Apple Music Playlists - File Formats

Apple Music Playlists - File Formats - MP3, AAC, Lossless

Summary

A review of my music collection and recent changes to the file formats I collect and why.

Cultural Criticism - August 1, 2021

2021.8.1.

I have several genres of music that I organize my digital music library into: classical; classical - Mozart; classical - Beethoven; Glass [Philip Glass]; jazz; smooth jazz; R&B; rock; metal; easy listening; country; Latin; world; Arabic; Native American; Indian; gospel & religious; opera; love; new age; new age groove; books & spoken; rap; camp; children's; environments; and voice memo, among others. I have a 256 GB Apple iPod that allows me to store music for playback on the road, without the need to stream. I do not want to rely on Internet access to play my music. I do not want to need wireless radiation for anything, much less music enjoyment. So I go out of my way to maintain a large collection of music that I own in my physical -- or at least digital -- possession. What I own under the genres "new age" and "love" fills my 256 GB portable device. It's about 25,000 songs. Recently, the collection began to exceed the storage device's capacity. As I want to be able to place on "shuffle" my entire collection in these genres, I made some changes to its structure.

Due to the presets incorporated into Apple's Music program, I cannot give a favorite song a tag of "three stars," for example, indicating that the likelihood of its playback will be three times that of a song with just one star, or a normal level of interest assigned by me. So, to increase the chances of songs being replayed, for the past ten years I have extracted all the songs I like from compact discs into MP3 format, followed by a second copy in Apple's AAC format (for songs I like even more), and yet a third copy in Apple's "lossless" format for my very favorite songs.

This is all well and good for a small collection. But as the collection grows, so does its need for disc space and its relative cumbersomeness to manage. The extraction or ripping process takes three times longer for my favorite songs. The larger the size of my music collection, the longer it takes to back up, and the more money I have to invest in back up storage, as well as the additional cost for larger storage capacity in my desktop computer. My music collection now takes up over 800 GB of space.

So now, for the first time in the ten years or so during which time I have been making multiple copies of songs I like, I have begun to delete the additional copies, along with now going forward I will only create a single digital copy (in mp3 format) for the songs I like on a given CD that comes into my possession.

This uncharacteristic shift in focus coincides with other factors. One is that my mother would like to have a few MP3 CDs to play on her Bose brand boombox that I bought for her. It takes time to separate out the MP3's from a collection that also has AAC and lossless files. The latter two formats are not standard file types. Being proprietary to the Apple brand means that they simply do not work other devices on the market that have not paid Apple the required license fee for playback.

Lastly, given that I have several greatest hits compilations from artists such as Joni Mitchell, America, Chicago, and the like (soft or light rock material), I might have 18 copies of a given song on my favorite songs list. The frequency with which it is played back, while initially enjoyable, means that I grow somewhat numb to its brilliance. The song stays fresher and more impactful if I hear it less. Joni's "Help Me," America's "Lonely People," Chicago's "Colour My World," or Crosby Stills Nash & Young's "Helpless," for example, are now heard with greater enthusiasm and attention now that their numbers have been winnowed.

So it is for these reasons that I have begun to erase all the AAC and lossless file formats of songs I already have MP3s of.

I have friends who swear by their membership in the streaming services provided by Pandora, Spotify, Amazon, and Apple. The elites pushing the "great reset" say that humanity in the near future will "own nothing" and be "happier" for it. I intend to be one of the "bitter clingers" who wants to own what he or she enjoys. I don't want my enjoyment in life to be under another human being's (or corporation's) control. How many songs do you need access to at any given time? If I have 50,000 or 75,000 songs, shouldn't that be enough to give me an inspirational auditory boost once in a while? Does the capacity to stream 50,000,000 songs really improve your life over what I am able to do with 1/1000th the number? I don't think so. Plus, not being hostage to a streaming service, my listening behavior is less easily recorded and monitored. And, who knows what kinds of modulation or sub-sonic programming might be embedded in the music being streamed? There was a huge push to have all Western countries adopt new high definition digital televisions, presenting video within which it is far easier to insert propaganda hidden to the naked eye, information that can alter moods and beliefs. I want to avoid that contamination. My soul and mind are not test monkeys for these people, fallen angels, or whoevever or whatever is behind the Satanic push for Earth's domination.

Comment 2021.8.7.

While in college I was an audiophile, or at least an aspiring one. I sold my car so I could buy a high end tape deck, record player, and amplifier. I noticed a sharp drop in the quality of music replayed on compact discs. There was a richness and depth associated with analog play back, and with recordings of vinyl albums at very high dB levels on top quality cassette tapes, that was missing from CDs and their digital inputs and outputs. For several years I tried to keep up with the maintenance of a large vinyl album collection, but it became too cumbersome. The benefits of having a larger digital collection in a fraction of the space became too great to ignore any longer. So I sacrificed quality and went digital. I figured that the focus should be on my interior experience and interior emotional amplification of the music, and not on any specific external factor. While it is still true that there is greater human resonance with analog music, I made up my mind to make up for it with a focus on high quality food, water, air, and other factors that raise one's vibration level. I could not afford to be stuck on music reproduction as my one answer for life's fulfillment. One important event was a two or three day headache I had from wanting a speaker system that cost a year's salary, and not being able to afford it. Then I became a school teacher living in rental housing subject to thefts, where craving "perfect" music -- and risking my entire life's savings for it -- become that much more untenable.

Noting my lack of satisfaction with the digital medium, being consumed with various encoding levels (music extraction quality) from compact discs should not have been much of a concern of mine. Initially, I determined that mp3's encoded at 192 kbps VBR (variable bit rate) were fine. I couldn't hear the difference between 192 and 256 kbps on my cheap desk top music system, nor on the inexpensive headphones I had. But the standard at the online download sites was 256 or so, so I decided to bump it up to the next level above 256, which is 320 kbps, on the off chance that I might own an amazing music system some day with which I might hear a difference. I started also extracting second copies in Apple's proprietary AAC format, as well as third copies of songs I liked even more in Apple's lossless format, which varied from 600 to 1100 kbps. But with all this additional "quality" based on a digital medium that gives me little satisfaction anyway, and with space becoming a premium on my desktop computer and iPod Touch portable digital music player -- which in 2021 maxes out at 256 GB (while my bloated collection on the desktop system is about 800 GB) -- I began to think that just one copy at 256 kbps in the mp3 format was sufficient. As stated above, I also had the issue of multiple copies of a single song. For example, I might have three copies of Jim Croce's love song "Time In A Bottle" from four different greatest hits compilations, the original album it came out on, as well as multi-artist compilations for the year "1973" or other compilations like "Soft Rock Classics" and "Hits From The Seventies," for 24 copies of the same exact song. This, of course, is insane, wasteful of disc storage, and leads one to become bored of the song because one hears it so often. So I allow myself now only one digital copy -- at 256 kbps mp3 -- per album, or just one third of the total number of copies that I once had.

Note: how to extract multiple file formats, tedious

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