playing with Volumio and organizing my music

Without really intending to, I would up spending a bunch of time today organizing my music collection and copying stuff over to my little Volumio box. I set up Volumio about a year ago, and still haven’t quite finished copying music over to it. But I’m now all the way through to the letter “P”, so that’s pretty good. I don’t use the thing too often, but I use it enough to justify the time I spent setting it up, I think.

My adventures today started out with a desire to listen to the Gorillaz album Plastic Beach last night. I was pretty sure I had it on CD, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, nor did I have it ripped on my Mac or PC. After spending too much time looking around for it this morning, I decided to just buy a new copy of the CD. So I wouldn’t have two copies of exactly the same thing, I bought a used copy of the “experience edition” version on eBay, which should include a bonus DVD. (I’m really not sure if I ever actually had a copy, but I think I did.)

That got me interested in getting back to organizing my MP3s and CDs a bit more, and copying more stuff over to the Volumio box. I got through the letters “O” and “P” today. There’s wasn’t much under “O”, but there was a lot under “P”, including Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd, and Phish!

My McCartney collection was a little disorganized, so I tried to fix that up. I found that I had exactly one song in there that was a DRM’d iTunes file. I thought I had replaced all of those with the DRM-free versions quite some time ago, but I guess I missed this one somehow. Normally, this wouldn’t bug me at all, since I can listen to it on my Mac, PC, and iPhone, no problem. But Volumio, of course, can’t handle DRM’d files. There’s supposed to be a way now to delete and re-download a track in iTunes, in such a way that you replace the DRM’d file with a DRM-free version. But I couldn’t get that to work. I just kept getting the same DRM’d file. I thought about just buying a new MP3 copy of the song from Amazon for $1.29, but decided to just live with it for now. I get the feeling that it’s going to bug me enough that I’ll eventually do something about it, though I’m not sure what.

And, when I got to Phish, I remembered that I had a copy of the Live Phish 01 two-CD set that got ruined by spending too much time in the trunk of my car. The “Live Phish” series of CDs were packaged in a weird way; the CDs are in a folded plastic page that can be inserted in a binder. It’s kind of nifty, but if you leave it in the heat for too long, the plastic melts a bit and adheres to the CDs, rendering them useless. And I’d never ripped those CDs. So, today, I decided to just go ahead and buy the FLACs for that concert from LivePhish.com. So now I have those CDs back, but in FLAC form. And FLACs play fine through Volumio, so that’s good. (I’m listening to it right now, and it sounds nice.) If I want to listen to it in my car, though, I need to figure out how to press FLACs to CD, or convert them to MP3 or something like that. It’s been a while since I was on a FLAC kick. I did a little research on that, to refresh my memory, but decided that I didn’t want to go too far down that particular rabbit hole today. Maybe tomorrow!