How do you store/manage all your music files?

[Huggy Love]

Half I have in CD, the other half on my HD, never merged them all together, never (and don't plan to) rip all my CD's to my HD, never like to use my phone to control my music in my home or car, too cheap to pay for steaming svc....

.... I really am a luddite .....
.... my music listening life is so messed up ....
.... thank god we have the best commercial free Jazz radio station on the West Coast or I'da kilt myself....


.... need a woman to do my computer stuff for me ...
.... have one or two that will....
... just don't trust them.

 

[aphantomvaper]

Every physical form going back to 78's (still some 8track!) And subscribed to YouTube music.

YT music is pretty sweet. Videos, albums, all sort of stuff and no commercials and I can let my phone go sleep and it will still play. It also seems to have every album released, ever! I was listening to some Bobby Vee the other day, and then some Acid King. It's got it all for me.

 

[Max Headroom]

Roon is my library management system.
It ain't cheap but I have not find anything remotely as powerful or useful for metadata and multi room playback.
All music files both streaming and local files are brought together and managed as one big library.
All my local files are stored on 2x8tb HDD attached by USB to my windows 10 PC.
Roon does the rest.

 

[Max Headroom]

And of course I still have a veritable mountain of vinyl that gets regular outings....hard to beat the SQ of a well mastered NM copy.

 

[watelessness]

i keep all my CDs in their cases, on shelves, grouped by category (blues, jazz, dance, classical, holiday, and everything else), sorted by artist name (including first name).

oh, you said "files". what is this "files of which speak?

 

[Tone-y]

I have to unplug and re-plug a stick every time I start my car (Honda) and it always started at the first song.

I finally gave up and went streaming.

Ouch. Mine luckily carries on from where you last were and had a random function to pick songs out of the many folders and subfolders.
Even better is the car recognises the difference between mine and the wife's keys so she can be listening to some naff radio station but when I get in it automatically picks up where I was with my music collection

 

[Frank McNerney]

Spotify is Evil. (I'm just sayin)

 

[Prina]

I have all my CDs ripped to my laptop, I also have them all on harddrive stored in a fireproof safe box. And just for good luck I have them all on a memory stick in the car. It's really only in the car that I listen to them though as I just stream music when I'm in the laptop

Multiple Copies Keep Stuff Safe. Especially when at least one is off site.

Depending on the size of your files you could fit them all on a 256GB SD card, a 1-2TB SSD or 8TB HD. If going for an HD, stick with the Western Digital or Seagate, probably WD. If you have the drive connected to your computer consider going with a PMR HD rather than the cheaper SMR HD. SMR is probably fine if you're only using it as an occasionally connected offsite backup.

 

[KThaxton]

I keep the "master copies" on my PC's external hard drive and have usb drives for my vehicles. I buy a mix of MP3 downloads and physical CD's depending on the artist/album....my favorites, the ones with a story and/or the ones I am most likely to sit down just to listen to, I buy the CD, then rip it for the vehicles.

One frustrating thing I have not been able to tackle....just bought a '21 4Runner, it plays the songs in the album alphabetically, not by song number. That grinds my gears. My Ram truck and the Sony head unit in my Subaru do not have a problem with this.

 

[DISTORT6]

I primarily store my music files on a dedicated external hard drive, which gives me plenty of space to keep everything organized. I also use cloud storage as an additional backup solution, just to ensure I never lose any of my favorite tunes.

Hmm…interesting first post on a guitar forum. Another one.

 

[helmi]

Over 1400 cd’s, a couple hundred albums. any “files” i have are kept in my “filing” cabinet!