Some people get freakishly OCD when it comes to their music players. A friend of mine has fastidiously downloaded album art from the internet for every single song on his 60 gig ipod.
Me? All songs must have a rating. Any song receiving a rating of 2 or 1 is immediately deleted from the ipod. Album integrity is not important to me. “Best Of” album names are not acceptable in the album title field. I must look up the album the song was originally from and enter it in manually. Blank album, artist, or song title fields are never an option. Even if I have to enter “untitled” or “unknown,” the field must be filled.
All the music must be sorted into folders by artist and titled by album, track, title. The only exception is compilations (soundtracks, famixes, what have you) which are sorted to folder by CD name then named by track number, band, song.
Everything has it’s genre as sorted by me (I have some of my own labels for things, though most just stay as labeled). If the genre is wrong it pisses me off since I make playlists by my genre. Unfortunately my player (Creative Zen), for some reason, often resets the genre when I add the music to it. So on my computer everything is fine, but my player I have to go searching for specific songs because they aren’t where I think they should be.
I’m in a long lasting battle to eradicate empty albums and correct my general id3 info. It’s been slow going but I’m slowly working through the collection. I haven’t begun rating songs, but it probably isn’t too far off.
Songs ripped from CDs must be redesignated, where necessary, to ensure alphabetical consistency. For instance, I relabel songs by “JS Bach,” Joh. Seb. Bach," “Bach, J.S.,” etc., all as “J.S. Bach.”
Hardly any song should be listed as “Alternative” in genre. 99% of the time, there’s a better descriptor than that.
If I find myself skipping ahead every time a particular song comes up in Shuffle, it becomes a ripe candidate for deletion.
This is probably my only rule. I’m pretty lax about everything else, mainly because my SO maintains the iTunes itself and he is anal at making sure all of the album names are in, etc. So at least all of my American songs have all the info.
My Indian songs are just thrown in there willy-nilly though.
Oh, well here’s one. Everything has to be in a playlist.
Geez, my music is in such disarray that I’m lucky if I know the name of the song playing. After years of copying directories and music from one place to another, all my id tags are screwed up. I so need to sit down and go through them and fix the ones I know…sigh
P.S. Umm…just a question…why don’t you use Itunes to sync the Ipod???
Slight hijack: for the organization junkies out there, i strongly recommend Foobar2000. Even if you don’t like it as your default player, its ability to edit tags and filenames en masse is a truly wonderful thing, and if you have any experience at all with scripting, you can work wonders with minimal effort.
As for me, i tend to lump everything into four major genres: rock, classical, jazz, and other. Beyond that, there are numerous subgenres: punk, baroque, bebop, etc. The subgenre is nice but not strictly necessary, while the genre is.
My file convention is: genre/artist/album/track number - song name. This all falls into the “music” folder of the “multimedia” folder of my drive. Oddly, this is the only part of my drive that’s remotely categorized.
Some time ago, i replaced the iPod firmware with Rockbox, which allows customization and better categorization, uses file formats that i prefer (namely flac and ogg), and uses a directory structure that’s completely visible on my computer.
Hmm…guess since I don’t use iTunes as my main player on my computer, and only use it for putting things on my ipod, I don’t really care that much if it syncs itself.
Almost everything has to have a genre and a year (even if the latter is a guess), because a lot of my smart playlists are built from that (plus I like to listen by genre sometimes). It also solves the problem of not wanting to hear everything in “shuffle songs” (like children’s songs or comedy, say) by creating automated shuffle-almost-everything playlists.
I will admit to making up weird album titles for groups of songs that are not from any particular album, like 50s pop hits or Western swing, say.
For a while I had an unhealthy fascination with the “play count” feature, but that’s subsided.
My big rule so far is “Try to find out what to do with it.”
It’s a Walkman that plays videos, one that didn’t even come with crappy speakers, relying exclusively on earphones.
That’s nice and all, but… so what?
I can’t use it when I’m driving (I gotta hear the traffic and other sounds). I can’t use it when I work (I gotta hear the employees). I can’t use it at home (I like to hear the family). I can’t use it while playing the guitar. I can’t use it when going out with friends.
I guess I can use it when I exercise, but do I need X-thousands of songs to choose from during a thrice-weekly 30-minute run?
So… what exactly is the purpose of this thing? My $300+/- birthday present is sitting on some chair in my office and I can’t figure out what the big deal is or why anybody would go ga-ga over a video player. Somebody want to explain the iPod to me?
That’s me. I hate having one band with multiple genres, because then I can’t find the songs I want when making a playlist. The only real exception I have to this is songs from a soundtrack, then they are labeled soundtrack (which is different from OST, for example The Lord of the Rings is OST, Mr and Mrs Smith is Soundtrack).
I’m surprisingly finicky about all my computer folders, but I have so many different folders of different things that if I wasn’t… I’d never be able to find anything.
Yes, but I don’t want to waste a bunch of money on accessories. If it’s so useless out of the box, they should add the accessories in it. Otherwise, they lose sales to people who say “so what’s the big deal and why do I have to shell out hundreds more to get it to work as well as my $60 walkman?”
And “changing tapes” isn’t exactly a problem of mine that needed a $300.
I agree with you on the accessories bit. But I don’t really see how that’s different than 99% of the things sold in our society. If they can make a buck off it, and if there’s demand for it, then of course they will sell every damn thing separately they can.
If they could get away with selling the wire separately to hook it up to your computer they would.
I bought as accessories: The Tape deck player, the car charger, and…an iFrogz case. But that was for fun. I love it particularly because it’s hard for me to find Indian tapes unless I drive to Edison or NYC. The iTunes selection isn’t the greatest in the world but it’s getting better all the time.
I recommend not using the earbuds that come with it anyway. I firmly believe things that stick in your ear are NOT GOOD. I like the ones that have little loops that hook over your years, and the thing I really like about these is I can leave one over my ear and hook one to my shirt in case I;m supposed to be listening to someone.
