One's Own Personal Music Collection : Growing and Curating it. Why and How!

Imagine there existed a way to get pleasantly surprised, over and over and over again...  all day long...  every day of the year...  every year...
Fantasy-land?  No, it's called my music collection on random play!  👀

My music collection, lovingly curated by me for over a decade, is now standing at 12,000 songs after an exciting series of additions over recent years, and continuous paring down.

My musical tastes are hugely eclectic, and from many genres, countries, languages, and periods. I appreciate a broad variety - except country and rap (unless it's in Russian, which is absolutely hilarious!)

Creating and Curating a Collection

I think that to attain a (nearly) always-pleasing music collection, one needs 4 elements:

1. Control over the collection 
   Streamed music services are a great way to get started and explore; nowadays, they are getting good at learning your taste.  Nonetheless, it's ultimately NOT your own collection.  It could take favorite songs away on any day (maybe copyright issues), or even completely close down - just like that!  Also, one cannot easily mix-and-match across different services, and it's just not fine-grained control over the whole collection.


2. Substantial size
   Otherwise, it's the same relatively few songs getting overplayed - a fast track to getting tired of! 
   How to build it?  Anything goes: free downloads, transfer of old CD's, digital recordings from streamed sources, paid download subscription services like eMusic, individual songs purchases, inheriting collections from friends, etc. etc.


3. Continuous paring down
   Mediocre songs, or songs that you can't decide if you really like them, sneak in - especially when you acquire large collections.  Also, taste can drift over time....
   
   A danger looming in my mind is to delete too many because one is "in a dark (or hard-to-please) mood on any particular day"!  To protect myself from that, I annotate the songs (I  use the music-playing software WinAmp) with a running count of "keeps" and "deletes".  When I especially like a song, I may increase the "keep" count, or conversely increase the "delete" count if it doesn't sit well with me. 
   
   If it's a song I've had for a while, I generally wait for a "delete count" of 2, before zapping it.  My taste is quite consistent, but once in a great while I come across a (single) "delete" that I transmute to a "keep" - typically a new song that grew on me.


4. Multiple backups, including offsite
   So, you've spent 10+ years acquiring and curating that collection...  are you ready to jump off a bridge if one day you lose it all??  Local backups (on another device in your house) are a great first step, but what if your house burns down?  (I use a variety of strategies, including the handy, inexpensive Backblaze service, also great for your other files, such as photos.) An aggressive multiple backup systems must be integral part of keeping a music collection – or it's a disaster waiting to happen!

Song Mending

For most songs, it's just a matter of "keep vs. delete", plus perhaps cleaning up the metadata (info about the song, such as artist's name.)  But in some cases, I find that a little "mending" - light editing of the digital file - comes in handy.

I use the program mpTrim for simple excisions, at the end or beginning, with optional fades (whose lengths can be varied, but are in other ways fixed.)  For anything more involved, I turn to Adobe Audition CS5.5 , part of the Adobe suite that also contains Photoshop and the video editor Premiere.  Nowadays, individual Adobe programs can be rented by the month.

The most common cases I occasionally handle are:

1. A truncated song, with a jarring sudden ending
   If a clean version of the song isn't obtainable, I sometime fade out the ending


2. A song with a long blank ending, or junk at the end
   A simple file trim can be nice


3. An otherwise fabulous song that is annoyingly too long
   Snipping off the end (maybe a repetition), typically with a carefully-constructed fadeout, can give the song a new "lease on life".  Taking out a part in the middle is typically much more tricky, but on a few occasions I was able to "cut on the beat", and it sounds fine to me (maybe a professional musician would disagree!)  My most elaborate audio edit was the partial elimination of an annoying voice, taking advantage of the fact that the voice was mono while the instrumental part was stereo.


4. An uncompressed song, in "wav" format
   Just a waste of disk space.  Easy to convert into mp3 compressed form


5. Heavy clicks/hiss
   I rarely remove hiss or clicks from old music, because I feel they're part of the "vintage charm", but there are cases when they are just excessive

In some cases, it's clear that a song should go on the "to-mend list"; for example, a truncated one.  But in many other cases, it's not completely evident that I don't like the song as it is (for example, "too long"); only time can tell how I really feel about it.  Well, that same "keep/delete" system of notes can be used to leave remarks such as "abridge ending"; a song with many such notes becomes a good candidate to do some editing work on, when time allows!

I'm not an audio engineer, but I've picked up a few tricks over the years; it's satisfying to have the power be able to do a light edit, rather than being at the mercy of the current state of the song.  I have done a small handful of "heroic rescues", but most mending is of the banal, straightforward type.

Organization and Playlists

What about organizing the music files (typically .mp3 's)?  For the time being, I'm using a fairly straightforward system of folders, typically by artist names - with special folders for things like soundtracks, etc.

I also maintain a few playlists, such as music for my small massage practice.  I've been complimented by many of my massage clients on having the most amazing bodywork music playlist ☺  That's because any song - from a huge variety - that I feel is suitable for bodywork gets thrown in the mix, whether it's "new age" music (way overdone by other massage therapists imo!), 1930's German jazz, tribal, French chanteuse, etc. etc.

In addition to the playlists that I currently maintain (such as bodywork music, or slow-dance music), I'd also like to be able to easily conjure up all French music, all music with an epic or mystical quality, all angry music, all funny songs, etc, etc. 

I've been using a database system I set up (using Microsoft Access, part of Office.)  For example, when I felt the need for "powerful, mysterious, suspenseful" music for a short video of a small airplane taking off into the sunrise (see my blog entry Cuba to Jamaica via the Cayman Islands), I was able to close in on "Chateau Saint Martin", from "The Ninth Gate".  Tagging music is of course labor-intensive.  I expect to be upgrading to a more powerful tool, such as the up-and-coming Knowledge & Media Management System BrainAnnex.

I'll have more to say on that, but meanwhile the everyday life of my music collection is occasional growth, regular curation - and constant enjoyment....



(All images found on the Internet; unknown image credits)