Here are some suggestions for getting your music ready.
Mostly, these are things to do with your music files before you dump them into iTunes. Good for times when you have to, say, format your hard drive and reinstall everything. Or when you stumble upon that CD of MP3′s that fell between the cracks. Or when you download the 2008 SXSW torrent of free and legal music, and flinch at the prospect of blindly adding 763 songs to your iTunes library.
1. Purge. Holy Toledo, people are pack rats when it comes to music. People are slow to get rid of music that they’ve added to their machines. Purge. Get rid of stuff. Are you out of your Judas Priest phase already? Flat out delete the files, especially if you still have the original CD’s somewhere handy. If not, copy the stuff to a CD or DVD and stash it away for you kids. If you really don’t want to listen to it regularly, delete it. Doing this means you looking through your files — I can’t offer any tips or tricks other than that. If you delete the file off your hard drive and it’s loaded into iTunes, it won’t disappear from iTunes — its ghost will live on there (though not play, obviously) untily ou hunt it down and kill it, too.
2. Delete duplicates. I can help you with this. After you’ve purged stuff out, fire up something like WinMerge (or even better, WinMerge Portable) and point it to where your music is. It’ll run through the files and come back to you with possible duplicates, letting you decide what to do from there. Now, I understand — there are certain moral conundrums you’ll face — do you delete the album version or the same thing that’s on the Greatest Hits album, or keep them both? Dunno — that’s up to you. But take the time to do a quick search for duplicates, and consciously decide that goes and what stays. But you might not really want four copies of How Soon Is Now? in your music collection, even though it is a great brilliant song.
3. Check the tags data. Since so much of what we’re going to do with the Smart Playlists depends of each songs having data associated with it, having the tags filled in is going to be critical. The MP3 format has some extra space built in, so the file knows it’s own name, the name of the band and album and stuff like that — data that does with it no matter what program you use to play the file. If you’re ripping the music from an original CD into iTunes, well, iTunes does all that for you automatically (except when you’re trying to load that rare export version of something). Take, for example, my stashes of REM — CD’s that I ripped to MP3 format back in something like 1998, before much of my CD collection went into storage. They lack everything. Enter Musicbrainz. Using any one of a number of programs that can tap into the Musicbrainz database, you can automate making a pass through your MP3 files to fill in the missing data. Sure, you might not agree that they call the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Alternative” and not “Pop” — change it, don’t change it, it’s up to you. But this is the best and easiest way to fill in the gaps for artist name, album, even year the album was recorded (which we’ll use later on).
4. Check the recording levels. These days, programs that convert CD’s to MP3 files are pretty good enough checking the recording levels of the original materials, and adjusting them to a nice, even level. But life isn’t perfect. Take the time to fire up a program like MP3Gain (Mac version here)and point it at your music files. It’ll go through and normalize the files (well, it’s a bit more complicated than that), that is, adjust their recording levels — nothing too loud, nothing too quiet.
5. Purge again. Seriously, give thought to making a second pass through your music to see what you really don’t need. Like Never Gonna Give You Up and Winds of Change. Does your mother know that you listen to that stuff? Please tell me it was a gag gift….
6. Set up iTunes. Under Edit, go to Preferences. Click on Advanced. Yes, Keep iTunes Music Folder Organized. Yes, Copy Music to iTunes Music Folder. Click on Import. Select MP3. Select Higher Quality 192 kbps. Automatically retrieve CD stuff from the internet, or whatever it’s called. Poof. Done.
7. Rate stuff (more is better). OK, you’ve cleaned things up. Go ahead and add it into iTunes — either from the Import feature in the File section, or just drag and drop it into the main Music section of the library (it’ll copy into place automatically). See the column called Rating? Yeah, start filling those in. It’s all arbitrary. Later on, you’ll see that:
- songs rated with one star don’t show up in my iPod;
- generally speaking, unrated = not played, which sort of begs the question of why it would be in my music library;
- new songs that are unrated will show up on my iPod for a while, but will disappear if they remain unrated;
- songs rated 5 stars are songs I can hear every day (it won’t happen, but they are truly the great ones).
April 7th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
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