This month in digital music libraries - June 2023
June 26, 2023 in digital music by Dan Gravell
This month we look back on a month providing new music collection tools, interesting reading material about how music affects our brains and some hardware news in the NAS and headphone markets.
New tools for music collecting
A bunch of new apps and tools for music hoarders this month!
A new lossless sync to lossy app, ideal for syncing with storage-constrained mobile devices:
A simple transcode + sync application, ideal for transferring to mobile devices. https://t.co/2H9KXRjIi2 #windows #linux #macos #easyaudiosync pic.twitter.com/YOKkLer8ZS
— bliss (@bliss_music) May 30, 2023
Filebot asked for feedback about a way of executing post-processing scripts after renaming files:
Is there any interest in custom post-processing scripts in the FileBot Desktop application? pic.twitter.com/6dZdEq1Xky
— FileBot (@filebot_renamer) June 2, 2023
And a new music player app, mainly aimed at the audiophile market:
Tonal is a *highly* opinionated music player for #macOS https://t.co/CBsqoita2S pic.twitter.com/Ht1aRD3PjE
— bliss (@bliss_music) June 21, 2023
Music and SCIENCE (a bit)
A couple of interesting alerts this week. First, a book about how music affects our emotions through things like lyrics, key changes and so on. Ever wondered why you get goosebumps listening to a track? Maybe this will explain it…
A new book that describes how musical artifacts; chords, key changes, lyrics et al; affect our emotions. https://t.co/cvqe2lpub7 pic.twitter.com/nTpHWE6KwM
— bliss (@bliss_music) May 28, 2023
Meanwhile, a study confirming that active listening is better for your brain than passive background listening…
I knew it! Put down that algorithmic background music playlist! https://t.co/AC4L4QoWei pic.twitter.com/7aaMPQzIpH
— bliss (@bliss_music) June 12, 2023
So how to choose what music to listen to actively? There are a bunch of places I use but this month I was reminded how good RateYourMusic is:
I love the year based lists on @RateYourMusic - really good for back-catalogue filling. https://t.co/7Jpyvy3jAC pic.twitter.com/auAagvRb4o
— bliss (@bliss_music) June 10, 2023
And you can also discover new music via a user-created radio station:
Radiooooo is a streaming service where the music broadcast is submitted by its users and curated by their DJs. https://t.co/BdJm1b7w2l @Radiooooo_com pic.twitter.com/uJishj4fvV
— bliss (@bliss_music) June 17, 2023
Metadata!
The music industry has been famously poor in providing accurate metadata with music that is sold. Will the growing concern about recording artists’ income neccesitate better tracking metadata so royalties can be properly apportioned?
Is the music industry going to be _compelled_ to fix music metadata? And will this metadata be made available to all, or just the big streaming platforms? https://t.co/I1yY4Ky235 pic.twitter.com/PyInCNsnvw
— bliss (@bliss_music) June 3, 2023
Meanwhile, the MusicBrainz project continues its Godly work by releasing a new dataset that makes it easier to match music to “canonical” data. This is useful, for instance, where there may be multiple matches for a given album or song and you want to choose the most likely match (e.g. original releases rather than re-masters with different track lists or cover art).
Build a semi-automated music tagger with MusicBrainz canonical data!
— MetaBrainz (@MetaBrainz) June 14, 2023
We put our foot in our mouth recently, claiming that you could use our new dataset to build a tagger without much effort… joke’s on you, our feet taste GREAT! Also, here’s how. Easy.https://t.co/ge9ubYEJ6O
Hardware news
This month, the consumer NAS market lost an entrant. Drobo were formerly popular with photographers rather than music collectors, but nevertheless the loss of a competitor is worrying.
A bad sign for the #NAS market, or just the result of a failure to address the concerns of their target market? #drobo https://t.co/19N1vAJgnM pic.twitter.com/jQz5x7g7WX
— bliss (@bliss_music) June 8, 2023
In other news, new Airpod firmware with new features:
New updates coming for #airpods - an adaptive approach to volume levels including automatic volume drops when someone talks to you! https://t.co/uXkJeiYnQb pic.twitter.com/22OGY7hpeV
— bliss (@bliss_music) June 15, 2023
But if you’re not in the Apple ecosystem and prefer more hi-fi headphones, take a look at this website with a bunch of hardware hacks to improve your ‘phones audio quality:
Do you have any of the headphones listed here? https://t.co/XWyjuAId32 loads of hardware hacks to get more out of your cans! Some of these are removing artificial manufacturer limitations #crippleware (Photo: https://t.co/E3L0CwL4Xg ) pic.twitter.com/khFxBsS6um
— bliss (@bliss_music) June 25, 2023
Busy month!
Photo by Bruno Bučar on Unsplash
