Long time readers of this blog will know that I digitised my vinyl collection many years ago. This wasn’t a simple task because I ripped well over a 1000 vinyl’s to my hard drive.
This is a job I never want to do again.
Now, that the work done I’ve been looking for the best way to monitor and preserve a large collection of digitised music. Here’s what I’ve learned.
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How to store a large collection of music over the long term
Digitising a big vinyl collection is a big task. And it’s a task which takes a long time. Ideally, we only want to have to do it the once.
Some important question to ask when performing this type of archival work are:
- Will my audio files still be playable in 10 years or more?
- How can I maintain the sound quality of our vinyl rips over the long term?
- What events in the future could cause me to lose all my collection?
So, it’s important we store our ripped music in a future proof file format. And we take measures to make sure we lose no data when our music is stored.
Taking precautions like this will allows us to listen to our music years from now. And it may even allow future generations to enjoy our music too.
Plus, if we choose the a good archival file format we can increases the likelihood that our music is compatible with new DJ’ing software, DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) and media players which might be released in the future.
If we’re archiving music, we should choose a file format which preserves the most information possible. And because lossy formats like MP3, by default, discard a certain amount of information, we should rule out these formats out if better alternatives are available.
Now, there’s a lot of argument over whether people can hear the difference between high-quality MP3 and lossless files. But I think this argument is irrelevant when it comes transferring vinyl to digital. You might not be able to hear the difference now with your present HIFI, but who’s to say you won’t hear the difference in the future. After all, technology is constantly improving. And in years to come you might have a better amp and speakers which enable you to perceive a difference in sound between lossy and lossless files formats.
In my opinion the best files format for archiving vinyl rips is FLAC or ALAC (Apples Lossless file format). Here’s why:
- Most modern media player can play these file formats. The exception is iTunes which still won’t play FLACS without some hacking (come on Apple, get with the times). Obviously, iTunes will play ALACs as it’s their own proprietary file format.
- Most DJ’ing, audio editing and DAW software also support these files.
- And archival sites like the Internet Archive allow the uploading of FLACS and ALACS. And these files types allow meta data to be embedded. And the Internet Archive doesn’t strip this meta data from uploaded FLAC/ALAC files.
One great thing about lossless file formats is that you can convert a lossless file to another lossless file format without losing sound quality. So, you could convert your collection from FLAC to ALAC and back again, all day long, losing no information.
Any good piece of conversion software will also preserve the metadata (artist, track name, artwork, etc) when converted. If you want a good media player and music file conversion program, I recommend Foobar2000 for this task. It’s free and it preserves metadata when converting.
What this also means is this we’re future-proofing our music. If we choose a popular and lossless file format for vinyl archiving, we stand a greater chance of being able to convert our files into an improved file format if one is invented in the future.
Storaging your newly digitised files safely
Transferring all my vinyl collection to digital has taken me years to complete – and it’s a job which I never want to do again. Therefore, I’ve taken various steps to make sure everything is backed up.
I recommend that you should have at least two separate copies of your lossless music files on different storage devices. Why? Because all hard disks fail at some point. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ your disk drives will fail. So, if you are storing all your ripped data on one disk is asking for trouble. And, if you don’t want to rip your whole collection again, get it backed up.
At the very least you should backup your data to an external hard disk or network storage device (like NAS or file server).
But, we can improve our backup solution further by adding offsite backups to the mix.
The 3-2-1 backup strategy
The 3-2-1 backup strategy involves us having two onsite backup (like I describe above) and then a remote offsite backup.
The idea behind this strategy is that if both localised copies of are destroyed, the remote copy can be used to restore the local backups. And if you lose your remote copy (like your cloud storage provider goes out of business), you can use a local copy to restore a new remote copy.
The 3-2-1 backup strategy works on the assumption that the likelihood of you losing all three copies of your data at the same time is remote.
In fact, the 3-2-1 backup strategy is the backup strategy that the US government recommends to small business for backing up important data.
You might read this and think its overkill, but just hear me out.
A lot of things can happen in 20 years’ which could affect or destroy my backups. In the next 20 years or more my house could burn down, a lightning strike could fry my PCs and network, and my computers/data could be stolen.
A good long-term backup strategy takes these rare events into account and tries to solve them. Over the long-term things like the 3-2-1 backup strategy don’t seem like such a bad idea.
Remote storage options
Cloud storage has gotten cheaper over recent years. And now the even amateur archivists like myself can afford to store a large amount of data in the cloud.
Examples of well-known cloud storage providers are products like Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox.
At the time of writing this article Google Drive overs 1TB of storage for a very reasonable $9.99 per month. This gives you an idea of the costs of storing a large collection of music files in the cloud. This is what I use.
One great thing about storing music this way in the cloud is that it becomes accessible anywhere you have an internet connection.
How to check a music collection for corrupt files
Over the long-term, it’s wise to check our files to make sure they’re fully working. Any digital file can become corrupt for a variety of reasons.
Luckily, there’s a free program to check our music files. It’s easy to use and it’ll help us to find any problematic files. For this task my favourite music swiss army knife (Foobar2000) comes to the rescue again.
Foobar2000 allows you to install 3rd party plugins and components. These plugins and components extend the features and functionality of the media player. In our case, we must install the foo-verifier plugin as this will allow us to check the integrity of our files in our music collection.
Using this plugin is easy. You just:
- Download and install Foobar 2000
- Download and install the foo-verifier plugin
- Drag your whole ripped collection into Foobar
- Select all your collection
- Then right-click > Utilities > Verify Integrity
- Wait for the plugin to finish checking your files
The foo-verifier plugin will only report any bad or corrupt files. The plugin cannot repair your files.
As you use this plugin more and more, you’ll find some music files report errors but are still playable.
If I come across any badly corrupt files, I check to see if they’re playable and if they sound okay. If they don’t, I delete the files and re-record the vinyl thereby replacing the problematic files.
In 5 years I’ve had one single (2 FLAC files) become unplayable. But I do have around 30 files reporting minor errors. But all the files with minor errors sound okay and are playable.
There’s no way of automating this file check, so I just set up a reminder in my Google calendar – I usually check my files every 6 months.