07/20/2005 12:37 AM
Posted by Pandabob

Like a Floridian Hurricane Survivor

I'm picking up the pieces...

I haven't gone away, per se. I had to take a brief hiatus from posting reviews while I reassemble my library. iTunes has a lovely feature where it will rearrange your music files into new folders based on the artist. This is all fine and good, except that some file tags include artist information that differs from track to track on a given album. And it's not just soundtracks and compilations, like you might think. The short of it is that it's a mess.

So, I'm in the middle of an effort to make lemonade out of 75 gigs of jumbled up MP3 files. While I'm at it I thought I would take the opportunity to clean things up a bit. Fix some tags, rename some folders, and consolidate some genres. Stuff like that.

I thought I would also take a moment and share with you guys a few handy tips for managing massive collections of MP3 files.


1. Put them on their own drive. Hard drives are cheap these days. I just picked up a 250 GB drive for $100 after mail-in-rebate. Having your media on a separate drive has a few advantages, but mostly it means that when you buy a new computer all you have to do is move the drive over.

2. If you're sharing your library across your network, make it "read only." If I'd done this, my library wouldn't have been tanked.

3. Don't be a genre snob. I know that Fugazi is "indy-emo-core" and that L7 might be more along the lines of "Riot Grrrl" than say, "Grunge." But really, it doesn't matter, nor does it help anyone when you've got 15,000 songs and three-dozen genres. Pick a few, less than 10. Then cram everyone into those categories. That way when you're trying to make that awesome punk mix you won't forget Iggy 'cause you've got him pegged as post-wave-punk-core.

4. If you have a bunch of DJ mix CDs consider changing the "artist" tag to the DJ's name. This will keep the mix all together when you sort by artist and will keep songs that shouldn't be heard on their own (due to the cross fades and such) from popping up when you search for the original artist. If you don't want to lose that information, then you might consider changing the "artist" tag to read something like "DJ Name - Original Artist Name"

5. Don't rip CDs straight into your library. Rip them into a staging area. If you spent a lot of time organizing your MP3 files you don't want to lose ground with your new files. As you acquire new tunes store them off to the side until you have a chance to clean up the folder names and file tags.

That's it for now. With any luck I'll have some more songs to review in the near future. And if I see you on the street the slurpee's on me. Just leave me the cup.