even that
wrinkle sorted itself out: a JRiver remote control app for my iPad, which
works via the wifi network. Its interface isn’t as good or as flexible
as the PC one, but still does the job well enough.
A pet peeve: booklets - the lack thereof
What is it about downloads that makes certain labels and providers think that
it is not necessary to include the booklet? I daresay many of you will say
“it’s all out there if you Google it” but it isn’t,
or “I don’t need the booklet for this new Beethoven 5” and
you’d be right, but most of my purchases are not the standard repertoire.
Is it because the download costs less? No, the download is cheaper because
the label hasn’t been required to physically produce the disc and case
and print the booklet and covers, transport it across the world and have it
sit in a record shop. At least it should be cheaper, but I’ve seen a
number of recordings on the Australian iTunes store which were more expensive
than the physical CD in the shops here.
Is it because the booklet is hard to produce in electronic form? Surely not
- the pdf format is hardly an esoteric one, difficult to create. Naxos, Chandos,
Hyperion and BIS have managed to produce pdf booklets of even their oldest
releases from the very start.
Yet, for labels such as EMI, Decca and DG, it is only very recently that their
newest releases, but not re-issues, have been made available for download
with a booklet. For some labels - are you listening, Dutton, Warner and ECM?
- the penny still hasn’t dropped.
From one provider to another, there is inconsistency. Emusic and Classical
Archives don’t seem to provide booklets for any label, while the few
EMI recordings that do come with booklets through iTunes aren’t supplied
if you buy the same recording from Classicsonline.
For some labels, the provision of booklets is seemingly random: some releases
have the booklets, others don’t. I’m thinking here particularly
of CPO. Here is a label that specialises in the most obscure composers, and
yet until the last month or so, about half of their new releases were missing
booklets, and remain so.
I contacted a number of providers about this. Their explanation: we are limited
by what the labels supply. My take on this - would a shop-based music retailer
accept CDs from the label that didn’t provide the booklet?
In summary
It has been a slow process getting my system to the point where it is now
a matter of putting the effort in to digitise my CD collection and organise
the new purchases. Slow it may have been, but ultimately rewarding. I like
pottering around on the computer, so the simple approaches of one-box music
servers and the generalist software never appealed.
There is no doubt that the time between the decision to purchase and listening
to that purchase, which used to be weeks when ordering a CD and is now minutes,
is a wonderful advance. Mind you, that near-instant availability could lead
to over-purchasing, but being able to listen to samples (or more) before making
a decision tends to cancel that out.
Some of you reading this have probably lived through the change to LPs and
stereo, and then to CDs. The move to digital is simply the next transition
in the way we listen to music. Some predicted the end of the world with CDs
- last time I checked, the availability of music has never been greater.
Go on, jump in - you won’t regret it.
Footnote
1. It has been pointed out to me, by someone whose opinion I trust, that Winamp
is not "totally unsuitable" for classical music, as he has been
using it for just that purpose for a few years. Undoubtedly, if I went back
to it now with twelve month's extra experience in using music library software,
I would have a different opinion. Possibly, the same might apply to the problem
that I encountered with Media Monkey (return to text).