I hate CDs. Actually, I’ve disliked them for awhile but there really wasn’t anything I could do about it until existing desktop tech made it feasible to replace large sections of my CD library with digital copies. Before going any further, this isn’t a rant about the inferiority of digital music, compressed waveforms, or hoary old arguments about digital versus analog fidelity. At least I’ll try not to rant…
Anyway, my hassle with CDs are with them as physical objects. CDs are great in small numbers or as temporary storage, but once you accumulate a lot of them (say hundreds) the inconveniences exponentiate. I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately in anticipation of resettling in another city and the idea of moving a couple thousand (I stopped counting years ago at 2000) CDs gave me migraines.
Okay okay, queue up the World’s Smallest Violin to play “Boo hoo, Barrus has too much music,” but that wasn’t my first thought. The geek SysAdmin in me looked at all this music as a data administration problem and quickly concluded “gosh there’s a lot of single-point failures here.”
Look at it this way, how many of you have or know someone who’s had CDs stolen from them? Your car or house might have been broken into, or you’ve had a portable CD player stolen with a disc still in it. Really annoying. Now multiply that by some super-obscuro CD-R release from a Kiwi band that tours the US once every ten years or by some ultra-expensive Japanese-only release that took eons to special order. Really really really annoying.
Not surprisingly I picked up an iPod early on and left all my CDs at home. I use a laptop full time so anytime I picked up a CD I ripped it to disk and listened to it that way. My stereo conked out a couple years ago and I never bothered to replace it. My ears are shot from too much drone rock so I don’t notice data compression artifacts at all. Packaging? Who cares… with a few exceptions (IPR, Factory, and Rhino’s box sets), music packaging has been dead since 1987. Why haul around boxes and boxes of CDs when you can carry just about everything in a shopping bag full of DVD-Rs?
Easy? Sort of… Going digital with a huge record collection creates a data management problem. iTunes is a pretty good music data interface but it gets unwieldy when you have thousands of files. My current listening pile has 8208 tracks and I have roughly 150 DVD-Rs of archived MP3s/AACs. Hard drives are getting large enough that I could conceivably put the whole works on a single drive (though I’m obsessive enough to use two and mirror the whole works). With the release of the Mac Mini, a lot of folks were kicking around the idea of a Mini-based media server, but I want something more server-oriented, perhaps a scaled-down Xserve with only one processor and one drive bay, but with input/outputs for whatever interface (analog audio/video, FireWire, optical, etc.) I want to throw at it.
Before the custom hardware though iTunes could use a couple improvements right now to make it perfect. Multiple library support that could handle offline discs so I could search archived tracks. Additional metatags instead of just the one “genre” tag would be nice. Couple that with Spotlight support for all the ID tags (e.g. show me all “radio show”-tagged tracks from 1962 that are longer than 30 minutes) and I’ll be a happy camper.
Do permit me, as someone who has to be forcibly dragged along with technology’s progression, to contribute a thought or two.
Only in the past year or two did I finally complete the tedious task of converting all my old LP’s and cassettes to AIFF CD’s. At the time, I fancied that a major technological tour de force. Now it turns out that I’m behind the curve again. Thanks to a very generous friend (who is probably a regular viewer of the Joshua Tree blog), I recently acquired a 20G iPod. Naturally, I got hooked instantly, and I quickly came to understand the impulse to get rid of the CDs, cumbersome and outmoded physical objects that they are. Presently I am converting or importing all of the AIFF albums into MP3 format using iTunes, so that I can dump them into the iPod at will. Following are the approaches I have decided upon in order to cope with the managerial difficulties:
1. Storage: Obviously, simply putting the MP3’s on MP3 CD’s merely reduces the scope of the difficulty–the bulk caused by CD’s, namely, physical objects, in lieu of stored computer memory, is reduced but not eliminated satisfactorily. Being the retrograde fool that I am, I still do not possess a computer with hard-drive storage space equal to the task of holding the digitized contents of my entire music library. So I’ve purchased a 250GB external drive, aping my aforementioned friend in the selection of models: a desktop-type internal hard drive encased in a separate metal box, the kind with the glowing blue light. With luck, this will provide some added security for holding all the MP3’s. At this point, I don’t need much more than 40 or 50 GB (still seems like a lot), so this external drive is more than adequate. One could simply amass a collection of these–still cheaper than a stereo and CD’s. Incidentally, as in your case, my stereo has fallen into Ungebräuchlichkeit, that is, desuetude. {Why is it that the German sounds “foreign,” but not the French?}
2. Organization: Most iTunes lists I’ve seen on other people’s computers have been nothing short of disaster zones, due principally to sloppy and/or hasty data entry. When you load an MP3, you should fill in all the categories–song title, artist, album name, and genre. That way, it’s cross-referenced and easier to find. It goes without saying that consistency and accurate spelling are indispensable, to avoid losing a file, or, better put, misplacing it.
Closely related to this is the question of saving individual “songs” or, in the case of classical pieces, individual movements (typically lasting 5-25 minutes or so). Contrary to the prevailing practice, I prefer to load an entire album, including the numbers I don’t care for as much, in order to avoid fragmentation. When you load the whole album, keeping the original nomenclature, song order and so forth, you can more easily keep track of what you have, what versions they are, and so forth. That’s why it’s important to cram as much information into the fields as possible. If everything is organized the way it came, and fully labeled, you’ll have no difficulty finding X song by X artist on X occasion.
Of course, when one’s music collection reaches Barrusian, Millsian or Urbanian proportions, listing every album as a separate playlist also becomes unwieldy. A simple compromise solution is to have a playlist for everything done by a given artist, composer, date or whatnot. Then subsume each of the albums-saved-as-albums thereunder. If all the information has been properly entered, the individual albums will simply appear alphabetically in the subcategory. By way of an additional failsafe, one can create redundant, multiple playlists and cross-reference the material. For example, I have one list called “German history,” in which I’ve placed recordings of the prewar political speeches that I analyzed for my master’s thesis. But I also have a category called “speeches.” The German speeches, therefore, appear in two separate playlists.
With respect to playlists, it is absolutely imperative to have every song on at least one playlist. Otherwise, the only location to find items will be the a massive, undifferentiated master library.
But sometimes it’s impossible to avoid having isolated, individual songs or items with incomplete data. In that case, one can simply lump them in a larger playlist, or create a separate playlist for them. The larger point is to classify everything, consistently, into playlists that more or less mirror the actual albums. The principal organizational difficulty with a computerized music library is that the spatial, visual component is missing. One can arrange CD’s physically, making it possible to know intuitively where a given album is located. Computerized playlists don’t provide this convenience–they substitute a verbally-based scheme for the archaic, simpler one based on physical arrangement: in other words, one must know cognitively where the particular album or song is located. Consequently, it is imperative to maintain careful and detailed organization; otherwise, chaos reigns and the music collection becomes worthless because it can’t be used as one wants.