File under: Music, Projects

Tales from the OCD-esque music frontline

01.29.07 | 15 Comments

This is where I reveal slightly too much about my OCD-esque tendencies when it comes to music.

Although it’s been a while - too long - since I had the pleasure, there’s something unspeakably pleasing about flicking through a stack of LPs, standing heavy vinyl in their smooth carboard sleeves, succumbing to gravity as they tip past your fingers. I can almost hear the fluhmpf of air escaping as they tumble to rest against each other. A sensual pleasure.

And although CDs are rather unloveable in their plasticness and ubiquity, there’s something weirdly calming about seeing row upon row of one’s own CDs satisfyingly sorted by artist/alphabet/date/some other personally significant schema. Squared edges nestling flush against each other. Being able to locate an album on a whim is one of life’s tiny but visceral joys, along with being able to find a particular book within moments in a home of many packed and groaning bookshelves.

iTunes - and other digital music libraries and players - have their own pleasing aspects, too. It’s much simpler, for example, to randomise tracks (ever tried doing that on a single turntable? Or using a tape player? Er, no thanks), and playlists are a doddle - much easier than the somewhat fiddly process of making mix tapes for friends, loved ones and people you wanted to get into bed, an activity which has faded into obsolescence with the familiarity of CD burners and digital music.

(Having said that, something’s undoubtedly been lost in the process. Can we honestly claim that as much thought, care and time goes into making personalised compilations for other people these days? If, indeed, that’s something anyone even does anymore.)

Back on the positive side, you can organise your music in lots of different ways - by album, of course, but also by artist, date, genre and so on. Plus of course the very act of adding and playing music within an application like that adds extra layers of relevance and context to each track: When was it added? How many times has it been played? Do you like it?

But the problem with metadata on digital files is that it’s only really helpful if it’s comprehensive - that is, if all your files have got relevant and useful data attached. If some files have got genre data on, while others don’t, then smart playlists and column sorts only make partial sense. And don’t even get me started on naming conventions - though happily, such issues are simplified (if not completely solved) on MP3 files with meaningful data buried within the ID3 tags. But are compilations made by Various or Various Artists? And is that Eminem track Hiphop? Hip-hop? Rap? Hip-hop/rap? Or what? Everywhere you look there’s a can opener and a wriggly supper waiting to be served up.

Plus with the inclusion of Coverflow within newer versions of iTunes, there’s a visual dimension waiting to be explored. Fantastic except, oh bugger, that’s another bit of information that needs to be sourced and attached for each album.

And we all know how I feel about album covers.

So for reasons best known to someone else (I’m not even sure myself), I spent a chunk of the last few days trying to apply cover art to all the tracks in my iTunes library, and tidying up the ID3 information in the process.

I didn’t mean to do it. I just sort of tumbled into it. I added a cover to something and then noticed the next one didn’t have a cover and so I found the right one online and copied it in, then realised that some tracks were in a different genre to the others….and so it began.

I can’t tell you how many I managed to get through, but I got to the Fs. So, verdict? Semi-successful. A work in progress.

I admit I used iTunes’ inbuilt cover art finder, which managed some good ground cover, but didn’t help much with the badly or un-labelled or more eclectic items in the collection. For the rest I turned to a combination of Amazon, Google images and this excellent cover finder. I know there are a whole range of OS X apps which purport to hunt out cover art for iTunes, but I’m afraid that when it comes to poor organisation and incomplete data and obscure Raï artists, there’s no substitute for hard slog, Yorkshire tea, and RSI of the mouse-finger.

Besides, while I’ve been using Gracenote to apply names and ID3 data to tracks when ripping them to disc in the first place, because it’s based on user contributions, you soon realise that people use different conventions for genres, identification data use of UPPER CASE and, bizarrely, spelling. Gah.

It was tedious but necessary, and the results make it worthwhile because everything’s so neat and visually appealing, rather than hodgepodge lists of information with great gaps in them.

I don’t want to give the impression about being a neat-freak, because I’m really, really not, but I like things to be organised - so, for example, I have a couple of sets of metal filing drawers, with different drawers for tax, pension, paid household bills, insurance and so on. Now, within each drawer, it’s a free-for-all, but I do at least know that all the bits of paper relating to one particular topic will be in one place.

Same with music, to some degree. Whatever organisation scheme I use, it doesn’t need to be perfect - there’ll always be exceptions and oddities and things which defy organisation - but it needs to be manageable. See also photos. See also life.

So ultimately, this rather dull activity helped me feel like I’ve managed to impose a little bit of order on an anarchistic and chaotic chunk of my digital world. We all know this is a run-up to sorting out the rest (see paragraph above). Wish me luck.

15 Comments