Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

I think I'd have a better sense of what is truly happening in 'pop' music if I listened to commerical radio more, rather than snooped around forums like these or the Singles Jukebox.

But now I just mostly listen to NPR and the local pop, hip-hop, and "alternative" radio stations. Which is good, because that's how I find out about a lot of music I wouldn't hear otherwise.

There's your complete inversion of the college radio role model.

But often I will have been exposed to these songs by osmosis almost, so when you actually make time to listen to 'I Gotta Feeling', it's like 'oh that's what it is'.

Also, when I did tune into the radio, the overplay/heavy rotation robbed even the best songs of their gloss and freshness. You remember how sick we all were of Hey Ya! by the end of 2003, not that everyone like it in the first place.

*liked.

iTrip/etc is ok if you can get some dead air. Not so good in urban areas, or all of spain apparently, where every .05mhz has some guy shouting from the back of his garage.

Ned, as you said in your Stylus Decade piece: "pop is the biggest musical subculture among all the rest." As many people before me have said, in some ways you actually have to go out and seek out this shit in a way you wouldn't have to before. If I stop listening to the radio for a few weeks, I don't even know what's going on in pop music, except for the tidbits I read here and there online, which isn't much because I don't seek new pop out much online.

it is true about pop music though...when I get tired of the few CDs at hand I just listen to the radio, and since I started driving more I've become much more familiar with the likes of Pitbull.

Poker Face sucks though, am I right?

I just over xmas succumbed to iTunes and got all my mp3s on an external drive --- this article was real helpful

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/moving-your-itunes-library-to-a-new-hard-drive/

I've been maintaining a digital music collection for 8 years and all the effort has been TOTALLY worth it for me. But then, I like having a neat, organized house - things go where they're supposed to go. Same with music - when I acquire new music either physically or digitally, it's easy to drop it into the appropriate folder in the appropriate section in my library. It took a few iterations to come up with the structure that I use but now there's not much 'maintenance', just regular use and enjoyment.

I can understand the angst involved if you've never had things organized and you've got a mountain of music to comb through, but you can chip away at it over time, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing chore. And maybe, just maybe, you'll find it enjoyable to pull out everything you've got by your favorite artists and listen to it while you fix tags and add album art.

Do you do spring cleaning in your home? Do you go through all the stuff in your closet and desk, chucking things, filing others, etc? Not everyone does and I suspect that behavior will correlate with how you handle your digital media.

i should seriously start a business offering to organize peoples' mp3s

more like gerald mcboring boring

i was given a gift certificate to an electronics store for xmas, so i went to see what they have.
they had a usb drive with the "twilight" soundtrack pre-loaded.
they had a toothbrush that played one song on it so you could tell how long to brush your teeth.
they had some mp3 players, and one of them had a feature where you could buy miniSD cards by genre, that had a proprietary playlist on them, but you couldn't access the songs individually, or change the play order, or rewind, but you could skip a song.
they had another mp3 player with NO FOLDER SYSTEM.
i didn't buy anything.

question that i'm almost embarrassed asking:

if i have a compilation on cd, how do i convert it to a single mp3 file?

on iTunes on my Mac you select all the tracks on the CD and then from the Advanced menu pick Join CD Tracks. Then import as usual.

thanks.

how about without itunes?

on linux i use abcde with the -1 (one) option

Why would you want to do that?

To upload a mix compilation to the net.

it's getting to where if i need to hear a PJ Harvey album or something i just type "PJ Harvey+rar" into google and i have it in like 2 minutes. I don't know if yall digital tag-and-organize hoarder types are expecting that to go away any time soon, but it don't look likely.

I'm not but knowing how badly compilations usually get tagged and organized by others I'm content to do some trawling just to get that under control more. (Was doing that yesterday with the American Pop: An Audio History files -- when everything has as its artist 'Various Artists,' I was happily cursing whoever entered THAT into the CDDB...)

I'm not either but (a) I like owning the music, rather than just streaming it (although this is becoming a little less significant to me (n.1)) and (b) I don't mean to sound like a tool, but is the "artist + rar" formula legal? I'm not judging anyone else, but I'm sticking with legal downloads and/or streaming.

________________________________________
(n.1) Between my old discs and MP3s I acquire from eMusic and Lala and Juno, I have so much that sometimes I feel like it's akin to having nothing (if an unheralded, unheard album cut is lost amid 13K songs (which is what I estimate I have now on my iPod, spread over 1448 albums), it's like not having that song at all).

Are there people out there spending hours organizing their mp3s? If you're importing a CD into iTunes, it will pull in the artist name, track names, and album art for you. If you're buying mp3s, all of the metadata's already there. And even if it weren't, it wouldn't take too long to just look it up on Wikipedia or allmusic and enter it manually. As far as keeping the files themselves organized, iTunes can do that automatically for you, or you can just put them in folders by artist or something, so you never have to think about where any of it goes. If you actually have to think about this too much, you're making things way too complicated for yourself.

As an aside, I also think it's hilariously odd that we've reached the point where a bunch of CDs are cheaper *new* on Amazon or my local record store than they are as digital files on Amazon Mp3 or iTunes. The big chain of indie record stores around here, Newbury Comics, have started selling a bunch of records brand new starting at $6.99. So, as people have noted before, this is a really good time for all of you who still buy CDs.

Daniel: Typing the artist name and ".rar" into Google and downloading whatever comes up isn't legal.

i dunno ksh, your simple theory doesn't really work with the way i DL music since

a) i download SO MUCH for work AND pleasure that i'm not gonna take the time to fix all the fucked up metadata. Like I get tons of promos that are just Track 01, Track 02; or weird things ppl put in "sort by artist"; and god forbid if you download a rap album. I'd have to really take the time to fix the metadata in EVERY album i download and sometimes, for work, I'm downloading 10-12 albums a day. People are so careless with metadata, and i used to take the time to fix it, but then just stopped because it felt like a retarded waste of my time to be fixing these albums.

b) then I have to move that shit to a hard drive, which becomes sorting and agony once i have to move the one High On Fire album into the High On Fire folder individually.

its all just a fucking pain in the ass since

c) If I want to hear PJ Harvey's White Chalk, it's easier for me to just DL White Chalk via rapidshare and have it in two minutes than
-plug in my hard drive to the wall
-plug the wire into my laptop
-find the PJ Harvey folder
-drag it into my iTunes

People are so careless with metadata, and i used to take the time to fix it, but then just stopped because it felt like a retarded waste of my time to be fixing these albums.

If (if) my proposal for EMP this year makes the cut, this is going to be one of the many points that comes up for discussion. (The title is "The Listener as Electronic Librarian.")

yeah, listeners are usually fucking dipshits in my experience

i mean even since the days of Napster, "OH FUCK ITS A FUNNY SONG, I GUESS IT'S WEIRD AL!"

i mean even since the days of Napster, "OH FUCK ITS A FUNNY SONG, I GUESS IT'S WEIRD AL!"

1) otm 2) lol 3) big eye-opening process for me in the napster days w/this: "oh, wow, I try not to be a big ol' cynic but there sure are a lotta dumbasses out there"

A sort-of sneak peak here but a big area of discussion in the librarian profession right now is the question of user-generated indexes -- think of tags like this, but also on YouTube and throughout the web. It can and does have a relevant impact on everyone participating in the digital world, and not just in terms of music. Since libraries/librarians/indexers/cataloguers are in the business of agreed-upon standards, when that goes out the window things get...involved.

J0hn,

i went to the New Museum in New York and this Scottish artist Ruth Ewan made a whole jukebox of lefty protest songs, which was a pretty cool concept. And fun to flick around. Great piece.

http://artobserved.com/artimages/2009/04/ruth-ewan-a-jukebox-of-people-trying-to-change-the-world-2009-via-ny-art-beat.jpg

But one of the songs is some wacky "Let's Bomb Iraq" song and she credited it to Weird Al, Napster-style. I was like, "Fuck, you're 30 years old and did how much research for this and you still don't know what Weird Al is like?"

That's why you can't trust metadata

Whiney, if that system works for you, that's cool! But many non-rock crit types, myself included, aren't downloading 10-12 albums a day. And if importing via CD or downloading via Amazon mp3 are the primary ways music ends up in your mp3 player, it only takes two seconds to double-check the metadata with Wikipedia or allmusic to make sure it's accurate, because most of the time it's going to already be fine.

gotta say that kshighway is otm there tho - people who want to hear as much music as they can fit into their day will always, always be a pretty small percentage of the listening public, who aren't dumb sheep: they're just not obsessed/permanently engaged/still reeling from their early experiences with the power of the form. I mean I first encountered this when I was in the 6th grade geeking out on liner notes: everybody else in class liked music just fine, but there were exactly two of who gave 1/10 of a shit about producers' names and whether they also played on the record and where stuff was recorded, and both of us turned out kinda whacked

everybody else mainly just cares about some cool tunes now and then

like, by "weird al," they mean something different from what you and I might mean by "weird al" i.e. the name of an artist

that post just blew my mind

xxpost -- Extremely true. There is an element of any kind of indexing or cataloguing that is essentially...I don't know if Sisyphean is the correct word, because it's not a case where you approach a clear end point only to have it all slip out of your fingers time and again; rather it's a case where there is never an end point even in sight. But it is nonetheless addressed as a task anyway, information catalogued, search terms judged and assigned, catalog headers created, etc. etc. It's absolutely true that for the vast majority of people the specific distinctions and paths to information created will never be of active or immediate use -- nonetheless, they are there, because one never knows who will need them or use them.

xpost

the universal weird al

from each according to his ability, to each according to what he means by "weird al"

if you see weird al on the road kill him

I always need to change the tags when it comes to double CDs. The title tags always say "disc 1" and "disc 2" but that's not how I want it to appear on my iPod, I just want the whole album as one item. So I have to change those titles and then renumber the tracks as well, from 1 of 12 to 7 of 12 or whatever.

not to mention i have to retitle all my comps because the iphone is a stupid jagoff that sprays my compilation artists all over place like a firehose.

and then when they fix it i'm gonna have to change them all back? sounds like a waste of time.

hi folks, I just finished ripping 250 DVDRs back into the new external HD and I'm sitting here sorting folders and fixing metadata on my day off.

for some reason the computer decided it hates around 20 DVDs full of mp3s, it keeps spitting the discs back out so I can't even see what's on them. not sure yet if this is a hardware issue or a problem with the discs. but like whiney sez, most of them are probably still out there (at least ten were from Mutantsounds).

and kshighway, ever tried to run iTunes with more than 175-200 gigs in it? not pretty, at least not on my old G4. for me iTunes is where I keep stuff I'm actively attempting to listen to, it doesn't have the capacity for my storage.

(The title is "The Listener as Electronic Librarian.")

lol you should interview me for this

"Furthermore, my son, be admonished: of organizing your music collection there is no end;"

lol you should interview me for this

Kept in mind!

On the topic of bad metadata, there seems to be a general misunderstanding of the "compilation" checkbox in iTunes... its for multiple artists people, not greatest hits packages.

Oh god the 'compilations' tag annoyed me for ages - all sorts of stuff came up as having that box checked when I ripped my CDs to iTunes. Like Physical Grafitti, but only disc 2.

I run across that with lots of rap album. I was trying to listen to The Game on my iPod a few months ago and couldn't find any of the three albums despite knowing I had put them on it. Of course, they were under "compilations". WTF?

The only thing I really care about w/r/t metadata is making sure artist/song/album tags are correct. I'd love to go through and make sure all the years are correct, although with 18,000 mp3s, this isn't something I'm really excited about doing (plus, there's the question: for re-releases and compilations, do you go with the year first released or the year it appeared on that particular album?). I'd also love to fix all the "featuring" credits so they appear next to the song instead of next to the artist, but again, I can't imagine that it will ever seem like a high priority.