How i learned to stop being scared and embraced iTunes :: Part 1
I confess, I’m a bit anal about my digital music collection, but who isn’t. We all have our little ways of keeping our music collection tidy and the way we want it. The obsessive-compulsiveness in us comes out when it involves collections of any kind for some reason. From the folders we keep them in to the way we name the files. Here’s a little back story.
When I was younger I collected mp3s like most people, single songs I liked with no such things as ID3 tags and everything just thrown into one folder using winamp 2.0 to play everything. Ahh the good old days when it took an hour to download one 5 megabyte song. Then came Napster and really changed the landscape of digital music. Without a doubt, Napster has been the biggest thing to hit the web since its inception. Apple’s success with the iPod and ITMS owe everything to Napster. Napster hit at about the same time @Home starting to hit big, Winamp 2 was out and programs to rip your own CDs were relatively available now. This is around the time I started looking at keeping full albums in my collection along with singles. It was easy to stick in one of my CDs, have it be looked up automatically using CDDB and have everything ripped, renamed and tagged for you. After Napster was taken offline, I turned to my good old friend IRC for my music now. The difference with IRC was it was hard to find individual songs, full albums were served. So when looking for a new song i wanted, I would have to download the full album. This is when i really started to eliminate single songs for full albums and actually building a �collection�. Between downloading full albums online and ripping my own I had a sizable, for the time, collection. Between 2001 and 2003 I had just keep my music in My Music folder using Artist – Album folder structure and having the tracks named Track Number (Artist) – Song.mp3 and this worked great for me. I could find the Artist and/or album i wanted fast and if i wanted to burn an MP3 CD for my, cutting edge at the time, Awia MP3 in-dash CD head unit in my car, it was as easy as dragging the folders into Adaptec EZ CD Creator 4.0 and boom, i would have a MP3 CD ready for my car in about 30mins. Long live 4x burners.
Enter 2003 and Apple announces iTunes for Windows. Being the geek I am, it was download and installed within minutes of me finding out. First thing I do is import my music. Unlike today, iTunes didn’t ask if i wanted it to rearrange my music, something I had been fighting with Windows Media Player at the time to not do. After being a little pissed off it just did that, I went to delete the songs out of the library so I could start over. Little did I know at the time, deleting from the library also deleted from disk. By the time I realized what was happening and hit the reset button as fast as i could, the damage had been done. 70% of my music collection was gone. 4 years of building it to all be wiped out in a matter of seconds. I’m pretty sure I shed a single tear at that exact moment.
With 70% of my music collection gone and the remaining 30% renamed and moved around, it was time for a fresh start in my mind. But I didn’t want to start from scratch, thats a lot of work. Lucky for me, one of my friends has very similar tastes as me and we owned much of the same stuff. So with his library and what was left with mine i started my work of rebuilding. This started with the purchase of Tag&Rename for Windows, which i highly recommend. One of a select few programs i miss from Windows. After a few weeks of hardcore renaming, tagging and adding album art i was in a good position again. At the time i was using Windows Media Center in my living room so there for had to use Windows Media Player’s library features which i have come to hate. WMP uses Album Artist and ignores the Artist tag. I finally got feed up with seeing Unknown Artist in Media Center so broke down and started using WMP’s builtin lookup. Surprising it did what it was suppose to and only add missing information. And this is the way it stayed up until November of 2005.
