After getting a 500gb hard drive for my new PC, I decided it was time to move my music collection from hundreds of CD-Rs to a more permanent medium. One advantage my former method had was if one disc failed, I only lost a couple albums. However, with a hard drive, a failure means a massive loss that may crush my very soul. I cannot afford a RAID right now. The migration itself has ended up being arduous, pure acid hell.

The real problem is that in my yarring career, I had different standards for storing media, whether it be in the file naming schemes, ID3V1/2 tags, or the capitalization of song titles. So for thousands of albums I scoured over each individual track, ensuring the tags, filename, and directory structure were all correct. I also made sure to remove any photos in the file system or embedded in MP3s themselves. I’m hear for the music, not to see some low-res image on my screen when a song plays. This is done all done through Tag&Rename.

For music playback, I use Winamp with the AlbumList plug-in installed, having it set to sort folders by “path and filename”. I made sure to disable auto-scan on Winamp’s startup because that check is taxing the hard drive. Which brings up how I hate Soulseek’s auto-scan on startup to build its file sharing database, but it has no ability to disable, unless you remove the share altogether. I digress. For sorting my folders out, in the root music folder, I have set out genres with artists inside each that I want grouped together. For instance, a “Canadian Rock” folder contains “I Mother Earth” and “The Tea Party”. This is sensible. Each group has its own folder, with compilations and soundtracks going under a “Various Artists” folder. Each album has a folder within the artist directory, sorted by year. So I have “i mother earth – 1993 – dig” and “i mother earth – 1996 – scenery and fish” to make sure the AlbumList plug-in will have the releases sorted ascending.

So with this plug-in, you can perform the same actions as the usual playlist, such as pressing F3 to search all albums, highlighting a release, and pressing enter to queue in the playlist. Make sure to check “Enqueue when double-clicking or pressing ENTER” under the Option tab.

Why do I go through all this effort for ease in music access? Because I spend too much time on my computer… and iTunes is a bloated piece of shite. I like the fact my minimal installation of Winamp v5.33 is only using 38mb. Just because present PCs having more RAM, it doesn’t mean one should code sloppily and get their feature creep on.

Now for a musical tally. Number of songs: 41,920. Size in gigabytes: 269. Number of releases: 4,109. Just to think, this leaves out the physical CDs I own, which are back in Nova Scotia, and I also left out a couple dozen albums that I didn’t think were worth copying to my PC. I really don’t understand my post-industrial/noise fascination earlier this decade. I am also aware of people that have more than a terabyte of music available over a network. I thought I was mental.

Sidenote: Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3′s dictionary function didn’t recognize “terabyte” as a word, instead suggesting megabyte. Thanks.

So, how about that Tool Time Conundrum?

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