All just my personal opinion
(…) Sure, the signs can be read off the wall everywhere: there is a trend towards computing and storage in the cloud — and frankly, it makes a lot of sense to me! Why should humanity store Exabytes (or have we already surpassed Zettabytes?) of information on thousands of millions of computers, including a zillion duplicates…
(…) without consistent, standardized labeling, a music library with over 10000 tracks would be a real mess, finding a specific track might be hard and time consuming, sorting & grouping would definitely fail. In the end, I found that in practice I can leave nothing as is! Luckily this does not imply that I need to retype everything…
Back in the “vinyl days”, comparing various interpretations was cumbersome, even if one had access to multiple turntables (…): if you didn’t want to listen to entire interpretations, one after each other (making it hard to remember all details from interpretations just heard), you were bound to have multiple LPs ready in their sleeves, place them on a turntable, position the needle…
(…) In the title I used “digital music collection” — this is a more accurate description, for two reasons: not all this music was bought in the form of CDs — some of these were MP3 or equivalent purchases, plus, the CDs for me are more of an archival medium — the active part of the collection is in my computer…