Stuck Inside Of Web 1.0 With the Web 2.0 Blues Again
Ten years ago, my favorite possesion was my CD collection. I had spent years collecting, sorting and listening to music and whenever my friends would come by, I always delighted in showing them how extensive my collection was.
Whether it was the mainstream hits or the classics, somewhere in my collection there was a song for whatever mood I happened to be in. At that time, most of my collection stemmed from countless hours spent bargain hunting at independent record shops or from massive binge buying from CD clubs like BMG and Columbia House. As my collection grew, I found that storing them became an escalating problem and remember having to spend more money on a CD storage rack then in on any other piece of furniture I owned at the time.
This collection was never cheap and it took many years to build up, but it was a labor of love and one of my favorite things to do would be to continually reorganize the collection either alphabetically, categorically or chronologically. Like an old miser who delights in counting his gold, I would continually flip through one CD after another even if there was never enough time to listen to them all.
Somewhere along the way technology developed though and it rendered my CD collection useless.
It started with Napster where I learned that I didn’t need physical CDs. I could suddenly build up a digital database of songs and by the time I realized how easy it was to convert my legal CD collection into mp3′s, things quickly evolved into a full scale ripping project.
As my ripping project moved forward I quickly learned that I was going to need space. Just like I needed a CD case to store my albums, I needed external hard drives to store my mp3s. My first external drive was a 200 GB drive that I thought would last me for a couple of years at least. When 200 GBs turned out to be inadequate, I added more and more and more drives until I eventually had over a terrabyte of storage dedicated to my storing my mp3s.
It wasn’t until I got a few years into this process that I began to realize that I had made a big mistake by embracing the hot 1.0 technology of the day. The hard drives turned out to be nothing but problems. In the last few years, I’ve had at least five hard drive failures and while three of those were still under their 1 year warranty, getting the data back was about as much fun as being the one stuck with having to clean Alice Cooper’s hotel room after a concert.
After a couple of data failures I learned to start backing up my music, but after constant I/O device errors and continually being prevented from backing up my music by what I suspect were DRM laced music files, I finally gave up on trying to save multiple copies of my mp3 files.
Because of the size of my collection, I could never get any music players to effectively manage the entire thing. Whether it was using Media Player, iTunes or Winamp, every system seemed unable to respond after I would import the collection into their software. To make matters worse, everytime my computer crashed, I could never prevent my external drives from trying to autoplay the entire collection everytime I restarted.
While I’ve loved having an extensive music collection, my problem now though, is that over the last few years technology has innovated so fast that we’ve moved from a web 1.0 world to a web 2.0 world and I’ve been left behind.
Just like my CD collection is largely irrelevant today, my mp3 collection has become less relevant by the shift toward networked solutions. This fact was highlighted to me when I was reading a great review of the Sonos music system, which Joel Spolosky titled “The Infinite Music Collection.”
By combining a wifi Sonos sound system with a Rhapsody music service, Joel has been able to replicate my entire music collection (and more) without the headaches of hard drive failures, loss of data or buffer overrun issues.
In retrospect, had I been able to think forward five years, I would have been better off putting off innovation and using Rhapsody (or more likely Yahoo! music because Real Network sucks), then to try and assemble a collection on my own.
Of course there are downsides to a web 2.0 solution. Because you don’t own the music it’s more difficult to share it or move it onto other consumer electronic products, because the all you can download services are subscription based, you have never ending fees instead of a one time purchase, and of course there will always be DRM restrictions associated with these services, but given the amount of time and money I’ve spent on my music collection, I think I would have been much better off renting 2 million songs, instead of trying to build my own music catalog.
Posted on November 16th, 2006 by Davis
Filed under: Music, Technology, Web 2.0
All this storage space is a nightmare. You almost can’t back them up.. just easier to buy a new drive to back up your old dive.
I converted my entire CD collection to MP3 format back in 2002 using the LAME MP3 codec and CDex to rip them. Never had a single problem with my Terrabyte+ MP3 collection. I rip them into folders by artist name and album name, then access them over a computer network from any room in the house (all my rooms have PCs instead of DVD players and are connected by a gigabit network) or any internet-connected location. If you spend a little time setting up your firewall and share your MP3s via private FTP or network share, you can access any files you want from anywhere. I never met a copy-protected audio CD that couldn’t be ripped by EAC or CDex running on Windows. Don’t import your entire library into any player application, any program will hang if you tell it to scan the metadata for a terrabyte of MP3s. Just drag and drop artists or songs into your player as needed via a regualar file browser, or set up playlists for artists and albums as needed. As for backing up, that will always be a problem no matter what media your music is on. Even your original CDs will eventually need to be backed up. With terrabytes of hard drive space now under $500, I say, just buy space as needed and run a decent backup program like Norton Ghost once a month. Heck for my music collection, I feel little need to back up more than a few times a year. It’s just music after all and presumably you have the original CDs or vinyl somewhere anyway. As for backing up DRM-protected files, if you buy downloadable music in any DRM-d format, then you’re just a schmuck who deserves to lose his music if his hard drive fails. Buy the CD or download from a service like allofmp3.com that offers the kind of files YOU want, not the kind of files the music industry wants you to have. As for me, my work files get daily backups, but I can afford to lose a few albums every now and then, so I don’t sweat not backing up my music all the time. Still, I see no reason you would need to resort to commercial services. With a little network configuration up front you can have your music and listen to it too.
[...] experience with Real’s Rhapsody music service. Before the internet, napster, and digitization, I used to collect music with a passion. Records, tapes, CDs, it didn’t matter. I would scour local garage sales and thrift stores [...]