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The Music and Me

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Daydream:
They released High Fidelity on Blu-ray. That's one of the movies I go to get inspired. About life. Or maybe it's that script's quality that makes you feel like you can quote half the lines in the movie. If not more.

However today is about something else. I got stuck to "I'm afraid I'll go berserk, throw the "Country Artists Male A-K" rack out onto the streets, go off to work in a Virgin Megastore and never come back".
That's kind of like what I feel right about now, about the music around me. Plus you can't find a Virgin Megastore anymore unless you go to France or something.

I have some 17000 tracks. Probably not big by any stretch of imagination, but enough to play for some 50 days non-stop.

I can't find the music I like.

It's in there somewhere, I know it; I stumble upon it every now and then, by chance: "Whoa, great track, haven't listen to it in ages". Wait. Why didn't I listen to it in ages?

Because organizing all this is insane. Don't agree? Let's see.

I guess I'm supposed to rate my music. Well, here goes the first problem. How should I rate my music? Listen again to my 17000 tracks and rate them one by one? I'd rather learn Japanese. Learn to write Japanese. So in my case it all resumes to aggressive bulk tagging "I know these songs are good/not good/approximately good/3 fries from a happy meal good". I don't know what to do with the concert versions and the remix versions and I don't know what other crazy versions. They're there cause they were on the CDs/Maxis/downloads, but I don't wanna listen to them when filtering by rating, but to the original tracks. There's a forever waiting list to be tagged. Thinking again to take the entire music collection and throwing it in the street.

So I didn't get to solve that problem when I'm faced with the next one. What scale should I use. Well MC has a 5 star scale. Some users wanted more, a 1 to 10 scale, and fractional star rating. When it comes to the real daily usage I don't give a flying monkey even on a 5 star scale. In my mind there are only 3 categories. Trash, never to listen to again (that would equate to 1 & 2 stars). Middle of the road stuff, I don't plan to throw it away, maybe because of some special occasion I'll like one of these tracks. And stuff that I do want to listen to at all times (4 and 5 stars; the difference between 4 and 5 is totally abracadabra, "it's something that I really like and it was/is a worldwide hit" as opposed to something that I just really like and it's just me).

Ok so I double fail when it comes to ratings. I can't do it in a feasible, practical manner that would represent my liking/disliking and not require a lifetime to accomplish.

On I go. How do you put your Genre, Styles and Moods in? Yeah, yeah, I lived in the times when scrapping AMG was an option so I have some music tagged. But having only some part of it tagged it's almost just as bad as not having it at all. 'Cause you're not sure of anything. And that elusive track that I really like, exactly that, it won't have tags and I will miss it on a smartlist because of that. Again, music collection - the street.
Maybe you think Last.fm scrobbing, tagging, whatnot? Huh. Do you wanna end up with genres the likes of 'Driving angry in my Porsche'? Sorry but that doesn't capture what should I listen to when I'm driving angry in my BMW (the only constant is that I'm driving angry, because of all the idiots on the streets that got their permit the day they got their car; driving school should be mandatory. For a month. Other topic) So I don't wanna end up with 10000 genres for 17000 tracks if you get what I'm saying. And the cars mentioned are fictional.

Would it be possible to organize something similar to AMG? Who knows. The thing is they have a finite (fixed?) list for all these. There's 21 genres, 102 sub-genres, 995 styles and 288 moods. And that's it and everybody goes home with the same list. But even if we have it probably it's good to wash our collective heads with it 'cause who tags moods by track? Or is somebody gonna argue that usually entire albums are made with a single mood, all tracks? Good luck with that; probably it's symphonic or Bulgarian or whatever music (sorry, still under the influence of the above mentioned movie).

Oh and then the year. Cause that would be a dead giveaway, hey disco ended kind of here, or let's make a playlist that makes me look like I live this side of R&B invading everything, and not in 1992. Tough, cause there's the Greatest Hits of the 70's, 80's, 90's the blabla years, who were just released yesterday so they get tagged with the current year and good luck figuring out each track on them, when it was originally released (if you feel so inclined to define custom fields for 'Original release year').

Bottom line I don't know how you guys do the things above (tagging, organizing) 'cause I see no end in sight.


There's more. Yeah, I should've put chapters in this. I used to be passionate about music. Well, not quite like born out of a boombox passionate, but I was a regular in record stores. I knew stuff. I used to make tapes, you name it. I was happy with the 15 tracks on a tape, but I can't be now with 17000 tracks, 3 computers and 4 mobile gadgets, with MC on top of them. But we're supposedly doing better, right? How? Probably something snapped in the back of my head and I lost the count, possible my marbles with the same occasion.

If above I said I can't find the music I like in my collection, guess what I can't find the music I like out there either. I think I just OD on the whole 'digital everywhere' that makes you stream music in bit buckets like it's a constant noise-to-the-brain. I wanna pick stuff and I can't pick anymore. The automated playlists of whatever service don't work for me. 'Cause you tell them what you like and they keep you in the same general area, not only of music that I know, but that I already own (lost in the vast mass of things where I can't find anything). I end up picking stuff off movies' soundtracks in theaters - whoa great track, get the OST, sweet. Wait. Why didn't I know about this artist/band? I used to know everything that was good, what they released, what they didn't, the collaborations, the rare tracks, the works. Now I can't even find out a band throws a mini-concert in NYC but with 3 hours in advance. I'm off my game big time.

I can't say I was ever able to arrange my collection autobiographically, but it was close. I could remember from where I bought every CD. And every DVD. Or if it was given to me as a gift and by whom. By the time I reached 500 the sources changed and now they're all a sea of bits on a 24 TB array.

How do you live with your music? I'm free-falling. Parachutes, anybody? No, not the Coldplay CD. I got that one. Somewhere... around here... don't know where.

JimH:
High Fidelity is a great movie.  The rest of what you said is total garbage.

Just kidding.  I know the feeling.  There's something here I'm not hearing.

The idea of building an AMG like database is interesting.

I think year is incredibly important.  If your first date was in 1960, that's your year, but if it wasn't until 1990, music from the 60's won't mean much to you.  My dad loved Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.  I hated it.

We once ran an experimental music service (music01) that was only open to around 100 of our users.  Each user exposed their library and anyone could play from it.  You could search for music and play it from their libraries, or download their libraries and look through them.  I found a couple of users who had similar tastes and listened to their favorites.  I learned a lot, found a lot of new music.  Being able to match your favorites against those from other users would be nice. 

This subject is something we've been talking about lately, as we've revisited Play Doctor.

glynor:

--- Quote from: JimH on August 20, 2012, 06:02:44 pm ---My dad loved Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.  I hated it.

--- End quote ---

I guess.

And I mostly agree.  But music changed in the late-50s/early-60s.  Rock and Roll appeared on the scene and created a bright line in the age range of musical tastes.  I'd venture to say that Hip Hop did something similar in the 80s, though to a lesser degree.

I like my dad's music, but I like modern stuff too.  I'd say that's much more common among the "children of the baby boomers" than what was common (your described situation) amongst the baby boomers themselves.  But that is as much of a before/after rock thing than a generalized "don't like my parents' music" thing, IMHO.

All, in all, though... I agree Year is important.  And it is also one thing that is a huge pain to tag manually (for an existing ripped library), and a small percentage of mine have this info.

PS.  Except for ABBA.  If your parents (or you) were a big ABBA fan, well then...  I'm sorry for you (or your kids).

glynor:

--- Quote from: Daydream on August 20, 2012, 05:49:55 pm ---Bottom line I don't know how you guys do the things above (tagging, organizing) 'cause I see no end in sight.

--- End quote ---

Fairly half-assed, and yes...  It never ends.

Generally, the things I "love" have much better tags than the "crap in the middle".

I think Ratings are a much too personal of a thing to have it looked up.  However, I completely agree that some sort of mechanism in YADB to automatically (in the background or something) look up metadata for tracks.  It would have to be more flexible than the current auto-metadata lookup system for video.

However... JRiver has a LOT of customers with massive libraries.  A lot of these are probably pretty well tagged.  JRiver is in a unique position to build a much more flexible "TMDB for music" in an automated fashion than many other companies would be able to do, simply because of the kind of users likely to have 40,000 tracks (cough...OCD...cough).

I'd like to be able to select an album of tracks that I ripped myself, with only basic "Artist, Album, Track Number, Name" tags, and have it pull things like Artist Bios, Mood, Year, Release Date, Lyrics, etc.  I'd want an easy way to "sanity check" these results, but I'd also need a way to easily apply them in large batches.  But, I also have a big swath of obsessively tagged Pink Floyd tracks that include every possible imaginable detail.  I'd be happy if this was somehow automatically ingested into the database.  The "crowd" could handle (if the "sanity check" tool made it easy to participate) keeping the data somewhat clean, by promoting (choosing) good data from the database, and demoting (skipping/marking-as-crap) bad data.

If it was somehow magically based on Shazam-like music fingerprinting (iTunes Match-ish?) then that would be even sweeter.

HTPC4ME:

--- Quote ---If it was somehow magically based on Shazam-like music fingerprinting (iTunes Match-ish?) then that would be even sweeter.
--- End quote ---

Paul T from jaikoz  may be interested in helping out:)
http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/
i'd pay jriver extra for jaikoz/musicbrainz built into jriver.

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