Over the years, my musical tastes have evolved. I used to be big into punk and alternative. Bands like Black Sabbath, MxPx, Bad Religion, Rancid and Pearl Jam filled my high school years with loudness and angst. Which was great. Now, I’m starting to evolve towards the more melodic, acoustic end of the musical spectrum with artists like Dar Williams, Emm Gryner, a sprinkling of country music, and lots and lots of Elvis Costello. I haven’t completely lost my love of the loud. I’ve recently learned to quite enjoy the Alkaline Trio and Anberlin amonst others. However, my music collection is no longer exactly representative of my tastes.
A couple of weeks ago, I started a daunting project: sort my mp3 collection. There’s over four thousand tracks, some of which are correctly tagged, and others which are not. What I want when I’m done, is a directory called Music, with a subdirectory for each artist. All of the files should be of the format “artist – album – track number – song nameâ€, all correctly capitalized. The tracks should have to correct ID3 information, and may include the year the album was released and the genre, but I don’t want any extra information, stuck into the comment, copyright or other such fields.
What I did to start was move all my songs out of their proper hiding place in the Music directory to a directory called Sorting, and then created directories for each letter of the alphabet. All my music files were dumped into the directory which corresponded with the artist’s name. I also created two other directories, ‘ZToTag’ and ‘ZCorrect’. The Z at the beginning is so they’re always at the end of the directory listing. I have been processing these directories alphabetically.
In order to not be bored listening to the same artist for weeks on end, I want to grab a subset out of the directory I’m currently processing, so what I do is draw a box 1 file wide down the directory listing and move those files to the Sorting directory. It ends up being about 10% of the files in a given directory. I listen to those files until I decide to keep or delete the file. If I want to keep it, the file gets moved to ‘ZToTag’. Sometimes it take five or six listens to decide to keep a file, especially considering I am doing this mostly at work, so it’s only a background process.
Occasionally I will check ZToTag and ensure I have the proper album and track number for the file. Wikipedia is super useful for this. I will then edit the ID3 tag in a program like EasyTag, and move that file into ZCorrect. When I have completely sorted one alphabetical directory, I will move my newly correctly tagged and labelled files into Music, where I move the files into a directory for each artist.
How boring was that to read? I was bored typing it. Right now, I’m sorting through D. Lots of Dar Williams, David Bowie and Dropkick Murphys songs.
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