Your music collection is a long standing thing - you curate it, it defines you. Because you aim to keep your music collection a long time, it's worth investing in making it more usable, maintainable and secure.

Rip lossless

If you acquire music from physical sources such as CDs, they should be 'ripped' (the transfer of audio from the source to your computer) in a 'lossless' format. The key advantages are higher audio quality and more flexibility.

What is lossless? Basically, it means that when the audio is being transferred from the source, none of the data is discarded in the transfer.

For CDs this is quite clear. CDs already have their audio data stored in digital format at the sample rate of 44.1kHz.

If you were to rip this audio losslessly, that means all of that data ends up in a form on your computer. That means the data may be compressed, but no data may be discarded during the compression. So long as the compressed form of the music can be completely reproduced back to the original form, we can say the data is still lossless.

On the other hand, lossy formats exist which discard data that is deemed less important in the listening process, with the aim of reducing the storage requirements of the audio.

Examples of lossless formats are FLAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF. WAV is also highly used, and lossless, but requires more storage space (it is uncompressed) and tagging and metadata support is lacking. Examples of lossy formats are MP3, AAC (commonly used inside MP4 files) and OGG.

It's pretty obvious a lossless approach derives higher audio quality (whether that can be perceived is another question).

What is less obvious, and I actually think the key advantage of lossless, is the flexibility. This is what really provides that *future proofing*.

Because the audio is as high quality as it has always been, you can use lossless encoded music for more things. As it is a faithful representation of the source, it can be further transcoded into lossy formats where required (e.g. portable music players that only support MP3). You can also use it in splitting and mixing the audio streams knowing that the source audio stream has not been compromised in any way.

Embed album artwork

Album artwork is important because it helps you navigate and browse your music library.

It is far easier for your brain to quickly interpret a group of images than it is read through a long list of text. In addition, the artwork images look far better when displaying currently playing music.

So the question arises: how should artwork be stored in your library? For future proofing, the first answer is the artwork itself should be stored at the file level. In other words, it should be a first-class part of your music library. If you just delegate artwork responsibility to your software you run the risk of that software storing the artwork in proprietary ways, which mean moving to a different player or even computer can lose the artwork (I'm looking at you, iTunes).

That's clearly not good for future proofing, so how best to store album artwork?

The answer is that it's best to embed artwork within the music files themselves. Saving the artwork in separate files is also a possibility, but embedding it has better support within music players (these days) and transferring music files is also easier; only the files have to be moved.

There is a disadvantage: storage space. Because the same image is replicated often (e.g. each track of an album has the same album artwork), there's a lot of duplication. That said it's questionable how much of a disadvantage this is; storage is cheap and getting cheaper.

Embrace minimalism

Information about the music in your collection, such as the album and artist names, release dates, genres, etc. are called music metadata. These metadata can appear in two principle places: within the music files (inside something called "tags") or within the folder and file names used to structure your music files. Of these, tags should be preferred due to their flexibility and lower cost of change.

Correcting, updating and otherwise maintaining these fields is a common, ongoing task in music library management, and if you want to ease your work in the long run, future proofing your collection, it's best to minimize the work simply by storing the bare minimum that you can get away with.

Minimalism is most important around file and folder names. Files and folders should always be named with as little information to still be useful; I use an artist/album/track number-track name scheme.

The reason minimalism is so important here is because changing the names, which gets more likely the more data you have, can be disruptive to your music collection; it's the way music software remembers what your favorites are, what was last played, ratings and more.

Even though tags don't have these disadvantages, you should still only store the metadata that are important to you. I look at it as the minimum viable metadata. Why? It's because fewer tags means fewer chances for inaccuracies and inconsistencies. There are fewer things to maintain and change.

Breaking this down, it's less likely that maintainability is an issue for immutable tag fields. For example, fields that identify the music, such as track name, album name, barcode or catalogue numbers are less likely to change (other than occasional stylistic changes).

Classification tags, such as genre, mood, style and the like, however, are much more subject to change, and so if you can bear it you should probably avoid having too many of these.

Backups: your backstop

The security of your music collection is important. So many memories, so much work in curating your collection, so much time spent listening... it can be devastating if you were to lose your collection.

There are lots of different ways of looking at the security of your collection. There are multiple different sources of threats, and multiple situations where a threat can materialize. Some sources can be malicious: crackers or virii, even physical threats such as burglary or vandalism. Some sources can be innocent: mistaken deletion of music files, hardware failures or software run awry.

The best way of mitigating all of these risks, and therefore the best place to start in securing your music collection is with backups.

Backups are your backstop, and they are useful in multiple scenarios. For the obvious cataclysmic events, simply recover from the last backup and your files are as good as before. Even if you've damaged a few files by some ill-thought tagging, it can sometimes be easier to simply recover from backup rather than try to remember what was there before.

Backups are best when they are automated, and off site. The automation part can be dealt with by software working wherever your music files are stored. Each day, or each week, a new backup of your music files can be squirreled away should it be needed.

Storing backups off site can be more challenging, depending on the quality of your connection to the Internet. If you have a lot of lossless music files they can take a while to upload and will take up a lot of space on your remote backup site. Still, storage "in the cloud" is cheap, so it may well be worth it.

This is a guest blog post by Dan Gravell, founder of Eslten Software, a London based company. AVS does not endorse Eslten products.