re: Organizing large music collections
Hi. I’m Ian and I have 87.4 days worth of music filling 233.8 GB of space.
<Hi Ian…>
For me, smart playlists kill the idea of not having every song you own in iTunes. It is fun to listen to a random playlist (I call ‘em jukes) of every song with the word rain or bird or star or remix or dub or ____ in the title, or in the album name. A juke of all my songs from 1982. I have a folder of smart playlists focused on colors.
I have playlists for my favorite artists, so I can easily add them to an iPod and run it on shuffle. Those start “…artist -” in order to fool the alphanumeric ordering scheme and put them closer to the top of my playlists list. I have tailored playlists to match different moods and are inspired by crazy names like ‘exotech,’ ‘surf and strum,’ ‘hurricane party jams,’ ‘burled neon,’ ‘just piano mostly’ and ‘girls I’d like to ride on a train through Europe with.’ All of those begin with “|V|.”
I have dozens and dozens of playlists and although there are some annoying problems with it stopping on something I don’t regret how I’ve organized things. I do regret using TuneUp on my entire library, because it made up some absurd genres that have wrecked some of my beloved playlists, or did it make them better? I’ve got one that looks for songs that have classic in the genre, which now includes the Classic Punk of the Velvet Underground and the Classic Soul of the Fats tribute disk… which isn’t even really Classic Soul, since it is contemporary recordings of Classic Soul.
Alright, I’ve added enough to the discussion for now… let me see why iTunes is stuck this time… oh, nevermind. It’s only the Beachles mashup disc. Now that’s annoying.
Jstn, the vowel-less creator of Muxtape, posted this response to my music organisation suggestion. I think there have been a few misunderstandings in his response, so here goes a rebuttal.
I hate it when reasonable questions get answered like this. Q: “What’s the best way to keep my fingernails trim?” A: “Cut off your hands!”
I hate when the default attitude of a dissenting rebuttal is “Cut off your hands!” My response is just as reasonable as the request — the author himself thanked me for my perspective — but I’m sorry that you disagree with it.
I have the exact opposite philosophy: I never delete music, unless it’s something I especially loathe. I’m the kind of person who, when something pops into my head that I haven’t heard in ten years, I want to listen to it immediately. Since we live in the future and storage is cheap, I can actually do this, and I fucking love it.
I would have thought the creator of Muxtape would realise how instrumental the web can be in feeding listening habits. Websites and services like Hype Machine and elbo.ws make it trivial to find anything current and listen to it right there and then, and in most cases, even download it. Services like Amazon MP3 and whatever else is in wide use right now (I don’t use these services) make getting anything on a major label trivial. The list goes on: MySpace, Virb, iMeem, and, once upon a time, Muxtape.
Since I live in the future, and internet connections are cheap and almost ubiquitous, I can actually do this, and I fucking love it.
Everyone consumes music differently, which is fine. If you’re the type of person who only cares about the shit Pitchfork reviewed last week, by all means, delete it this week. On the other hand, if your collection passed four digits of gigabytes a long time ago, deletion probably isn’t in your vocabulary.
To restate my previous point (did you miss it?), there’s no way anyone has time to listen to that much music. Four digits of gigabytes must encompass months of continuous listening. That’s a collector’s library, not a listener’s. How much of your four digit-gigabyte library has less than ten plays? Do you really think you’re making valuable use of your disk space by filling it with music on the offchance that you may want to listen to it some day? I don’t. But it’s fine if we disagree, I still don’t think it’s as dumb as you seem to think it is.
By the way, I’ve never been a Pitchfork reader. Most of my music discovery these days comes from my Tuneage inbox.
Another gem of advice from the same guy: “If you deleted something you ripped from a CD, rip it again next time you want it.” Seriously? Why rip it at all?
Because I was responding to a guy that was asking about organising his iTunes library.
When I wrote this, I was responding to one person publicly, not trying to cater to everyone’s music collections. But since you asked: convenience (what’s easier — a spotlight search or scanning a wall of CDs?), security (what if I drop it, break it, lose it, burn it, etc?), and generosity (what if I lend it to someone?). The list goes on.
One more: “MP3s are a fantastic way to archive your music (but FLAC and OGG are better)”. No, they’re not. Esoteric formats, even if they’re super OMG high fidelity, are usually a terrible choice for long-term storage of any kind of data. MP3s are about as universal as it gets, and they support ID3 tags, which is an organizational godsend that FLAC and OGG lack.
This is a personal preference. I’m not wrong, and neither are you. I merely mentioned the formats as a popular choice for another crowd of music-listeners.
By the way, OGG and FLAC share the same tagging scheme, which is way more flexible than ID3.
I was reminded of something Alex Payne wrote a little while ago, albeit in a different context: “If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out the filesystem.” That’s how I do it. I’ve only got ~50GB in my iTunes library at any given time, but I keep everything else in a simple hierarchy on an external RAID. No fancy groupings or playlists, just a folder for each artist with a folder inside for each album (or loose tracks). That’s it. iTunes starts to choke after a few thousand songs, but the total filesystem limit on a Mac is in the billions. You’ll never hit the ceiling.
I don’t know which version of my post you read, but this was more or less exactly what I suggested as an alternative to deleting everything.
Sorry for the rant. This is an issue close to my heart :)
I don’t know why a rant was necessary, Tumblr’s pretty good at fostering good old-fashioned discussion, but no problem! Looks like we’re mostly in agreement on the major points!
One final note, aimed at no one in particular: my post was aimed at one person, and anyone else that happened to be interested. It wasn’t well-written — it veered from recommending deleting everything, to just backing it all up; for the record, do whichever you’re most comfortable with is my official stance here — and I didn’t expect it to get read this widely (thanks, Marco), so I didn’t take too much care with it. Obviously, I regret that, since anything you publish online should be of the highest standard possible, but it’s a little late for edits now, and the point is made perfectly well regardless.
90 Notes