How i learned to stop being scared and embraced iTunes :: Part 2

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’m a huge fan of Last.fm / Audioscrobbler project. I’ve been a member since April 2005 when i was introduced to it when Xbox Media Center added support for it. The guys over at Last.fm use and promote the usage of Musicbrainz to keep all your files tagged for accurate information. I remember trying it out when i first started using Last.fm and frankly i hated it. User Interface was lacking, program had some shitty documentation and was not intuitive at all. So as fast as it was install it was uninstalled. Tag&Rename did everything i could ever want, no reason to switch. Fast forward to November 2005 when Picard 0.5 was released and the article was on digg. I decided to try it out and it was far more user friendly than the previous Musicbrainz Tagger. I started tagging some of my new music that still needed to be tagged and it worked like a charm. The interface was clunky but what do you expect for a 0.5 version. I slowly started to get addicted to tagging my files using picard, what started as a new program to mess with had become a project. After a week of 8 hour days each, i had gone through my entire music collection and it felt good to finally have everything tagged correctly. I was actually surprised how much stuff was mistagged or missing. I had setup Picard to rename my files to a standard template so everything was uniform. So the next step was to delete all my cover art which i had label folder.jpg so it would show up in WMP/MCE and in XBMC. I was going to embed the cover art into the tags instead. Since Musicbrainz doesn’t do cover art it was back to trustly ol’ Tag&Rename. Album by album I went and added cover art into the files tag. When all the smoke cleared, i had rid my digital music collection of incomplete albums, mistagged songs, renamed everything as one standard template and added cover art to each files tag. When i would add new music it would now run through Musicbrainz before anything else. This is when Picard posed a problem. Everytime you opened it, it would load 700+ cds from the server. It would take 15-20mins to load the program. So i want back to Musicbrainz Tagger and set it up the same way. All i had to do now was drag and drop any new files into tagger and they would be tagged, renamed and moved to the correct folder. All i had to do was just download and embed the cover art using Tag&Rename. Life was good.

Until I made the switch from Windows to Apple a month ago.

The Switch
Tag&Rename was gone, Winamp was gone, Musicbrainz Tagger and Picard werent available for Mac OS X. My perfect system was now unavailable to me. Some changes would have to be made. Obviously iTunes was my music player of choice, i had been using it on and off in Windows for 3 years. First thing I did was turn off �Keep iTunes Music folder organized� and �Copy files to iTunes Music folder� when adding to library� and imported my files. One small annoyance i have is that when playing a music file in finder, it copies and adds itself to the iTunes library. I got around this by setting Quicktime to be the default player for Mp3 files. This way i can sample mp3 files without adding it to the library. I now needed a tagger and batch renamer. IEatBrainz is the recommended client for Musicbrainz on Mac OS X. IEatBrainz is a totally different animal as Picard and Tagger were. Its integration with iTunes was nice but that meant i had to add possible incorrectly tagged files into my library first. IEatBrainz doesn’t rename files like Tagger/Picard did either. For this i turned to Media Rage. My process now was the following:

1. Open new music folder and delete anything not related to the music files
2. Use Media Rage to rename the files to the same template i had used before.
3. Rename the folder to Artist - Album
4. Move folder to Music folder
5. Import new folder into iTunes
6. Run IEatBrainz on the new files
7. Find the Cover Art using iTunes Cover Art Widget and add it
8. Remove the genre if any*

* I don’t use genre’s as they are too hard deal with, so i ignore them all together
While this worked it was kinda a lot of work.

Problems
I own an iPod Shuffle and I never really had the need for a full featured iPod but the Shuffle was perfect for file transfer and the gym. I would use Autofill before i went to the gym. With a 10,000+ song library and only a 1G Shuffle i would get a lot of stuff i really didn’t want to listen too while working out. While my friend and me have similar tastes, they weren’t the same, so I had some stuff i would never listen to on my own but always keep it for the sake of having the biggest library i could. So I started weeding out albums i would never listen to but i would have to delete it out of the iTunes library first then find it on the hard drive and delete it there. Annoying at best.

I had starting using Playlists and more importantly Smart Playlists to my advantage at this time too. This really was my first step to seeing the true power and ease of iTunes. I started rating music, making Smart Playlists then autofilling my Shuffle from that and I finally got to listen to stuff i wanted instead of skipping 4 or 5 songs songs just to hear one song i liked.

There was only one small thing to do now. Find the courage to turn on “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” and “Copy files to iTunes Music folder”. After what happened back in 2003 it was a bitter pill to swallow but 2006 is a near of change for me so i made a backup, duh, and checked the two boxes. Then i took a deep breathe and hit Consolidate Library.

It was done and know what, I haven’t looked back. My process now is:

1) Drag files into iTunes (they rename themselves and put them in the correct folders)
2) Open IEatBrainz and run it against Recently Added
3) Use Export Artwork to find and add album art automatically
4) Use iTunes tagger to remove genre if needed

Besides the easy of use now, i can delete in one place now and backup is a breeze now. Just save the iTunes folder and all my music, playlists, rating and playcounts are saved. I can even restore to a Windows machine running iTunes without a hiccup too. I’m also digging Bonjour sharing. Its nice to open up my laptop and start iTunes and have my entire collection ready to listen too or turn on XBMC and have access to all my playlists.

I can finally say I’m happy iTunes.