Ah he meant the albums in Tidal overall. I didn’t get that 
My current library. Just over 60k local files, the rest are about 3/4 Qobuz and 1/4 Tidal favorited. So about 15k Qobuz and 5k Tidal.
My M1 MacBook Pro has 8 gb of RAM and Roon sits around 3.5-4 gb used. Every few weeks I’ll give it a reboot but otherwise it runs flawlessly. 
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Right, but also the 9,999 is the limit for favorited “items”. I never favorite tracks so for me that means 9,999 albums, which is prob 100,000 tracks give or take.
Yes, we are entirely in agreement, I did say 10k favorites of any kind
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Fully understand your idea and had followed that one for years. Some day I decided to abandon it and move ´unloved milestone albums´ to a disabled folder if I am not likely to ever feel eager to listen to them. If I recall it correctly, ´Nevermind´ was the initial reason to do so as many people regard it to be the most important album of 1990s but it was simply annoying me by its existence in my library.
Completely agree, and I doubt that many people having considerably more than 1,000 albums will ever listen to all of them. It is good to have a library of recordings which might come to your attention one day. For me personally, having recordings of all important classical composition in the core library is a priority while I keep rock, pop and jazz section limited to my favorites.
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I have reached a stage now, where I am slowing down purposely acquiring new music. I spent the last 18 months filling holes in my library, back catalogue filling from bands/artists I had ignored for various reasons and replaced most of the material I had added from streaming services.
My library is purely local now and I am now focusing on what I have collected and going back over it. Only selectively committing to new releases. I still only have a modest library compared to some 2246 albums at last count. I no longer store music from streaming services as it’s just not needed and I don’t care to catalogue or organise material I don’t own. I can find them easy enough (Roons search oddities aside) to play them if required.
I am enjoying going back through time now, not to say I won’t still buy new or even old music I have missed but it’s becoming less of my focus of late.
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It must make karaoke quite tricky 
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Say that the decade from 1985-1995 happens to be your formative years, musically speaking. That was from just a few years after the debut of the CD format up to around the start of the “loudness wars” mastering trend. During that roughly 10 year period, new music was made and mastered largely with CD in mind because CD had gone from bleeding edge niche format in 1982 to burgeoning mainstream format by 1987. You could argue that you cannot get any closer to new music as it was intended to sound than those original CD releases, circa 1985-1995.
Cut to present day. You basically have to hoard, either physically or digitally, new music from that 1985-1995 time span if you want to hear it in its original, authentic state ever again. Because those original masterings with 12-15 dB of headroom — as had been good mastering practice for several decades — probably have been “modernized” down to 6-9 dB of headroom for the 10th, 25th, 30th anniversary or whatever remaster that has become the only version available on streaming services.
As such, being a “historian or librarian” of albums and tracks rendered “obsolete” by streaming services has a definite purpose if you “will probably listen to [that music] at a certain point” and actually care about authenticity.
AJ
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You should mention that you are speaking about “popular” music. I believe that are many other musical genres, such as jazz, opera and classical, that have NOT been part of the loudness wars. Many of today’s new jazz releases feature outstanding recording and audio quality, without a whiff of dynamic range compression.
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I hope you mean “that have not been part of the loudness wars”.
Oops! Of course I meant “not been part”. Edited. Thank you
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I have a lot of pop/rock albums from that period, original releases as well as remasters of the first wave (1995-2010) and recent ones. Always failed to find such general rule of higher dynamics in original releases and compressed in re-releases.
Loudness war, misuse of limiters, compressors and other effects in my understanding were mainly phenomena of radio stations and popular music of certain genres (pop, electronic, hiphop, post-hardrock etc.) being recorded after 1995. Yes, some remasterers were using similar technology in order to raise the level normalization and making the reissues sound louder than the original CDs. But whenever I have compared examples with my own ears (and not senseless theoretical calculations like DR), I did not find any signs of overcompression.
My theory: the loudness war in remastering is purely a myth among audiophiles who prefer to stare at dB and DR figures rather than being capable of listening to different versions of those albums. Or could you name a popular example of a dynamically ruined album? Even classic Led Zeppelin or Cream albums which in later versions definitely sound as if someone tried to make them louder and more energetic do not show signs of overcompression
I fully support this idea (and partly practice it myself from a completely different perspective), but I do see no reason to do this with original releases vs. remastered ones.
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Wow lots to unpack here.
Dynamic range compression is a very real thing and not some “senseless theoretical calculation”. However, as you correctly stated, it was and is still used in radio broadcasting.
A dynamically compressed version of a recording might not sound any worse than the uncompressed version at first but over an extended listening period dynamically compressed music becomes very fatiguing.
I’m not going to go into further detail since this discussion is way, way off topic and belongs in a different thread.
You are mixing two things here: Dynamic compression which is a real and audible thing on one hand. And ridiculous attempts like DR to calculate dynamic range with mathematical methods which will always fail. I call such things hi-fi astrology.
That is exactly the myth I was talking about. There is no such thing as listening fatigue as a result of reasonable appliance of dynamic compression and limiting.
Have you ever used a compressor in a studio?
My personal experience proposes that there are diminishing returns with adding to a collection, but that won’t stop anybody! Multiple versions of the same album, for one. Even remasters that are objectively dynamically compressed were conscious, informed choices (that said, we all know music that had been ruined by same).
Thanks for this: this really made me stop and think. While circumstances dictate that I accept the streaming version as the basis of my collection (mainly given convenient as opposed to serious playback), I’m now wondering whether I would do well by “hoarding” that initial mix for archival purposes? Perhaps half of what I’ve already collected had been remastered with compression.
Even adding “historical” versions, though, won’t get me to 1,000,000!
I think this discussion about having more than 1,000,000 tracks is simply ridiculous. Have you done the math?
If each track is 3 minutes long… we’re talking about 3,000,000 minutes… it’s like listening to music for 8 hours a day… which would be for the broke or millionaires from birth… lol
With 8 hours you could listen to… around 4,000 tracks… it would take you between 5 and 6 years to listen to all of that… for 8 hours a day without stopping during these years… it’s completely insane.
As I’ve said:
Of course, here we are 2.5 years later and I am now up to over 52,000 tracks / 2.3 TB… (Roon seems to have a problem calculating the time total in this current release…)
EDIT: After a Roon Server restart after the 8/21 new release, it calculates 145 days…
Well, I couldn’t resist. FWIW I’d think (and a calculation would support) that 4,000 albums is plenty. More than that would be impossible to appreciate in a lifetime.
Collecting, though, is a distinct impulse.
I think we have all agreed on the idea that it does not make sense to calculate one with a huge library is planning to listen to every single track in his lifetime. If does make sense though to have tracks (or compositions, in my case) or recordings at hand in case you want to do some research, listen to an alternative recording or whatever.
Would not say plenty, particularly if you are interested in completely different genres of music (classical, pop, jazz, electronic for example), 4,000 feels rather like a minimum in my understanding.
What I found when having a library of almost 200,000 tracks or 15,000 albums active in roon, browsing options like album overview (which I like the most as a starting point) get messy and annoying even if you do focus a lot. You just stumble upon too many albums and versions which you simply have in order to keep them.
But it is everyone’s choice of course. I personally gave up particularly on having several versions of the same album or more than a handful of recordings of the same composition active in my library. It helps to focus on the music.
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Reminds me of the Mr Creosote sketch in Monty Python
“just another little wafer mint”
Sorry if a little gross
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