Sort. Ing. Ob. Jects.

[pseydtonne]

I really like having an iPod. It brings me instant access to songs and albums I haven't listened to in years. It combines the benefits of MP3 files -- portability, single tracks easily played at random -- with the ability to play entire albums in series. On the way to work today, I played XTC's 1980 beauty The Black Sea without having to worry the changer in the trunk would screw me out of the first few tracks. I could also skip the couple tracks I don't care about. It did have a problem loading a track, but I backed up and it make the leap the second time. I'll assume any machine of this complexity in such a compact space (shit, the thing is more complex than my first 32-bit computer and has as big a hard drive as what was cutting edge three years ago).

Unfortunately, having an iPod means dealing with Apple's software. In this case, I'm talking about iTunes, a bureaucratic hunk that turns my giant stacks of loose tunes into a spreadsheet with half the entries missing. Why can't iTunes figure out ID3 tags automatically when it imports songs? This shouldn't be the trickiest thing.

Before certain Macophiliacs get wingnut about "how dare you trash talk the sacred blabitty bloo", save it. I was using Apple equipment when you were in diapers. They still have this problem of needing to reinvent the wheel and making the user fix problems and feel honored to do it. Hey, back in 1992 when System 7.0.1 could kick Windows 3.1's ass easily and do it with less, that was great. It wasn't until OS 10.1 that they could keep a minor app crash from crashing the computer and still get working networking at the same time (from 7.1 until 9.2 you had working networking; with OS X.1 you had a BSD variant but somehow had no TCP/IP stack worth booting). Apple is a company, just like any other major corporation. Expect issues. People have issues with my company, too. I'm not saying "burn Cupertino!" I'm just asking.

Those of you that don't geek may have no idea what an ID3 tag is. Let's say you play an MP3. It probably has a file name such as "01-Song_of_Joy.mp3". When you play it in Winamp, what you see on the screen is actually "Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Song of Joy". The computer isn't guessing that data: it's been slapped on the end of the file as a bunch of formatted information. The slab of appendix is the ID3 tag. Often you'll grab an MP3 (legally or not) and it won't have this tag (for example, you weren't online when you ripped the disc so the ripping software didn't add the song info). You may never have noticed because Winamp extrapolated enough from the file title to make a band name and song title.

I've been using Winamp since 1998. Back then I only had a few MP3s and what would now be considered an antiquated computer. Winamp was always able to play the tracks (well, at least once they came out with a version that could handle Variable Bit Rate rips, which happened later) and make its wuss attempt at shuffling them. It just worked; it wasn't dynamic. As I think about it, it's been the Model T of MP3 players -- you can mod it out as you see fit but it's really only there to play tunes. In turn, every PC owner can turn it on and get music.

iTunes is not content to play your tunes. It wants to be Tivo, figuring out your next move. It wants to be your home version of the Library at Alexandria. It wants to impress you about what you already have or sell you more stuff by those artists you like. It isn't smart enough to figure out a fake ID3 tag from a file name because I guess that's plebeian. Apple is only for the Sacred Few, after all -- people too busy creating to be bothered to learn how to monitor their resources.

I'm going through programs that can label songs without my doing them manually. Frnakly, I wanted to rant so badly but I've tossed most of it. It's just been annoying. Now that I've sorted a lot of the files (I still have about 1000 to go), the randomizer is pulling better. I don't know why, but it does. This is a reward for a fit of OCD.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Since *I* was using Macs when *you* were in diapers, let me just reiterate, hit http://www.ipodlounge.com/ and tool around for the applescripts to automagically generate ID3 info from complex filenames like 01-Song_of_Joy.mp3. Oh, wait, here it is: http://www.malcolmadams.com/itunes/scripts/scripts09.php?page=1#trackparser

I don't know why your machine isn't picking up the ID3 tags. It's worked fine on 90% of the windoze mp3s I've imported, and I don't know what separates those 10%. But it will pick up ID3 tags in general.

I really like how you take a missing feature and see the decline and fall of western civilization (A Good ID3a) in it.

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

it will pick up ID3 tags in general

no no - i could be mistaken, but i believe the issue is that pseydtonne has a raft of files that are not actually tagged at all (but are named in a regular and sensible fashion), and would have preferred it if iTunes had generated its own "best guess" tags while importing.

am i right?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

For that need, see the linked-to applescripts above. But given his example I was thinking not:

"01-Song_of_Joy.mp3" -> "Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Song of Joy"

I don't see the Nick Cave part in the filename....so I was thinking it was hiding in the ID3 tag, or in the subdirectory the file is in. (For the latter case, a clever shell script will prepend the dir name to the file name, and then you can suck it in with the Applescript...)

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

I apologize if I haven't made that clear, meta. I have thousands of MP3s with no ID3 tags. I do not feel haka's need to perform pennance by entering these titles because I already have enough unnecessary guilt that I'm trying to overcome. I don't need an electronic hairshirt.

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

another, more featureful tool is Media Rage, which has, among many other features, the ability to generate ID3 tags based on filename regexp. i'm pretty sure you get get at least a time-limited demo without paying for it.

and for a different approach to the problem, you might try MusicBrainz, which is more for when you've got a song and have no idea whatsoever what it is.

i am sorry, however, that this has given you so much grief; personally, i kinda see the current iTunes state of affairs as my long-awaited remuneration for painstakingly tagging all my mp3s by hand back in college when NOBODY tagged anything.

-steve

p.s. how dare you trash talk the sacred blabitty bloo!

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

lightfixer had a similar answer (same company). However, all of their stuff requires being on my Mac. My Mac doesn't have enough room for my MP3s and I loathe the idea of using the slower processor to parse files over an NTFS share. I need a Windows solution.

This is why I'm reading up on regex, too.

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

Ok, here's my question -- are you hooked up to the Internet while you're importing songs? Because when I'm importing a CD, it goes online and queries the IMDB music database (or whatever) and I get all the song info just fine. If I'm not online, however, everything goes to hell and it just imports the songs as "song 1, song 2, song 3" which is fuckass annoying.

M

I am, but...

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

I'm always online. It's kinda part of my job, if you haven't guessed. I come home and use my company's perks all night.

However, I didn't make most of my MP3s myself. They're, ummm... inherited. Yeah. That's it. From gramma.

I have scored several gigabytes of MP3s from computers I've fixed. Their owners were not necessarily online themselves.

I've only started ripping my own material recently. I realize no one owns a lot of the albums I have even if they weren't obscure when I got them. Many of these objects I'm ripping are on vinyl, so no CDDB query would help.

Re: I am, but...

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

Aaaah. I "gotcha". I "understand." You don't have to "spell it out" for me because I'm "down".

;-)

M

Re: I am, but...

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

Oh wow! You're online right now! This is cool.

-back to ripping some Nusrat

Re: I am, but...

[mkhobson.livejournal.com]

I'm playing in a truly demonic hold 'em tournament and trying to think up ideas for a SF story about a space elevator 'cause there's this contest thingy.

M

[fuzzplugjones.livejournal.com]

My MP3 collection started out as every song from a particular artist in a directory or on a CD. A .m3u or .pls playlist file named for the album would tell Winamp what to play, and provided me an easy way to start the album (being a musician I'm big on the concept of an album, even when it's not a "concept album" per se). As the original portable MP3 players began to come out in 1999 (the portable CD players that could read an ISO9660 filesystem), they only sorted files one way: first alphabetically by directory, then alphabetically by the filename. Try as I might, I couldn't find any players that would read or interpret playlist files (yes, it's an issue of the player not having any memory, but seeing as most playlist files are under 1024 bytes, how hard - or expensive - could it have been to put 1k - or even 2k or 4k or 16k - of RAM in the thing and load the goddamned playlist?).

Thus I set about renaming all of my MP3s. Luckily I got into this at the time when I was still ripping quite a bit, so a lot of it got done automatically. Now, the system that seems to work both for portable players and intuitively in Windows Explorer or what-have-you, is this: A folder with the artist or band name. In that, a folder for each album in the following format: "(xxxx) Album Name" where "xxxx" is the four-digit release year. (The only time this fails is in the rare case of two albums in the same year by the same artist, in which case I sheepishly do, like, 2003-1 and 2003-2. So far I think it's really only happened when a live album and a studio album by Rush were both released in 1981.) Then, in each of those directories, the MP3s, named for the song, but with a two-digit track number (always a two-digit; otherwise everything will sort like: 1, 10, 11, 2, 20, 21, 22, and so on).

This has been a pretty foolproof system. I have an Aiwa in-dash CD/MP3 player in my car, and this system works perfectly. I would like my next major consumer electronics purchase to be a hard-disk-based media player, and I sort of always wanted an iPod, but luckily for me (and unluckily for pseyd), I have now seen how they handle media.

Saw it first-hand, too. Before depearting on a trip to NYC last month with pseyd, I ignorantly connected the iPod via USB to my Windows laptop. Now, I'm a Winamp kinda guy. None of this MusicMatch Jukebox crap, I even try to not use Windows Media Player for anything but streaming Windows Media, and certainly no iTunes. The iPod showed up as a standard USB hard drive, so off I went, copying almost a gig of tunes to the thing.

We get in the car, and pseyd turns on the damned thing and the files are NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. Come on, Apple! Your users whine and complain that Microsoft implemented a smarmy little animated paperclip into Office, and I can't put something on an iPod without your little software that "holds my hand" while I "check out" the music to the iPod and "check it back in" when I'm done? Come on.

Oh, and I have another question. How many Air America affiliates do we need before portable MP3 players come with an FM ***and*** and AM tuner? So I like to listen to talk radio sometimes, sue me (no flames please, you aren't going to convert me). And I imagine there are enough "sports-talk" AM stations that the demand is great enough even if Apple or the other MP3 player manufacturers wished all Republicans would just explode. Pseyd says perhaps the interference is too great from the other internal components; well turn them off! I have an Aiwa walkman from like 1987 that has a digital frequency readout and pushbuttons on the front, and it picks up AM radio swimmingly. I do not, however, want to carry around a different portable audio device for every little thing I might want to hear.

So... yeah... comments and stuff...