Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[journeyman2016]

I am a professional rock, blues musician of thirty five years (I will not mention my name) and having toured the world with various internationally known bands, I am now retiring and looking forward to the good, laid back life. Over the last four decades I have continually received free promo music from every major label, audition tapes, tens of thousands of colleagues concert mixing desk recordings, likewise home recordings and even, quality bootlegs from concert tapers. My collection now contains 150,000+ titles (i.e. cd, lp length recordings)  comprising (estimated by friends) most likely 18TB of digital content (when it finally is fully digitized) (although receiving from 400-800 new titlesper month this will "forever" get larger). My question, quite simply, is can JRiver's software handle data of that mass ? Or am I in a no-man's land where I will need to connect various "mini" servers to JRiver's (or other software), rather than one larger centralized "home" server, as I would like - for accessing all of my muisc ? Thanks, in advance, for any info you can share with me.
(And apropos servers, any thoughts on hardware would also be welcome).
Journeyman

[JimH]

Welcome to the forum.  That's within MC's capacity.

The best way to learn about is to start using it.

Rip to a lossless format like FLAC.  Any will do. 

[blgentry]

From what I've been told (but not experienced myself), JRiver MC has been tested with collections of over 1,000,000 tracks.  150,000 titles at an average of 10 tracks per title works out to 1.5 million.  I'm not sure how a collection of that size will perform.  I would expect performance to be fine, but I'm having trouble locating examples of collections that large in forum postings.

But let's step back for moment.  You've got a massive cataloging project to conduct.  I would expect that you, or someone you hire, or even a small team (2 or 3 people) are going to be busy with this for quite some time.  Making sure that this is approached in a very structured manner is going to be important.

With a collection this size, figuring out the exact release of each disc (or other recording media) you have becomes much more important than in a more modest collection.  You're bound to have a good bit of overlap including true duplicates, different release numbers which are actually also duplicates, and of course re-releases that are unique from the original.

You've probably thought through all of this and more; it's just something that's been on my mind recently, so I wanted to share a few of my thoughts.

If I were doing this, I would start with the physical collection and get it as organized as is practical, trying to group artists and albums together as a start, so you can have an overview of the collection you plan to digitize.

Finally, I'm certain everyone has said this, but make sure to have a robust backup strategy in place from day one.  This should include backups going to a separate offsite physical facility periodically in case of fire, theft, or other disasters at the primary site.

Sounds like it might be fun actually.    Good luck.

Brian.

[WolfMan/Trekker]

I'm so darn impressed with the possible capabilities of JRiver MC??, I'm trying to develop a 'playlist' set to work INSIDE Windows (10 Pro).. only ONE request of y'all users/thememakers, I am a Star Trek fan.. could somebody develop an LCARS theme interface? I'm not asking for the World here..  JUST THE GALAXY!

[journeyman2016]

Brian
Thanks for the comments and tips - Unfortunately (at least in the "organized procedure" sense) probably 80% of the physical collection has ' been' digitized. But haphazardly, I would guess. Although a "Born In The U.S.A." (don' t sue me Bruce the Boss - it is written in quotes,bro) guy, I live (and have lived) in Europe for many years. A large part of the physical collection resides in the States, though. Touring through the years, I did not have a large place that could be called home, and so for many, many years a mass of this material had to be re-routed to my brother's huge place in California where it could be stored - so over last decade he has had various friends of ours digitize the music as it piled up - in an "as it came" fashion.
Therefore, although it is a world class collection - it is spread all over a stack of multi-TB external hard disks that have been Fed-ex' d to me in recent years - so it is a bit of a jumbled mess. I guess a new crew of volunteers on this side of the Big Pond will have to do some extensive work to straighten it out. But even before that I am going to have to jump into some research on hardware.....because if I could do this as I would clearly like to, I would eventually have all of this music on one server. A server connected to a desktop system -with touch screen, of course...with (hopefully) software that can fully access it. First for me personally will be checking on the hardware possibilities - and although I know a bit about computers.......server technology, home server connectivity - well, they are like learning the first notes of a new song. I have a long way to go.
Luckily the back-up aspect is, in a sense. covered- by about 6000 miles. In California, the physical music is stored in one place and back-ups of the disks shipped to me - although obviously also in bit of a jumble are stored somewhere else. Thus three separate storage locations.
By the way..if you know any web domains that might help me to understand what I need to watch for in a search for hardware - I am open to any and all, ideas.
Journeyman

P.s. Hopefully it is a bit fun. And I probably do need luck.

[blgentry]

Although a "Born In The U.S.A." (don' t sue me Bruce the Boss - it is written in quotes,bro) guy...

I've only learned to appreciate Springsteen in the last couple of years.  But now I'm a pretty big fan!  I think he's fantastic.

so for many, many years a mass of this material had to be re-routed to my brother's huge place in California where it could be stored - so over last decade he has had various friends of ours digitize the music as it piled up - in an "as it came" fashion.

Wow.  Ok. So you might have some serious auditing to do depending upon how careful these various people were.

I would eventually have all of this music on one server. A server connected to a desktop system -with touch screen, of course...with (hopefully) software that can fully access it.

That part probably isn't that hard.  You don't need super smoking fast hardware to have a good JRiver server.  A modern i5 or i7 based system should be all you need.  You'd need to do some testing of course, as I'm not sure how many tracks you have right now and how well MC will handle them.  Though I expect MC will perform well, even with a half million to a million files.

MC can talk to as many drives as you can plug in, or mount inside the machine, so that's no problem.  Your 18TB of storage (estimate) shouldn't be any kind of issue.  As for the "desktop interface", you can use the same computer that's "the server". Or you could use another in client server mode.  Or you could use a nice big tablet like an ipad or an Android tablet running JRemote (or similar) to remote control MC.  The tablet apps are pretty darned nice.  Very friendly and rather fast.

Luckily the back-up aspect is, in a sense. covered- by about 6000 miles. In California, the physical music is stored in one place and back-ups of the disks shipped to me - although obviously also in bit of a jumble are stored somewhere else. Thus three separate storage locations.

For me, that's not anywhere near enough.  I would want *exact* copies of each hard drive, made on a periodic basis.  I would also want periodic backups of MC's internal database to go with these.  It's easy and fast to make the MC database backups, so they aren't a problem.  New hard drives are cheap, so that's probably not a problem either.  It's all about developing a process for data backup, testing it, and then using it all the time.

You're in for a journey here.  But like we both already said, it should be fun. 

Brian.

[WolfMan/Trekker]

I currently have over 49,000 audio tracks (MOSTLY MP3..).. What kind of difficulties would I have in, as you suggest, converting to .flac? (I have LOTS of storage space.. My audio is, along with installers, images, and documents, on a 2TB external USB drive.)

As a side question, What VIDEO format do you suggest? (My video is on a separate 5TB USB drive..)

[JimH]

There is nothing to be gained by converting MP3 files to FLAC.  It is not a good idea.

The same is probably true for converting your existing video files.  MC should be able to play them in their original format.