Jan 29, 2007
Tales from the OCD-esque music frontline
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.
I pulled all my music off my CDs and started my digital collection with iTunes.
Now I’m not sure that I like how it’s organised, and I don’t know whether to go backwards or just persevere with the playlists.
Good luck with yours!
I kind of do this on a new album and listening to old album basis.
How did you get around Amazon’s now annoying habbit of putting a big white square around the cover art?
I suppose I shouldn’t point you to this Lifehacker feature about adding album art etc., should I?
“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.”
*Raises hand nervously”
Well, in my defence, I don’t get out much. And for me, there is something so satisfying about sending an actual burned CD far afield (Australia and Canada being frequent destinations) rather than just bunging together a zip file and placing it online for donwloading somewhere.
Do you edit your ID3 tags within iTunes or using something else rather more, um, quick and user-friendly? I always mean to tidy up my tags too, but it just seems to take so long in iTunes …
I’m currently trying to work my way through ripping 1500 vinyl albums, so don’t even get me started on this…
I’m moving house in a couple of weeks, so i’m tempted to leave all the vinyl in the garage, then only allow albums into the house if I can rip them as i play them. But there’s a huge business model for someone to offer a swap for vinyl in return for MP3s – i’m sure i’m not the first person to rip loads of these tracks. Something like what mp3.com tried to do years ago…
Actually, iTunes has showed me that even my advanced state of OCD-ness has its limits. Basically, I draw the line at genre. In fact, I have a vague ideological objection to the concept. So, if Gracenote really wants to tell me that my nice gentle Camera Obscura album is “Alternative & Punk”, then so be it.
My other quirk – possibly to the annoyance of the Last FM community, but hey, it’s MY music – is to rename the “album” titles for lone MP3s, as I hate having incomplete albums mucking up my sort. So I’ll give tracks titles like 06 Singles, Misc Oldies and so on – and I’ll always, always make sure that the “compilation” box is ticked, so that I can easily locate and drag them into my mixing software, for compilation CDs and podcasts. (A separate Windows folder for every single artist, even if there’s only one track? Ugh, no!)
@Lyle: Dangnabbit! There must be something in the air. Actually, when I was a windows user I happily used MediaMonkey for ages, so I agree with that recommendation. Unfortunately, as I said in the main piece there is no substitute for personal gruntwork.
@UW: I tend to edit ID3 tags for files in batches, to make sure I standardise genre and title information. It cuts down the nitpicky stuff, but not hugely, especially as I’ve got a lot of orphaned tracks.
@Matlock: My dad set up something elaborate involving a turntable and line-in…it was pretty effective if not A1 quality. But now you can get turntables with USB which would make life easier, especially if it forced you to revisit all those albums as you ploughed through them. Ah, bliss!
I’m surprised there isn’t a service for it, though – there were a bunch around for Cd ripping and even photo digitisation. I seem to remember reading something about Selfridges planning a service like you suggest…Here’s the link but I don’t think it came to anything, unfortunately.
Convenience aside, could CDs replace the sensory pleasure of vinyl, though? Another thing I was thinking about vinyl after writing this was the way that vinyl (and tapes, come to that) imposed an order on your listening. Albums were constructed like novels, with a journey of sound, to be consumed in a very particular order. The closest thing I’ve heard in recent years is Kate Bush’s Aerial. It just doesn’t make sense on shuffle.
@Mike: “My other quirk…is to rename the “album†titles for lone MP3s, as I hate having incomplete albums mucking up my sort.”
I feel your pain. I do a similar thing, though my pattern is:
1. If I can find out which album a particular track is from, I assign it that album name and image, even if it’s the only track I have from that album or artist (see: John Denver)
2. If I have other orphaned tracks by the same artist, or I can’t figure out which album it’s from, create a new compilation “album” called “miscellaneous tracks”, illustrated by a photo of the artist.
I know somebody who adds the key each song is in to create playlists non discordant songs.
If I could achieve such a level of OCD I’d probably plough it into getting all the recording volume levels to match so I didn’t have to keep jumping on the wheel to adjust up or down when on shuffle mode. Procrastination wins wverytime though.
Stroppycow, (Much as I hate to spam about Lifehacker links, but it’s a great site) this is the part of the alpha-geek series about levelling the volume of one’s MP3 collection…
@ Adrian: I find using Google Image Search and putting an album title in the search box negates annoyance caused by Amazon and their big white squares. I swear they’re actually doing it to make it more difficult for everyone to get the album art from their images.
Having just done the ‘cover art boogie’ on upgrading from my mini, I can empathise.
My own little OCD moment is renaming Gracenoted tracks where it’s Such-and-Such featuring So-and-So: the protocol is always “(feat. So-and-So)” after the song title, not “ft.” or anything else, and not after the artist name. Not sure why I went with that method but it’s too late to change now!
As for genres, I tend go generic so punkish tracks get filed under “Alternative” and all variants of dance music go under “Electronic/Dance”, rather than “Hard Handbag Trance”. Oh, and all artists must be tagged with the same genre, even if their style changes over time! (I’m looking at you Madonna).
Enough to keep a therapist in business for a good few days there, I think.
@lyle, thanks
Post and comments contain the information I’ve been seeking. Thanks.