rubiefawn.me

CD Collection

Authored / Modified

I have been cultivating a growing collection of CDs. I don’t have a convenient CD player, so I’ve been ripping them and putting their music on my modded iPod Classic, as well as my own Jellyfin media server. But why?

I’ve grown increasingly frustrated as streaming services decline in quality while also increasing their subscription prices. Not only that, but streaming services pay virtually nothing to artists. I decided to start collecting CDs and listening to music I enjoy on my iPod, free from algorithms and suggested content. Purchasing CDs is a legitimate way to financially support the artists as well (for artists that don’t offer CDs, Bandcamp gives artists a more reasonable cut).

I find that I now listen to full albums rather than cherry-picking individual songs like I would have on Spotify. Viewing albums as the primary unit of music as opposed to singles has changed the way I enjoy music (and I just think that’s neat!)

Benn Jordan’s Why Spotify Will Ultimately Fail and Spotify’s Phony War On Bots are excellent videos that explore the unsavory details behind the music streaming business model (not just Spotify). There is no better time to take control of your music; it sounds better without corporate greed.

Converting FLAC to ALAC

The iPod Classic is not capable of playing FLAC audio files (at least, not without Rockbox. In order to sync my FLAC CD rips to my iPod, I have to convert them to Apple’s ALAC format. To do this, I use the all-powerful ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i $INPUT_FLAC -map 0:a -acodec alac $OUTPUT_M4A

Since I’m typically converting an entire CD’s worth of files at once, I use the following command:

ls **/*.flac
| insert out {|it| $it.name | str replace "flac" "m4a"}
| each {|it| ffmpeg -i $it.name -map 0:a -acodec alac $it.out }

The shell used here is nushell, but other shells can do the same thing (find -exec in POSIX, Get-Item -Recurse | ForEach-Object in Powershell, and so on). Or you could just install Rockbox on the iPod in order to play FLAC files directly, and save yourself the trouble of maintaining two copies of your music library, lmao

It’s worth noting that converting to ALAC seems to strip most of the metadata tags, which seems to be the result of some Apple nonsense ffmpeg doesn’t account for. I’ve been using mp3tag to import metadata from musicbrainz both before and after converting to ALAC, but I’d prefer to only do this once. I’ve also heard that atomicparsely can help with this sort of thing, but I haven’t investigated that yet. I’ll update this once I figure out how to handle this.

Below is a list of all of the CDs I have collected so far, updated as needed. Happy listening!

#music #physical media #ipod #jellyfin