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Music! How you: acquire, organize, listen, etc.
Organichu
poopspeesRegistered User regular
poopspeesRegistered User regular
I'm up this early organizing the music on my media player (I use my phone). I'm importing any covert art that didn't transfer properly, and by and large ensuring that there aren't any tracks missing from albums, irregularities in spelling etc. It led to me consider how others approach music. Do you still purchase physical CDs? If so, do you typically leave them on the CD or rip them to a HDD? If you purchase music digitally, do you only purchase full albums? If you do have most of your collection digitally set up and organized, do you generally listen to albums all the way through? Or do you give an album one play through then put it into a shuffle with all of your other stuff?
I think these are interesting questions. For example, with me, I don't purchase individual tracks anymore. Even if I did find a song I liked from an album I disliked, I wouldn't purchase it. It's just... so much of a wrench in my setup. What do I do, make a folder called "miscellaneous tracks"? In a day where I have all of my media organized anally (media > music > [artist] > [album] > the individual and consistently titled tracks, here), and where I use coverflow mode and don't want an extra sub menu for one track... I wouldn't even know what to do with an individual song.
So there are my questions. How do you acquire, organize, and listen to music?
I think these are interesting questions. For example, with me, I don't purchase individual tracks anymore. Even if I did find a song I liked from an album I disliked, I wouldn't purchase it. It's just... so much of a wrench in my setup. What do I do, make a folder called "miscellaneous tracks"? In a day where I have all of my media organized anally (media > music > [artist] > [album] > the individual and consistently titled tracks, here), and where I use coverflow mode and don't want an extra sub menu for one track... I wouldn't even know what to do with an individual song.
So there are my questions. How do you acquire, organize, and listen to music?
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Also I'm always borrowing CDs from people and putting them on the computer so I can have them for free. This was great right up until the computer got sick and had to be reformatted.
Im into a lot of music blogs etc that give you rapidshare links to recommended tracks etc, if i like it i explore then pick up the album. Torrents serve a purpose to in making my mind up about a purchase.
Everything i buy i rip to itunes and then put on ipod. Generally i like to listen to an album all the way through, tracks are put in place for a reason and for me this is the best way to listen to songs from an album. Obviously there are numerous tracks that are just one offs (stuff off blogs, the odd club tune or catchy single) but these i just stick in playlists.
Every few months sort it all out a bit and thats about it. Boring i know
Files: Artist - Track Number - Song Name
All my album art is sized (at least I try to) 500x500 and are all PNG so that no media player like iTunes or Zune will resize it and replace the original. They are all named 'folder' (for Foobar) and is located in the album folder, but I have a separate zip folder with all the original file names in case I need to salvage my collection.
I'm very particular about my music collection.
that said, i still rip all my cd's straight to the pc so i can stream it randomly or set up a playlist for a party or whatever. sometimes you just need to have it all there and ready for you.
C:\MP3s\Metallica\Master of Puppets\[mp3s here]
Then I can just hit Add Folder on Winamp to add an album to my playlist.
So I have an entire 200GB hard drive dedicated to my music, everything pre-2005ish is probably ripped CDs, while everything since then comes from various online sources - Amazon's music store is my favorite. I'm pretty anal about the way I tag my music, e.g. for soundtracks and various artist compilations, I set the artist field to "soundtrack" or "compilation" so I can keep them all grouped together. I do this because I use my iPod fairly often (my car even has an iPod dock so I can control it through my stereo) and I always search by Artist and I don't want 15 million artist who I only have 1 or 2 tracks from cluttering up my search.
F:\MP3\Artist\Album\Track # - Track name
Winamp handles all my listening needs and I use MP3Tag to handle all my tagging and cover art.
I only really buy and listen to entire albums. I don't listen to much in the way of mainstream music so, for the most part, they aren't a collection of 2 - 3 singles plus filler songs.
I do have a "singles" folder in there for one-hit-wonders. Also keep a few video game songs and remixes up in there (organized as "Soundtracks" in the Album part above).
I use iTunes to listen to and acquire my music. I use Winamp only for the purpose of listening to chiptunes.
Edit - Ah hell, I'll leave the smilie there.
I can usually find something I like for atound $3-$5 after shipping. That beats iTunes, and I can live without the fear of my ISP throttling me back, or the RIAA sneaking in my room at night and buttfucking me.
Only downside is new releases are always going to cost more.....but honestly there haven't been many new albums that I like lately
Also its nice to have an actual tangible album with artwork and such. Too bad cds will likely go the way of the Dodo with digital distro being the norm within a decade.
On my HDD, it's usually ... /Music/Artist/Album/ ...
My player of choice has been Foobar2000 for a long time, although I'm trying the new winamp right now.
Organization/Playback: On my MacBook, I have iTunes handling directory structure and playback--I use Get Info to handle tags manually. Back on my Windows machine I used to use MusicBrainz to automagically tag things, and foobar2000 for playback.
Portable: 8 gig iPod Touch (came free with the MacBook), managed with iTunes. Back in the Windows days, I had a 32 gig iPod Classic managed with the stellar foo_dop plugin.
Next on the horizon: ripping CDs to Apple Lossless (I only recently discovered how to do this
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Too bad that I'm in Europe, and buying anything online means that I get charged the dollar price in euros instead (either they use some crazy moon maths, or the price is higher due to some bullshit excuse). For 8-10€ I can get the actual CD. Also, the audio from a CD is still superior to 256kbps MP3.
Besides, some of the stuff I listen to that is published by smaller bands isn't really available any other way than on CD.
I procure my music from a variety of sources. I sometimes buy CDs, but only as an act of charity. I don't actually use the product. I spend a lot on music tickets, as well as various other merch that I give away as gifts.
My music is meticulously organized. Artist\[year] Album\track # - name, with a playlist file for every album. I don't keep singles, as those can be found on Youtube if I wish. Album art is attached to the tag as well as in the folder.jpg. I use MP3tag to keep everything organized. I use Winamp to listen to everything, and the fantastic ml_ipod to transfer music to my iPod Classic. I could not imagine using iTunes and really feel sorry for people that subject themselves to such inconvenience.
(Also, sweet avatar obolon
I do still
As for organization, I'm quite meticulous in making sure everything is tagged with the correct artist, album, year and genre. I do have quite a few singles and such, but I always label tracks and give them art from their original album whether I have the rest of it or not. It's a major pet peeve of mine to have things labeled as coming from a greatest hits collection or such...I figure, if I'm checking that info, I'm going to want to know the album the song originally came out on. I don't care when or how it was rereleased, and I'd much rather have an incomplete album than a miscellaneous album/folder full of disorganized crap.
(Note: this post is a plea for someone to convince me to use Winamp or Foobar again. I...I hate iTunes. I hate it so much.)
I really don't like iTunes but I sort of have to use it on my laptop. So I just tell it not to recopy the files and keep the same generic "MP3" folder on the desktop.
The majority of music that I get now comes from free songs put up at either Amazon or KEXP.
Truth be told, the amount of streaming available through KEXP, Slackr and XM makes my collection almost obsolete. I can't control it but it basically has everything I need unless I feel like something specific.
I use both to browse new and old music, zero in on albums that show promise, and then listen through the tracks. iTunes is nice because there's a cart -- I can shop for a few and think about it over the next couple days. Amazon is nice because you can preview all of the songs continuously. I rarely buy full albums, because of what I'll cover below, but I'll typically buy a portion of an album based on the samples and, if they really stand out, I'll revisit the artist and either buy the rest of the album or explore their other work. Usually there's a reason I'll skip songs, though.
Occasionally I'll end up buying enough of an album that the price makes it more than simply buying the full album, and then I get the album. I don't give a shit about liner notes because a) most of the music I buy doesn't have any and b) more information is available online. I don't need more stuff to store at home.
Organization and playback: I use iTunes extensively, and use my iPod for portable playing -- in the car, at work, and downstairs through the stereo. My iPod is my portable iTunes.
I group songs into loose genres, the vast majority of which is "electronic." That's not techno, but rather more of a catch-all -- if it's not jazz, rock music, or classical, it's electronic. "Rock" is anything that's more guitar/live based, or has a vocalist. I don't have subgenres -- there's no alternative, punk, rock, oldies, surf, metal, and there's no techno, idm, drum n bass, hip hop in "electronic." They're rough groups so that the next step works.
I have each song rated, 1-5 stars. 1-2 means "it sucks." 3 means "it's OK but I don't really like it." 4-5 means "I want to hear this song when I shuffle." I then have smart playlists that pull songs based on their rating and when they were last listened to -- if they were heard within the last couple days, they cannot be in the playlist. It's sorted by "last played" so songs that I haven't heard are towards the top. Each are limited to a small portion of songs, usually around 99, so that I have a consistent sample -- I will eventually rotate through all the songs that I like to hear over the course of a month, two months, and I can skip a song I don't feel like hearing one day and hear it the next, without it being lost forever in a huuuuge playlist.
I have a few set up to tilt towards "new" music, music that has been played infrequently, so I can focus on more recent purchases. I have a "purgatory" playlist that contains 3-star songs that I listen to when I'm feeling bored with music, and while many stay at 3-star they do occasionally get bumped up to 4 (and then enter the regularly played playlists).
I do occasionally listen to an album, but typically there is always a small handful of songs that I dislike, and will skip. Or I just get tired of hearing the same music for a full hour. I like my current setup because I always have new music that I like at my fingertips, without having to decide what album I want to hear or what track. If I'm shuffling everything, I have something like 7000 songs, a lot of which I won't like very much. I don't want to listen to Pearl Jam's "Ten" probably ever again, but I like "I Got Id," so I hear it without having to think "I really want to hear that one Pearl Jam song."
I told a friend of mine about my setup and he took his a step further, using the star rating in iTunes to determine how frequently he wanted to hear a song. 1-star is once a year, 5 stars is once a day, with the inbetween being inbetween. He has a few nested smart playlists and ends up with a pretty solid mix depending on what he wants to hear, and can adjust ratings without worrying about "losing" a song.
And, of course, I let iTunes handle all of the management. Before it, I had everything in folders and would subsequently never listen to any of it, because I could never find particular songs I liked. After I got iTunes, I rediscovered my existing music library, which was awesome.
Say, for example, that I have an hour long track mixed by multiple DJs that contains multiple songs originally done by different artists.
How the hell do I tag this in some meaningful way?
My ideal setup would be something where I could do partial searches. So, if I wanted to find all tracks that contained music by Artist A, it would find their original tracks, but also mixes that contained their music. The current mp3 tags don't seem to be set up to support something like this.
Edit: I suppose one solution would be to chop the large mp3 up into individual tracks and use original artist or composer or something, but that still doesn't handle multiples very well.
Music goes into a folder that is watched by MediaMonkey. I set it up to only use embedded album art. I usually don't get full albums so I just put the songs wherever, in folders like Games or Movies for types of music. Mass tagging, embedding album art and other organization is done within MediaMonkey. It's also able to sync with my iPod touch, since it's such an awesome program. I've also got everything rated and some smart playlists set up. It also handles the volume leveling. It does lossless gain changes to MP3 files to make everything around the same volume. A few songs can't take the volume increase so I revert them with MP3Gain.
Everything is mp3 of course, and the few old CDs that I ripped are at V2 quality (~190 kbps) and they sound just peachy. I don't have a disorder that causes me to want music in a quality higher than I can actually discern. And I don't harbor delusions that suddenly a new format will come out and make me want to re-encode my entire library.
I'm also a big sucker for album art, I've got a huge album art pane for MediaMonkey. AllCDCovers is a nice source for high-res covers, if a general internet search does not provide. I've also got a scanner that I use to get covers from the few CDs I own.
Flippy: if you're talking about being able to do this while on the PC, you could just put all the artist names in the song title and they would show up in a quick search.
You can tag separate parts of an MP3 in the ID3 standard. Whether players actually support this is left as an exercise to the reader.
I can't really bring myself to buy CDs anymore...I have no place to store them, nor any strong desire for a physical product. Also, not having to actually *find* any given CD makes my life much easier.
I still have somewhere around 600 CDs in cases back in Maryland, and someday I'll get around to ripping them all to my hard drive.
As for listening, pretty much iPod at school, while I'm working on my PC at home (with headphones), or while I'm playing PS3/360 games without interesting soundtracks.
That shouldn't be split up, because it's a DJ mix. Those get marked as "Part of a compilation" in iTunes and ignored from every playlist. If I want to listen to that particular mix, I play it. For me, I don't want the edited, DJ version of a song to come up; I want the real deal ;D
If you're asking simply semantically, you can do it however you like. Many people put the DJ as a comment or "composer" within a track, with the actual track artist being the artist. For a lot of classical music, the tags aren't as I like them for my system, so I change them.
I also always change the genres whenever I buy new music.
Organize: I'll rip them using EAC (as one big .wav file), compress them in FLAC (lately it has been WavPack), and put them in their own folder under my albums folder, generally named 'Artist - Year - Album Name (Disc # if applicable)'. With the generated .cue files, most of the ID3 tag info is automatically generated.
Listen: I'll scan my media library in foobar and that will automatically add it to the album list. Quick and easy. I have a smallish music collection, and I only listen on my computer, so I have no problem keeping everything in lossless compression. I like the idea that I have an exact backup of the disc. And sometimes I'll take my CDs with me to listen to elsewhere, so if they get lost I can just burn another and it's all there, down to the last sonic detail.