SRHuston Dot Net

With a crash that kept happening in iTunes recently (since I’d upgraded to 7.0.x), I was getting annoyed. Got to the point where I could sometimes play one song, but never a second – as soon as it would try to load another song, *poof*. Turned out to be an issue with the Macbook Pro’s audio settings (bitrate was too much for iTunes to handle), but then the latest release also fixed the problem so I didn’t have to keep changing the bitrate on the sound card. But, before I discovered the correlation, I ended up wiping my entire library, again (first time was when the laptop crashed, and thanks to FileVault, I lost a bunch of stuff). So, since I was going to have to re-sync the iPod, I thought I should clean up the library. And I did.

Over the last week or so, I’d been taking any time I had available and cleaning up my iTunes library. Everything from adding year of release to a song, to putting it in a proper album (many were blank, which this newer version of iTunes will show as “Unknown Album” in many cases) and downloading the correct album artwork. Contrary to iTunes belief, “Queen’s Greatest Hits” is not by some woman named Queen Erykah or something stupid, and neither are any of my Zeppelin albums by “Dread Zeppelin”.

So, finally last night I finished the last one. All the songs have years attached to them, though there’s still a handful that aren’t attached to an album – mostly because they were released as singles back in the day, before songs would be released on an album first if at all. This gives me a few benefits – while browsing with “album art” turned on, there’s a picture for just about everything. When using the nice playlists that show a decade’s worth of music, it won’t show Led Zeppelin in the 90s simply because that’s when one of their box sets came out. And if I eventually get a newer iPod, it’ll show the little album artwork on the screen while it’s playing a song. So I’m ready for the future too :>

Why is this that bad? Well, when I was younger and started amassing a large collection of CDs, I realized that a pile next to the stereo wasn’t going to cut it for much longer. I started with a turnstile tower (which Stephanie now uses), then moved to a little three-drawer box and put them in sleeves, and finally onto an Odyssey DJ case. Now, the sleeves are great – I can hold 2-3 CDs in the space of one jewel case, so 200 CDs fit comfortably in the Odyssey where I’d have only got 50 or so otherwise. Now, in order to easily see what each CD is, there’s room for a tag on the top of the sleeve, so you can quickly thumb through the discs and find the one you need. So on each one, I wrote the artist (Lastname, Firstname if a person, or the band otherwise), the name of the album, and the year of release. And all my albums were in alphabetical order by artist, then chronological order by release… can you see where this is going?

So now you might understand why I’m chuckling at the fact that I’ve gone and done it again – especially in iTunes, where I can find a song by typing some bit into a search box, yet it’s still being organized just like it was that chest next to the stereo, or the DJ case sitting on the table next to the dual-deck player. *sigh*