AKA “we’re going to need a bigger harddrive”
AKA “why I just deleted my entire iTunes library”
With the stroke of one key, I deleted over 10,000 songs this weekend. I was tired. Tired of listening to a random playlist and going an hour without hearing a song I really liked. Tired of missing ID tags like artist names, track numbers, proper album release dates… Tired of all this music I have no connection with.
Then, I pulled all of my old CDs out of storage.
Nine Inch Nail’s The Downward Spiral. Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes. Roger Waters’ Amused to Death. Ahhh… now these were albums. These were songs I had a connection with. I had the lyrics booklets. I had the various inserts and limited edition slip cases. I had 1,000 finger print smudges on each disc from repeated playing and traveling.
The music coming out of the speakers was the same as it was yesterday, but the listening experience had changed.
I began building towers of CDs on my office floor. One stack for albums I couldn’t wait to reimport. Another stack for albums I wanted, but could put off importing, and others still that had a few good tracks, but also a few bad ones.
I began the process of rebuilding my iTunes music library from scratch. I filled in every ID tag before importing. I corrected every song title variation that bugged me, and properly labeled all special editions, imports, bonus tracks, reissues and featured artists.
I even used the vastly overlooked “sort album” ID tag feature to input the year the album was originally released. Now, when I browse my music library, each album is listed first by the artist, and then in the order it was released, NOT alphabetical order. A small detail, but a really important one when listening to more than random singles.
For instance, this glorious collection of Tori Amos CD singles (US and UK imports)…
…were a mess in my old iTunes. Now, they are presented in the actual order of release, not alphabetic order:
…ah! So much better!
I also imported every track utilizing the Apple Lossless codec (ALAC). This is a little technical but, basically, when you rip CDs to mp3, you are throwing away about half of the audio signal information. So you know those horribly pixelated jpgs you sometimes see online, or the YouTube videos that were processed before 2009 where the edges are just kinda blurry on everything – yeah, that’s what you’re doing to your music when you use mp3 or other lossy compressions. Apple Lossless does just what its name says, it imports your CDs with zero loss of the original audio signal. The files are bigger, but so is the sound. =)
I then spent hours on Google Images, tracking down accurate album art for each title. So this Smashing Pumpkins CD singles box set…
…actually has accurate album cover art:
Now my new music library is clean, and organized, and only filled with the good stuff. No more “Track 01”s no more “alexday_covers_ladygagaomglol.mp3”, just full, (personally) important albums that I can listen to without skipping or randomizing. And ones that I can pull the lyric booklets out for, and sing along (out of tune) to every word.
I particularly enjoyed digging in to my Pink Floyd mini LP box set again…
Which ended up in all its lossless digital glory as…
From here on out, if I want an album enough to spend money on it, I will buy the physical package. I know, first hand, how hard artists (and some good labels) work on the physical packaging of their releases, and I miss holding a piece of each artist in my hand as I listen to them. I will utilize the free streaming players that so many artist use, from Alex Day to… myself, on their websites to listen to the albums before making a purchasing decision. And my iTunes will again be relevant to my musical interests.
It’s been a very relaxing, enjoyable (looong) weekend. =)
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Just out of interest, how many songs have remained?
Over the weekend I was able to reimport and catalog about 1,400 tracks. I still have a lot of work to do, but I started with the albums that were most important to me.
1400 in a weekend with full and proper cataloguing is quite impressive, congrats!
I can’t really do anything like this. Far too much of my music has been bought off of iTunes or Amazon MP3- although for the last year or so I’ve been trying to buy a physical copy when I can, I still have a lot of music I wouldn’t be able to retrieve if I erased my entire library. :3
While I think this is a great thing for you personally to do, it’s a bit more ambitious than I think I’ll ever take on.We come from a generation where music is supposed to be here NOW and for the cheapest price possible, not when I find time to go to the store or when the mail lady gets around to delivering it. We are a society of immediate satisfaction, which is unfortunate for a lot of artists. You and I know first hand how much an artist makes off of a physical vs iTunes or other digital means. And nowadays people don’t seem to care about that kind of stuff like you do, which I don’t think encourages the artists to put more care into packaging like they used to, which makes the customer want to buy it less and on and on into a very unfortunate cycle.
That said, I think it’s great that you’re finding that connection with the physical albums again. It’s certainly a dying art, and one more person appreciating the effort put into those things is a greater good. =)
Fantastic! That is quite a big thing to undertake and not one I’d ever do, I think, but: admirable! Whenever I import/copy things into itunes, I make sure all the ID3 info is right…at LEAST (obviously) track titles, artist, album, track number, and year. I try to make sure they always have album art but sometimes I’m in a rush and don’t have the time! But every so often I spend a half hour or whatever googling and adding things.
I used to rip all my cds to apple lossless, but my external hard drive is getting full (have like 11.5k songs total), so regrettably I’m just doing 320kbps mp3s now. Blah.
I don’t use shuffle very often, I like listening to full albums/sequential stuff so at least 80% of the time that is what I do, otherwise it’s playlists I’ve made or itunes genius for if I’m in the mood for a specific type of music/sound. Which it is pretty impressively good at delivering! Normally.
Also I just got my first functional, not-fisher-price turntable, so I’ve been listening to a lot of stuff on that (for a year or so whenever I buy physical music, I buy vinyl (if it’s possible) cause they usually come with a download code anyway, and they are so gorgeous as objects. I mean I like liner notes a lot lot too and it’s sad when I miss out on those (also when albums do not have them at all!) but yes.
I got a data dvd of Math the Band’s complete discography a couple months ago as a kickstarter reward for helping fund their new album and imported it all into itunes and NONE OF IT IS TAGGED RIGHT OR AT ALL and oh god alan i honestly cried a little bit about it. ~400 songs. It took so long to fix it and i gave up halfway through. it is so distressing that i haven’t listened to them in a while because i don’t want to see or think about the mess haha.
parenthesis fail…apologies
I would love to do this, if only to have music on my computer that I actually want to listen to (I have 16K songs and that’s just silly). I used to listen to music while reading the lyrics, and I miss that. I just might go through and do the same thing with my library :)
These days the only music I acquire is from DFTBA, or shows that I go to. I dislike iTunes and if I want an album badly enough that I would download it, I’ll just buy it – and then I can listen to it in my car too.
Oh goodness Alan, I feel like you and I could geek out over music organization for a while.
My own iTunes library has been through many reincarnations and reorganizations. I’ve restarted from scratch a few times (unfortunately not by choice), which has certainly built my appreciation for having a physical CD to fall back on. I’m also terribly anal about song info and tags. I’ve gone through many weekends similar to yours going through my entire library, ensuring everything is cataloged correctly. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time creating my own genre tags and groupings so that my music is sorted in a way that makes sense to ME. It’s certainly a long, painstaking process, but once the system is in place it’s so simple to organize new music as soon as you import it. It’s worth it, I promise!
As I mentioned on twitter, I’m finding myself turning to digital downloads more often, which worries me a bit. I really do love my physical CD collection. I’ve always found my most intense music listening occurs with CDs on repeat in my car for weeks at a time. (Though this worries me too – all of those CD rotations can’t be scrobbled and included in my last.fm stats!) Downloading music is just too easy and fast. I find I tend to go through periods of downloading dozens of albums at a time, but then I never really go back and listen to those albums properly. Easily obtained, easily forgotten. I’ve been trying to force myself onto a music diet recently… to really chew through and properly taste each album before I move onto the next bite. ;)
I’m curious – how do you feel about different methods of listening to music? Album by album? By artist? By genre? Chronologically? On shuffle mode? In carefully crafted mixes? I find I’m constantly thinking about how the way I choose to consume music changes my relationship with that music.
I’m crazy about last.fm stats too. I use this http://universalscrobbler.invitationstation.org/ for car music/record playings. So helpful. (the musicbrainz option is the most useful, normally)
I wish itunes let you sort things more precisely. album by artist by year is nice, but for example I have 14 releases from They Might Be Giants from 2001, and it can only put them alphabetically within that. Yuck!
(Thanks, a lot, for universalscrobbler. Should be really useful. :) )
Oh, I can help with that Valerie… let’s say you have 6 releases all from 2010, label them in the “sort album” as “2010a”, “2010b”, “2010c”, etc. Then the releases will be organized in order (this was important to figure out for the Tori Amos CD singles).
ooooh thanks!
Do you think its possible that you like this set up now but in a few years youll be heavily used to it that it becomes samey again, or you stop wanting to do it
Very cool, Alan :) I did the same thing recently, but with a different outcome – I switched to Spotify Premium so I have access to whatever music I want when I want it. Means I get to enjoy all the music I always loved again, getting rid of the fluff stuff, but without any of the worries of space of disorganisation (me and my minimalism).
TuneUp is a companion app to iTunes which is able to scan the first few seconds of a track, compare it to the Gracenote catalog in order to identify it, then fills in your missing data automatically and it grabs album art as well. For serious music fans (that use iTunes), it could be a must-have application. TuneUp provides the functionality (for a fee) what I believe should have been there by default in iTunes.