To ID3 or not to Be

In true Dan McConnell fashion, I've taken on a project so large it'll probably never come to complete completion. However, I'm going to go into it just like I do everything else, with the idea that it'll be completed and perfect and completely worth it. Anyway, the project this time is to categorize all of my MP3's.

Since my freshman year when I really started downloading/ripping music, I've organized my music manually because programs didn't automatically organize MP3's back then like they do now. My music is sorted into hundreds of folders according to artist, album, singles, and genres. It's all very logical, naturally, and is sorted in a way that is very comfortable to me. Also, because they weren't standard years ago and many programs didn't support them, I hated ID tags. The tags would always be wrong and the file names would always be in some retarded internet slang language like 12_aLIci4_KYS_-_WhtAW0mANzWurth.torrENTZnW4R3Z.mp3, so it was easier for me to just delete the tag and rename the file manually. I didn't see the point of the tags anyway; Winamp would read the artist and song title by my perfectly-formatted filename so I didn't want to waste my time to fix the tags as well. By the time I realized the benefits of ID tags - searching, categorizing, listing on MP3 players, etc - it was too late to go back and change the information on 11,000 songs, or so I thought.

Skip a few chapters ahead to this summer. When a friend of mine complained to me about how she had an iPod but no music to put on it, I offered her my collection. Since Apple has something against its products being compatible with the Windows world, I had to install iTunes in order to transfer the music over. Initially, I didn't much care for the program. It seemed intrusive, something I abhor, as it tried to go through and re-organize the entire music collection that I'd spent years keeping in order. I had thought about using an alternative to Winamp, because it no longer functioned well without the ID3 tags I so mistakenly neglected, and decided against iTunes after the experience I had with it this summer.

Then, I meet this girl who's absolutely obsessed with Macs. TANGENT It's interesting, everyone I've met who has an Apple machine is completely obsessed with it and everything the company does. Same thing with Linux people. I rarely meet people who are obsessed with Windows, or, for example, the newest Dell or Hewlett Packard machines. Maybe the Mac and Linux-heads feel they must defend their machines to the Windows world by talking them up. Or, maybe they really feel that they are better alternatives and feel the only way to get the point across is to evangelize about them like the salvation. Either way, I'm an open-minded person, and understand that sometimes, counter-culture is worth a look. end TANGENT So, after Emmy kept gushing about how great iTunes was, I realized that maybe I didn't give it a fair chance this summer. Since I value her opinion, I decided to opened it up once again to give it a second look.

For those of you unfamiliar with the program, it's similar to the new version of Winamp and many of the other less-popular music players out there in that iTunes works on a library system. The program knows where all of your muisc is located at all times, instead of looking for and selecting a specific song or album or folder that you choose through Windows Explorer to play for that session. Originally, I didn't really want it to appear as if all my was together like both Winamp 5 and iTunes did. I wanted my music sorted and organized in a more logical manner and I actually liked looking through my subforders, searching for that specific album by that specific artist. Boy, was I stupid.

Emmy eventually showed me a feature of iTunes that I realized actually made ID3 tags, and iTunes, worth my time. Basically, iTunes has implimented tags to create what Apple calls 'smart playlists.' One can enter parameters for the playlist that they want to create, and then iTunes will search the entire music library and add songs that fit those parameters to the playlist, according to the ID3 tags. Lance informed me that Winamp does the same thing and is more comprehensive than iTunes, but I found that it isn't as user-friendly.

Because I reazlied I really wasn't experiencing the full advantages of digital music, I've decided to go back through and add ID3 tags to my entire collection of MP3's. That's right, over 11,000 songs! However, iTunes will automatically fill in all of the information for a song such as title and artist, so most of the work is already done. All I have to do is enter the genre and the albums. However, I'm not going to stop there. In the comments section for each song I'm going to add adjectives that describe the genre nouns for each song. So, for example, a song may be in the 'Rock' genre, but may bring the words such as soft, slow, love, suggestive, irish, 90's, soundtrack, and cover to my mind while listening to it. I've decided I'm going to put those words into the comments section, so that I can search for songs that have commonalities between them other than genre. The plan is to do this for all 11,000 songs so that when completed, I'll be able to come up with crazy insane playlists after only a few moments of entering text into a couple of fields.

Say I'm about to throw a party, I'll make a playlist that only contains songs which contain the words hip hop, pop, dance, party, and upbeat. Or, say I'm really sad but don't want to be, I'll make a playlist that has songs that are uplifting and happy. Planning on a romatic evening? I'd make iTunes search for for all the songs that are either R&B or rock and that I've described as soft, slow, love, sweet, and touching. In all, I've got 25 different genres and about 60 of these adjectives. It's quite the undertaking, but hopefully it'll be something that I can do little by little everytime I listen to my music, so that after a couple of months, everything is perfect. I'll keep you updated on how things eventually turn out, but so far, I've tagged over 400 songs and my enthusiasm for the project is still going strong!