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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.

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.