The Musidex: A physical music library for the streaming era

Streaming is no replacement for a physical music library.

It’s not only that a lot of good music is not on streaming: music also get removed. I have a smart playlist that gets automatically populated with songs in my library that are not available (evidently pulled from Apple Music), and it is growing with tunes that I like and that are sometimes impossible to find elsewhere. If I had the foresight to get actual copies, I could still listen to them.

I have been enjoying building a CD and vinyl collection recently. IMO there is no better listening experience than putting a disc on a reasonably high end sound system, and sitting down with the liner notes and reading about what you are hearing. No screens, just music. It’s really quite something these days.

My 2 year old son is also enjoying this process. There is something magical about him asking to “see” the music, and getting excited about the album art. Some of his music requests are based on the album art — usually ones that actually depict the musicians.

Slightly off-topic: https://tonies.com/en-gb/ is a very popular physical music box for children coming from Germany. I guess (not sure) it pioneered figures with NFC chips which then let the wifi-connected speaker stream the music from their platform. Prices are crazy (like EUR30 for a 45min audio play) but wealthy middle class parents happily play it to avoid their children to control their streams from our sad addictive mobile screen world.

As an 1980s child I would love to see more (also cheaper) solutions coming up to make music physical again.

This would be awesome with the QR code pointing to a torrent for example from Anna's archive with the albums filepath. The problem with streaming services is that you need an account, and additionally they might remove the music at some point.

Why are the backs upside down from POV browsing the Musidex?

Final animated GIF drives this home.

You only see one side at a time, never the other way round. The back art and QR code should be pasted and taped "upside down" so right side up when top card's face (bottom card's hidden back).

For the list of improvements to next one...

I think there are many options between music streaming and reverting to 70s technology for music discovery.

As an avid listener, I've been assiduously building a digital music library since the year 2000. I started buying physical CDs, mostly used and in bulk, only to find that they are an impossibly huge burden when moving countries, which I did twice in the intervening years. I slowly moved to digital by ripping everything I could lay my hands on to FLAC, doing my best to scan all the booklets into PDF along the way. I believe I'm mostly done with my local public library's CD stock - at least for the music that interests me. I dig deep in so-called world music and large collections like magazine compilations. I usually collect whole series and I have a soft spot for cover versions of important composers.

To host all this (around 10TB today), I am running a Synology server and I'm backing up the whole thing to Backblaze. Synology has helpful apps for all platforms that allow connecting and listening to the music. I am using an old tablet as music player, connected to portable speakers around the house. It works great!

It's been my pleasure to share music discoveries with my friends and family. What's missing is a very good way to navigate this massive library in the many dimensions of the music universe.

See https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115939341268444811 for music cards that i decorate with and share with people.

Cool project! What I miss most about switching from CDs to digital music/streaming is the CD art/booklets. Yeah, I know, that itself was a far cry from the art on vinyl record sleeves (mostly because of size constraints), but still, if I built one of these, I would probably make the cover images bigger - or even provide a sleeve in which to insert a CD booklet (however I guess that would be difficult with a Rolodex?).

The tactile feeling of the physical media is important.

I buy a lot of used CDs. It's a great time to buy because prices are still very low. It's not uncommon to find charity shops (a.k.a. thrift stores) in the UK selling used CDs for £0.25. At this price I don't put much effort into selecting discs, and if I don't like one I just donate it to another charity shop (ideally in another town to keep the discs circulating). I discover a lot of good music this way I wouldn't otherwise hear.

Accordingly, I shop mostly by intuition. One surprising thing I discovered is that I can do better than chance at identifying good CDs by touch. This is because jewel cases from the 80s are generally thicker and heavier than modern jewel cases. In the 80s, recording technology was expensive enough that people didn't usually have access to it unless they'd demonstrated some musical talent. In the 80s, the loudness war hadn't started and CDs were mastered on the assumption that they would be played on a good home stereo. A random CD from the 80s has a higher chance of being good than a random CD from any other decade.

Every used CD I've bought has played without audible defect. A few have circumferential scratches long enough to defeat the error correction but the error detection still works to interpolate the missing data. In a previous HN comment I wrote that I had a few with disc rot; I was mistaken and what I thought was disc rot was actually "pin holes". These are holes in the metal layer that people say are a manufacturing defect caused by contamination between the injection molding and metalization stages, and don't get worse with time. Since then, I bought one with genuine disc rot, which looks like corrosion starting from the edge of the disc. This one will probably continue to decay, but for now it also plays perfectly because the rot hasn't reached the data.

I also have two "sticky Nimbus" discs: a known manufacturing defect where Nimbus UK in the 80s used some material for label printing that becomes sticky over time. The first one I attempted to clean with a damp cloth and damaged it, the second I recognized as the same thing and didn't touch. I've heard that you can clean them with ice-cold water, but I'll just tolerate the dust and fingerprints on it. Aggressive cleaning will remove the label entirely. It doesn't affect playback.

All this experience is missing from index cards with QR codes. You could get the same kind of experience from vinyl, but that would cost a lot more and the sound quality won't be as good.

Somebody had a similar idea over here, just with NFC cards. How weird I ran into it ten minutes after seeing your post.

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/control-roon-with-nfc-cards...

Brilliant!

I like that this combines the annoyance of when a streaming service randomly stops streaming a song/album/artist with the irritation of then having to update or remove a physical object