Lost my MP3 collection - options?

Thirith

As mentioned elsewhere, my old NAS was scrambled by a ransomware attack. Among other things, I had my entire music collection on there, largely CD rips. I still have the CDs down in the cellar, but they're difficult to get at, and I don't particularly fancy the idea of re-ripping everything, especially since I don't currently have a PC with a working Blu-ray/DVD/CD drive. However, I did copy most of the music onto my iPhone a while ago, and while this isn't my complete collection, it's most of the stuff from the CDs.

So here's my question: can I just get those files off the iPhone and get them back onto my PC, and more importantly, will there be any loss in quality, or have they already been converted from MP3 to whatever the iPhone uses and now they'd be converted back to MP3, which I can't imagine is a lossless process?

Alternatively, I could imagine culling my music collection somewhat and rebuying some of the music in digital format (in case something similar were to happen again), with the additional benefit that the quality of the digital tunes might be better than the MP3s I'd originally got off of the CDs. (I can't remember what bitrate they were.) If I were to do this, where's a good place to get music online that isn't shady but also offers good prices, and I can transfer the downloaded music onto my new NAS?

(I guess that somewhere in there there's also a question about Spotify & Co, and whether that might not be the better option altogether - but at this time I know very little about the Spotify model, so I'm pretty much clueless.)

Pailryder

i'm not an iphone user but i seem to recall that you could just load itunes on your pc/mac and then login with the same account and have access to that music?

Naphtali

It probably depends how your collection got copied over to your iPhone, but if it was just a file copy it shouldn't be that big a deal. Can you just hook it up your computer and take a look? Worst case, you might need iTunes or something.

You could always buy a cheap USB bluray or dvd drive and re-rip your collection. CD quality is going to be fine (unless you were listening to FLACs/lossless files already, but I doubt it from your post).

Spotify is subscription based basically, or free with ads. There's also other services like Amazon Music that lets you do the same (if you have Prime, you may have access to a lot of stuff already as well). You could also buy MP3s from Amazon and then they should stay on your account permanently and can be streamed from Amazon Music as well; plus you get to download them and have local copies to do whatever you want with. Some artists may sell stuff directly through places like Bandcamp as well; depends on if they were released through a label, etc most likely.

Fiendishrabbit

The files you copied to your iPhone should still be mp3s, because while the iTunes service uses AAC/M4A the iPhone has supported other music formats since...2003-2006 or something like that.
So it should just be a matter of connecting your phone to your PC and then use the Itunes app to copy the files right back to your computer.

Thirith

Cool, thanks everyone for your answers.

Skeith

I've used a program called iExplorer to pull the contents of my ipod on to new computers before.

Thirith

Cheers, I’ll give that one a try.

BlindZenDriver

Naphtali wrote: »

You could always buy a cheap USB bluray or dvd drive and re-rip your collection. CD quality is going to be fine (unless you were listening to FLACs/lossless files already, but I doubt it from your post).

CD-quality would be ripping to a lossless format since CD's are just discs with data in lossless uncompressed audio, to be specific it is 16 bit, 44.1 KHz two channel(stereo). When ripping one can chose to store that in an uncompressed format, lossless compressed fx. FLAC or destructive compressed like MP3 (It can be more or less destructive depending on settings). Some music is available in even better than CD-quality, there is even streaming services that offer that.

An uncompressed CD takes up around 450-600 MB, depending on how much music is on it, about half when using a lossless compressed format and around 1/10th of that when using MP3.

When ripping CD's I highly recommend storing the result at lossless compressed audio files, the files can then be used to create MP3's if needed - the other way round is of course meaningless since with MP3 you have thrown away something.

To make an MP3 files from lossless audio files, or to make lossless files in one format into another format, a tool like dBpoweramp Music Converter is handy.

Thirith

Thanks for the tip. Most of the time I listen to music while doing other things, or while travelling, so lossless isn't my first priority - but if I were to rip the CDs again, I'd go with your suggestions, as it wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of the time it takes.

Solvent

Having re-ripped my collection again recently (from CD), I'm not sure if I'd bother ripping to FLAC if I have to do so again. Yes, it doesn't take more time to rip to FLAC, but if you want to store stuff on your phone you do need mp3s or some other compressed format due to space considerations. So you need to rip to two formats, or convert, and for a big collection that does take a lot of time. It's also going to substantially increase the time it takes to transfer a big collection between backup drives or to new computers. It is highly unlikely that you can tell the difference between FLAC and mp3 at 320 kbps (there are blind tests out there if you look).

Yes, if you want to manipulate the audio for other purposes, you may want FLAC, but do try to consider how likely that is.

tl;dr: if I was in your situation I doubt I'd re-rip my collection to FLAC, mp3 is likely to be more convenient.

Hahnsoo1

Solvent wrote: »

Having re-ripped my collection again recently (from CD), I'm not sure if I'd bother ripping to FLAC if I have to do so again. Yes, it doesn't take more time to rip to FLAC, but if you want to store stuff on your phone you do need mp3s or some other compressed format due to space considerations. So you need to rip to two formats, or convert, and for a big collection that does take a lot of time. It's also going to substantially increase the time it takes to transfer a big collection between backup drives or to new computers. It is highly unlikely that you can tell the difference between FLAC and mp3 at 320 kbps (there are blind tests out there if you look).

Yes, if you want to manipulate the audio for other purposes, you may want FLAC, but do try to consider how likely that is.

tl;dr: if I was in your situation I doubt I'd re-rip my collection to FLAC, mp3 is likely to be more convenient.

Conversion is not so bad. fre:ac does it pretty painlessly and quickly in one big drag-and-drop batch.

BlindZenDriver

Solvent wrote: »

Having re-ripped my collection again recently (from CD), I'm not sure if I'd bother ripping to FLAC if I have to do so again. Yes, it doesn't take more time to rip to FLAC, but if you want to store stuff on your phone you do need mp3s or some other compressed format due to space considerations. So you need to rip to two formats, or convert, and for a big collection that does take a lot of time. It's also going to substantially increase the time it takes to transfer a big collection between backup drives or to new computers. It is highly unlikely that you can tell the difference between FLAC and mp3 at 320 kbps (there are blind tests out there if you look).

Yes, if you want to manipulate the audio for other purposes, you may want FLAC, but do try to consider how likely that is.

tl;dr: if I was in your situation I doubt I'd re-rip my collection to FLAC, mp3 is likely to be more convenient.

No need to rip twice. As long as you rip to either a fully uncompressed or lossless format, then you can simply have a tool make files in what ever other format you need using those files from your rip. Just do no convert the files and throw away the originals.

Also note that MP3 can be a lot of things, there is very noticeable difference between low bitrate MP3 and high bitrate MP3 unfortunately not all gear will tell what bitrates are supported so some experimentation might be needed. This is then also a situation where having files in uncompress/lossless format is handy.