Recombinant Music

Because Clear Channel seemingly owns all of the local radio stations, there is little worthwhile programming on the radio and my music collection becomes very important on a daily basis. I have taken to connecting my iPod to my stereo at home. Using the iPod this way I have realized the CD player has become anachronistic, like my turntable and cassette deck. The reason is obvious: a CD only holds about 1 hour of music, while my 5GB iPod holds over 60 hours.

I remember listening to vinyl records and dealing with the annoyance of having to turn the record over after about half an hour. On a multi-record album like The Clash's Sandinista! (3 records) it was quite a hassle to listen to the whole thing. If I chose to stack the records on the spindle I could let the next one drop automatically, but that didn't seem good for the records and the songs couldn't be heard in the recorded order. I'd end up listening to sides 1, 3, 5 and then 2, 4, 6. While not an issue for an album like Sandinista!, it certainly would be an issue for other albums, such as any classical music.

With the advent of CDs most of these problems seemed to have been solved. Now my Sandinista! album is on only two CDs instead of three LPs. As I've been ripping my CDs to mp3s for my iPod, iTunes would show Sandinista! (Disc One) and Sandinista! (Disc Two). This seemed less than ideal to me, so I thought I'd tinker with the mp3 tags in iTunes and see what happened. I figured if the music is stored on media that effectively is unlimited in size (relative to typical album lengths) I should be able to see Sandinista! as a single album. And I can (see previous entry).

My new view of music leads me to see CDs as nothing more than permanent, high-quality archives of music. The music I truly value is the music in file formats that I can freely move around, because that is what I listen to on a daily basis. When I've finished ripping all of my CDs, those discs will be stored away and not touched again unless I need to re-rip. And of course any new (or used) CDs I buy will immediately be ripped to this new useful format. Anything that can't be ripped will be returned and I will just listen to older stuff.

kherr @ 16:12 CDT | link | music

iTunes and my tunes

I have iTunes configured to include the track number in the file name, because I like to see the songs in my file browser in the order they are on the album. When I looked at the files from The Clash's Sandinista!, I discovered that iTunes also includes the disc number on multi-disc CDs. So, as an example, the fifth song on disc two would be saved (relative to my iTunes music folder) as "The Clash/Sandinista! (Disc Two)/2-05 Washington Bullets.mp3".

iTunes seemed smart enough to me that I should be able to combine the two-disc album into a single album. I turned on browsing in my iTunes library and selected Sandinista! (Disc One). I then opened the Get Info window and changed the album name to Sandinista!. Looking back in the Finder I saw that iTunes renamed the folder as I expected.

Now for the big test. I selected Sandinista! (Disc Two) and again changed the album name to Sandinista!. iTunes moved all of the songs from the second disc into the correct folder, preserving the original files. Sweet, this is exactly how it should be. You have to give Apple a lot of credit for adding little features like this. They provide an extremely satisfying user experience with these small features that aren't exactly bragging points from a marketing standpoint. It feels like they care about what they're doing, which doesn't happen enough in the marketplace these days.

kherr @ 13:53 CDT | link | music