Thursday, December 09, 2004

MP3s, iPods, convenience...

Man, organising an MP3 collection can take it out of you. I've been ripping my CDs for so long now I've nearly made it through the entire collection (and my wife's as well).

Trouble is, I wasn't organising them as I went along. With the arrival of the iPod in August, I started trying to organise them a bit, and used MP3Tag ( a great piece of software ) to tidy up tags mangled by the grabber I'm using (the track numbers come out like 1/10 - 2/10 - etc and that toally confuses the ipod).

But it's a huge task... and it's tiring... and freedb's lag is huge today... and I've lost my voice, pretty much :)

All this lovely gadgetry to listen to music, and you spend more of your precious time slaving away to organise Gbs of files so you can remember what the hell you've got to listen to! I reckon John Peel had it better. He was (predictably) a huge vinyl fan, with hundreds of thousands of records in his collection, all housed in purpose built storage where he lived (he did his Radio 1 shows by ISDN). If the spine of the record case has a title on it, you can file it physically somehow: with MP3, the damn albums are buried under directories.

I wonder if there's an indexing system for MP3s you can type in a preference of style to, then have it suggest stuff in your collection to match your mood... of course, this would have to run on a PC at the moment.

I'm sure there's a shitload of stuff I just haven't listened to yet...

Bass stuff?
I've listed myself on a couple of "musicians available" websites, and I'm trying to find other ones. I guess the local freeads paper should really be my next stop.

Maybe I should start hunting in london again. That recording session on Friday seems like a bright spot behind me when I look back, but the tunnel ahead looks very dark. You've got to get out there...

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