Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

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.

oh man, i don't know if i want to get started on this. i have almost 40,000 MP3s and i spend too much time trying to make sure they are tagged correctly. i've always been a bit of a closet librarian.

one of these days i plan to get the years right.

they should have separate entries for "year released" and "year recorded" or something like that. anyone else ahree?

when itunes introduced the "album artist" tag it was a good day.

i think i spend time on this b/c it's something i (in theory) have total control over and can actually be "accomplished" to a reasonable degree unlike all the other work that piles up.

I've been "yelled at" on last.fm for incorrect tagging several times because I tag my featuring artists with the song "incorrectly".

Hahah part of my proposal mentioned the possibility of being contacted online by someone with that very complaint...

What I wonder is: Why the hell is there not a computer program that can do this? You should be able to set a few parameters and let it do its thing. Another couple of clicks, and two hard drives are merged and sync'd, just like two contact lists. I much prefer to let machines do the machine work.

Software coders: I would pay $50 for a program to do this well.

what is last.fm?

always wondered this ^^^^ too, btw

music listening/streaming service, yeah? I don't do it myself.

UPDATE***

Well, my roommate's PC recognizes all the discs my drive spits out, so now it's just a question of dumping them on HIS external, then over to mine. No idea why they won't read, whether it's a weird format glitch, a hardware thing, or a bad batch of discs (they are all from the same spindle). Or some combo thereof.

Now I am going to venture into the "various/compilations" folder and try to get some consistent formatting going on. I swear I think I might end up using iTunes for the compilations and nothing else, then another manager for all the regular album folders and flac files.

i sort of like "featured" stuff to be in the artist tags, but usually i don't take the time to change it.

the biggest mindfuck for me is the GENRE tag.

what the hell?

the very nature of GENRE precludes a systematic way of deciding what goes in what category, but i can't help wishing for one.

does anyone have some system for dealing with genre?

i HATE a lot of the default GENRE tags in itunes, like Indie/Alternative or whatever.

but there are so many artists i have NO IDEA how to categorize. like townes van zandt? country? not really. folk? i hate that label. singer-songwriter? ugh.

The one iTunes feature I've always longed for is an ability to click on a song and see which playlists, if any, it appears on. I have a bunch of duplicates, but I don't always know which of the two versions of a song I should delete, because one might be the version I've put on a mix.

I decided to use the genre tag to hold, well tags - so: "Country, Folk, singer-songwriter".

If you want to sync files over two hardrives and you're on windows give 'Synctoy' a try. It's free:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&displaylang=en

I decided to use the genre tag to hold, well tags - so: "Country, Folk, singer-songwriter".

the problem is that if you want to actually browse your collection BY genre, you end up with some as

country, folk, singer-songwriter

and others as

folk, singer-songwriter, experimental

or whatever.

In other words, they come up as different genres. So you have to construct "smart playlists" that take all this into account. And frankly I don't use playlists very much, since they clutter up the interface. I'd rather be able to search for something quickly, or just use iTunes' native filing structure.

the ability to tag with multiple genres would be the greatest leap forward in itunes functionality since ctrl+i function

What are people here doing as they reach the upper limits of their MP3 player's memory capacity?

I have an external drive with lots of room, and I use iTunes and a "Classic iPod." I've used 90GB of memory, and have about 50GB left. Whenever I open iTunes on my PC, all the music I've loaded appears in the window, even if my external drive isn't plugged in. At my current rate, I think I'll use the remaining 50GB by the end of 2010. What then? Will it be necessary for me to get a new iPod and a new external drive (to clear the old library off my iTunes program)?

at some point you have to stop automatically sync'ing your entire collection. How big is your external drive? Why would you want to clear off the old library? You just have 1 big library with all your music, spread out over how many hard drives you like. Then you have your iPod and you put the music on it that you want to listen to.

That's the answer, I think! I've been automatically sync'ing everything I download to my iPod; how do I stop that, and how do I begin removing stuff that's now on the iPod (to clear space)?

Not sure how much room I have on the external hard-drive. Maybe 500GB? Anyway, not close to reaching capacity on the drive, just on the iPod.

(Thx for info, BTW)

I have only a 4GB ipod, and something like 200GB of mp3s on an external drive. Right now I just copy the albums I want to my laptop and sync using playlists. Its not perfect. But like others I move the laptop too much to use my external all the time (I've tried).

I assume you'll have to do some version of what we Nano-ites have to do, which is to instruct iTunes to load only specific playlists (which could be huge with an iPod proper). As you probably know, this is done by clicking the boxes you want next to the playlists in the Music section of the iPod controls. I usually just create a smart playlist to randomly pick about 7.4gb of music (I want to be surprised, though I usually limit the "date added" in some way), which fills up an 8gb Nano. But you can choose multiple playlists, too, of course.

I'm guessing that for the next few years our collections will outpace our iPods' memories, so we'll have to limit what goes on them from our larger libraries (stored on increasingly cheap externals). But eventually devices will have more memory and this will be less of a problem...unless we respond by using up the space with higher fidelity files.

Yeah, I've never had an iPod of any size (8GB being the largest), so syncing the whole collection has never been an issue. Never wanted to at all to be honest, there is too much stuff I only listen to once every few years literally, don't need to make finding stuff any harder.

You know what I am desperate for now is the latest version of iTunes; there's a bug in 9.02 where none of my smart playlists are recognized by the device. I have seen others with this problem but none of the suggested fixes work. So I have been without them for several months and it's a pain in the ass.

I don't know what the "Grouping" field is supposed to be for in the iTunes metadata, but I use it to give tracks a second genre or subgenre.

Plug in iPod. Click on iPod under "Devices" on the left side menu. Click "Manually manage music and videos".

That's it. When you click on the iPod, you will see what's on it. Remove what you want. Go back to your library and select various files and drag them to the iPod and they will move to the iPod. Or drag entire playlists to the iPod or get more advanced with smart playlists. I have 321 gigs of music, so syncing hasn't been something I'd consider for a long time. But I also have never felt the need to carry close to my entire collection with me. I bought the 8 gig Touch, and I have some stupid big apps on in. Even with all of that I've still got 6 or so gigs on there. But it's fast enough that I can sit down before leaving for work, empty the entire iPod and decide "oh, I want these 20 playlists". Currently I have 89 albums by 29 artists, all suited to my mood this week for commuting.

the problem is that if you want to actually browse your collection BY genre, you end up with some as…

This is where search is your friend.

yeah, but it's sort of inelegant.

is there some website that classifies artists by genre in an intelligent way? NOT amg.

Genre is easy - everything after 1991 is "Alternative/Punk"

or "World/Other"

The one iTunes feature I've always longed for is an ability to click on a song and see which playlists, if any, it appears on. I have a bunch of duplicates, but I don't always know which of the two versions of a song I should delete, because one might be the version I've put on a mix.

― Hoisin Murphy (jaymc), Tuesday, 19 January 2010 02:52 (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I discovered by accident that you can do this - right-click the song>Show in Playlist. It's really handy!

1 have two terabytes and i use one as a backup and this method seems to work fine. I'm due to clean them both up though.

does anyone have some system for dealing with genre?

since the tag is basically useless, I just put the record label in there. doesn't make much sense for major labels but it's kinda cool if you want filter for all releases on basic channel or whatever.

I also use the genre tag for labels if they are distinct, like Basic Channel, Mo Wax or Factory.

Genres are so useful! Pick broad genres and don't nitpick about it (probably asking too much of ILM). Then if I want to listen to electronic music, I can just put on that genre and know that I'm going to get similar music, but not so similar because I don't have these rigid rules for genre selection. Sometimes, I just want to hear metal, not specifically Chilean death metal or any other granular genre.

I discovered by accident that you can do this - right-click the song>Show in Playlist. It's really handy!

Wow, thanks!

what is last.fm?

Seek and you shall find, Rolling last.fm thread 2010.

last.fm was cool, till I got paranoid that it was eating up resources to be uploading that information in the background, though I'm sure it wasn't. Also when DJing weddings and whatnot I'd listen to lots of terrible music and was too lazy to always be turning scrobbling on and off. What I forgot however is that my Squeezebox still reports, so what shows up on my Last.fm only represents what my girlfriend and I listen to in the living room.

didn't manage to read all 80000 messages (made it through about 300 of them) but i just really want to say one important IMPORTANT thing on this subject of maintaining a digital music collection:

BACK YOUR SHIT UP!

one day your hard drive will crash, period, end of story- it happens to every last one of them sooner or later.

buy a time capsule if you can afford it, or a second hard drive if you cant, maybe every month on the first burn all your new shit to dvd's and sit it on a spindle, whatever. but the less you have to think about it the better, manual backups just don't really work that well - your hard drive crashes and you're like "oh shit i haven't backed up in 7 months!" get a program to back it up automatically if at all possible (superduper is great and tres cheap if you run mac)

you guys sound like you're being too anal about the genre tag. your tag is not the final say on categorizing the music for future generations. just tag stuff how it makes most sense and is most helpful for you. course, i don't listen to much "rock" and so anything from Led Zeppelin to Lush gets the same "rock" tag from me.

Is there an IMDB for music? There's gracenote/cddb/freedb and trouserpress and wikipedia and such, but has anyone tried to combine them all?

^allmusic or discogs

is there anything wrong with them that you wouldn't feel comfortable letting some software automatically tag and organize your music according to the site?

I use both once in awhile... allmusic is good for a general overview. Discogs is better for collectors. It has details of different versions of the same release, etc. I've never paid much attention to genre tags in either tbh.

discogs is by far my fave

discogs is fantastic, yeah. I haven't bothered with genre tags for years! until you can tag songs with multiple genres in a sensible way, it's just too much subjective hassle.

mediamonkey and i think winamp does multiple genres