Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

(A quick further note -- my EMP topic proposal has been accepted so yes, definitely expect to hear more about this now!)

I have fixed all the featuring credits on albums where they were tagged in the artist field. I have also gone though and properly categorized my compilations. I have spent hundreds of hours fixing metadata in my library but my ability to sort/filter/enjoy has gone up exponentially.

I heart keith sweat!

I love tagging music. I too have spent hundreds of hours doing this, and I found it all strangely calming. I basically took several swipes through my collection.

Pass 1: Make sure the basic information is correct. Album, artist, track name, year, genre. Use very broad genres and don't fret too much about it. Also, I tend to keep the genre same for the same artist. I know that this is flawed, but it's one of the rules I laid out at the beginning of this project and I've stuck to it. Also made sure that compilations were tagged properly and the album artist field was correct.

Pass 2: Album art. Every single album, single, compilation, anything must have album art. I used an applescript to just create a playlist to find all tracks that didn't have album art, then went through each of them. Also, I changed some other album art that I thought was too small. I even found scans of each disc of the Merzbox. In the rare case that something didn't have album art, I created it myself. This is the case for some mixes that I've recieved or something like ILX Top tracks of the 1970s.

Pass 3: Proper capitalization for album, artist, and title. For this one used another applescript, and wouldn't have done it other wise. Essential that the artist case match, otherwise the iPhone displays them twice. This one didn't take as long as I thought it would

All along the way I've been doing ratings as well. I don't rate every single song and I don't rate on perceived quality. I rate on replayability. Basically, if I give a song 3 stars, then I like it and I would like to hear it again sometime. I have a 3 star playlist that I know I can put on and hear songs that I will enjoy and there not be a bad one in the bunch. Currently this playlist is at 1434 songs.

I haven't experienced iTunes problems now that I've headed well north of 300gb. Sometimes you get a bit of a hang-up while the external drive does its thing (perhaps a function of the Firewire 400 that would disappear with an 800 or eSATA connection).

congratulations ned. if, as a small part of your presentation, you can persuade the entire world to agree on a format for crediting songwriters ...

"Madonna/Patrick Leonard"?
"Madonna / Leonard, Patrick"?
"Madonna, Patrick Leonard"?
"Madonna, P. Leonard"?
"Madonna and Patrick Leonard"?
"Madonna"?
"Weird Al"?

...then my computer will be your computer's best friend.

p.s. i have unilaterally decided the first way above is correct.

also please, while you are wielding the power of the EMP podium, please order all record companies, publishers, etc., to include songwriter credits on any and all metadata they produce.

yeah, I think it's a function of the USB2 connection to the LaCie HD or the hardwired bus speed of the old G4 that slows it down, not the actual library size. I should try the Firewire connection.

the new drive is a Seagate and has really been put through the paces in its first week, performing admirably.

xp hahaha fcc otm, #1 would be my choice as well.

Weird Al, surely.

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.

― Hoisin Murphy (jaymc), Tuesday, January 19, 2010 5:15 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

this is my approach, to a tee. I sometimes dream of how nice it would be to have *all* the metadata sorted out properly, with lyrics to each song even (but only if there were lyrics in the original liners, obviously.)

I also make sure all my albums have cover art - but get really annoyed when the biggest image I can find for an album is say, 150x150, and it happens to be a really shitty/pixelated scan. or when I can't find a jpg of the cover art at all, and have to use some random picture of the artist.