For the past several months I have been undertaking the herculean effort of finally importing every cd I own. I have several terabytes of music (the vast majority of which is dead and little feat and other live music from the archive), but I probably have about a terabyte of cd’s.
I got completely done with the import several weeks ago, and the itunes organized my library and fucked everything all up. So I dutifully started over, backing up my entire non live music library every night.
The most frustrating thing for me so far has been the artwork. I know there are taggers and the like, but I have found they make mistakes and do not import the art as I remember it. So I am doing it manually. A lot of the time, itunes will autopopulate, but since it is a public thing where any reject with no sense of decency can upload his shit and it fubars everything.
The other problem is it is just hit and miss. For example:
HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU NOT FIND THE ARTWORK FOR EXILE ON MAIN STREET ITUNES
— I'm So Over This (@Johngcole) June 4, 2017
I'm using discogs and allmusic, but the point is it should be able to autopopulate one of the greatest 100 albums ever made https://t.co/IENdKgWucK
— I'm So Over This (@Johngcole) June 4, 2017
george harrison all things must pass, no problem
elton john live in australia, got it right here.
exile on main street- NEW PHONE WHO DIS
— I'm So Over This (@Johngcole) June 4, 2017
I mean fucking hell.
At this point, many of you are probably wondering why the artwork is so important- “Why don’t you just listen to the music?”
Well, for starters, it fucks with my sense of order. When I open itunes and there is:
Instead of this:
It hurts my soul a little bit. People spent a lot of time designing album covers. There were multiple revisions to them, the artists had to approve them, and it meant something. It’s part of the whole feel of the album. It’s part of the experience. And let me take a moment to give a big fuck you to Tipper Gore for those fucking warning labels.
Second, a very formidable portion of my important years as a teen was spent in two places on the college campus on town- first in the computer lab playing on dummy terminals connected to the PR1ME mainframe and the Apple desktops, and at the college radio station working as a dj. I spent thousands of hours there, either actually live on air, or engineering a show (I did Monday Night Oldies with a professor who was technically incompetent and the Ashborne Hour playing classical music with another professor), but I spent most of my time just learning how to do things and listening to music.
And I would sit there on the floor, or lie under the turntables, and hold the album in my hand and look at it while listening to whatever it was. It’s one of the reasons I love music, and the album art not only means something about the album, but it brings back good memories. Maybe this is lost in the digital era, when people don’t listen to albums but just have playlists. But when I listen to music, I listen to the entire album. The way it was meant to be. From start to finish.
I mean, if you are at a bar or a club or listening to radio, I understand mixed tapes and shuffle and playlists. And I get greatest hits albums- I am not a complete monster.But if you are at home or driving or whatever, it makes no sense to me. You don’t just pick up a book and randomly read a chapter. Oh, I really like chapter four of The Sun Also Rises, and after that maybe chapter seven of Naked Lunch. Oh, and maybe a chapter of Brautigan.
I mean, maybe that works for you all, but not me. Rambling. The end.
Fuck you itunes users who can not get your tags and labeling right. You probably voted for Trump.
raven
Album covers died with the advent of the CD. Ever try to clean some bud in a fucking cd case????
Yoda Dog
I most certainly did not vote for Trump. You’re the puppet.
ETA: Also, too: Please tell us you dont own/listen to that much Cypress Hill. They’re amazing and all but how many different ways can you expound on the nuances of bustin’ gats and smoking blunts? Nah mean?
TaMara (HFG)
I’m beginning to sense that albums and album artwork are very important to you. Just an inkling mind you…but I think I’m gonna go with it.
Lit3Bolt
I stopped using iTunes after I found out it had deleted stuff in my library to “upgrade my user experience.”
Apple deliberately throttles their software through “updates” which forces you to upgrade. iTunes is no exception.
Winamp, on the other hand, has never betrayed me.
hueyplong
Don’t you know he’s loco?
WereBear
We merged two CD libraries with remarkably little duplication when we got together. And yet, we have highly compatible tastes.
We were meant to be!
p.a.
The original sin of course was the downsizing of classic album art to cd-sized format, and the dearth of liner notes in non-collectors editions. Grew out of Yes/Uriah Heep music decades ago, but still appreciate the artwork. And those of us of a certain age always have a warm spot (or 2 ?) for Ohio Players and Roxy Music.
DavidC
For album covers, I just copy the pics from Amazon (or scan the actual covers).
smintheus
lp over mp any day. Gotta go flip my record.
ruemara
I dunno. I’m kinda like this. I like my book series covers in the same style and I like my albums to have the right covers.
Another Scott
@WereBear: I don’t have TB of stuff, but I’ve got a few hundred CDs that I put on Google Play (in my Music Library). I pay $7 a month to be able to upload whatever I want and play it wherever I want and they take care of the backups. And I can play whatever else I want, also too. And I can download stuff to my phone when I don’t want to be tied to the network. I let them worry about the artwork and the like (and yeah, they don’t have the right covers for a few of them). The Music Player isn’t the greatest (some of the hot spots on the sliders seem to overlap so scrolling down can cause the currently playing song to end; there aren’t enough equalizer settings to cut the shrillness in the treble in some songs; etc.), but it’s good enough.
J is a Mac person and fights with iTunes occasionally and pulls her hair out every time its updated – “How do I copy a CD? Where did it put the music I imported??”. It’s been a horrorshow for years – I don’t know why people put up with it. I still can’t believe that the updates every few weeks are nearly 0.5 GB. It’s ridiculous. Life is too short.
I’m glad JC is making progress, but, man. Cut your losses if it happens again! :-)
[edit:] I thought I was replying to Lit3Bolt (sp?)]
Cheers,
Scott.
AndoChronic
Awesome. I do this on deployments at the base’s library after my shifts. A nice months long hobby, keeps ‘ya off the streets! We also do external drive trades. Always bring a terabyte or 5 when on the road youngsters.
Another Scott
@smintheus: About the only thing LPs were really good for was “perpetual music in the last track” (e.g. on some Rush albums, TheThe’s Infected, etc.). Otherwise, you can keep the pops and cracks and jumping and skipping and … ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
toine
I listen to music the same way… that’s also why I don’t buy too many albums nowadays. Bands always seem to give up on the rest of the album after they have their 2 or 3 radio/spotify tracks down.
smintheus
@Another Scott: I’ve had some lps for almost 50 years and they still don’t pop, crackle or skip.
eddie blake
maaan, i LOVE early cypress hill. those first three records are AWESOME.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Yoda Dog: Their work up until 2000 was all pretty good, but their attempts at rock music (and also most of Stoned Raiders) are mostly embarrassing.
I’ve also noticed that production-wise Muggs and RZA seem to have switched places. As RZA’s branched out into other genres he’s gone from “Top 5 Dead or Alive” rap producer to “mostly decent, but really shines in his other ventures;*” Muggs’ hip-hop work, meanwhile, has only gotten better with age,** but most of his side projects tend to be motherfucking awful — though I’m not sure how his trip-hop work stands up to other works of the genre; suggestions are welcome.
The Wu-Tang’s last album should have been a double album produced entirely by Muggs and Pete Rock, and titled Soul Brother Meets Soul Assassins.
*Though his productional decline isn’t nearly as stark as Havoc’s, which really took a hit after ’06.
**Somewhat unpopular opinion is that Muggs is at least as skilled a producer as his protege The Alchemist.
Death Panel Truck
I stole Exile On Main Street at Kickass Torrents two or three years ago, and iTunes had the artwork then.
If I can’t find artwork, I just scan it from the CD or get it at Discogs. It’s a royal pain in the ass, but sometimes there’s no other way. I get what you’re saying about LP covers. When I play We’re Only in It for the Money, the cover reminds me that one of the best LPs of the Sixties was recorded by seven ugly motherfuckers.
WereBear
We loaded CD in, then lost some in a upgrade, and the CD themselves are in storage so we can move around the place… I wound up getting a Pandora subscription.
Even Tristan the Cat has a channel.
frosty
@smintheus:
You obviously never played them on a cheap Radio Shack turntable, all I could afford.
Nicole
I misread your first tweet and thought you meant this Exile:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOAFDrgHufc
Another Scott
@smintheus: I know. Just yanking your chain.
We’ve got several linear yards of LPs (including stuff from the ’50s from J’s parents) that I want to make into MP3s one of these days. My dad still (AFAIK) has a bunch of Spike Jones 78s that he used to play on his Macintosh tube amp system, etc., etc. “Beetlebaum!” Lots of great, fun stuff is on LPs. But they’re fragile and heavy and much, much less convenient than high-quality digital reproductions.
Cheers,
Scott.
donnah
For me, it’s lyric sheets. I loved albums with great covers, but I really learned the songs by reading the lyrics in the album liners. I used to sit in front of the stereo with those lyrics so I could understand all the nuances of the songs.
I am of an age (59) where music production has changed immensely from my initial listening to the Top 40 on my transistor radio. I stream some things, but honestly I mostly listen to CDs. And I’ve been guilty of looking lyrics up online and printing them out for myself.
*end nerd confession*
TheronWare
I used to be concerned with album art but no longer. iTunes is like the Borg, resistance is futile and I am fully assimilated.
Yoda Dog
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Man, you know your stuff. I saw them once in Raleigh with The Roots and it was a blast. That was like ’99 though, so lightyears ago.. And I havent really listened to much since college, I’m a little sad and embarrassed to admit.
You know “Souls of Mischeif: 93 til Infinity” by chance? I hadn’t thought of that jam in forever but some car commercial just brought it back and it gave me the nostalgia, bigtime. Still one of the best hip-hop beats of all time, in my most humble of opinions.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Yoda Dog: Yes.
Yoda Dog
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): lol. Cool.
kindness
My library is on iTunes. I’ve wanted to go the network route and import uncompressed .wav files or whatever. Getting the external multiG drive isn’t bad but the ready made digital music boxes are kinda pricey. I know there’s software you could do the same thing with one’s computer but……easy to procrastinate on.
My compliments to you John for doing it. Did you import your old bootleg cassettes? I’m afraid to listen to mine. I’m sure they are filled with drop-outs at this point but I can’t get rid of them. Such is life.
Death Panel Truck
@donnah: Try reading the lyric sheets from Japanese import LPs. I have Jimi Hendrix’s The Cry of Love, and in most of the songs the English translations are hilariously wrong.
bystander
What iTunes does to classical music, including opera, and musical theater recordings is staggering. Entire operas broken up according to whoever was the first listed as singing in that aria/recitative. Never any lyrics included in iTunes downloads.
Mohagan
Ah, Memory Lane. My first programming job involved a PR1ME mainframe and PRIMOS introduced me to operating systems. As I recall, PRIMOS was far superior to the various IBM OS (or the Burrough’s OS) I had to deal with later in my career. IBM commands always remind me of German – the way shorter commands are combined into one longer word, instead of being able to string words together. I still have a PR1ME mug!
aarrgghh
i’m the same way about the art and the tags — totally anal. so i do everything manually. for example, i’ve changed all “year” tags to the date originally recorded, whenever available, for individual tracks. since i’m an artist, tracks without album art, like bootlegs, get original art. because every track needs art. as i learn new info, i will go back and update tracks as necessary. revising my collection has been an ongoing project for about fifteen years, so my basic advice is to try not doing everything at once. make it a hobby, like knitting. since i’ve already imported all the music that i can remember i like, the amount of time i spend on this has fallen dramatically. in the last few years, i’ve been importing tracks from movie scores that catch my attention, the latest being selections from clinton shorter’s work for “district 9” and marco beltrami’s work for “logan”.
Adam
I think I recall you mentioning that you also use Media Monkey. Mediamonkey is my go to tagging program. Really good with the artwork and it allows you to customize almost anything. Learn a few keyboard shortcuts and you’ll be cruising. If it doesn’t find your artwork you can simply copy and paste the artwork in. You can rename files really easily too. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
James Powell
@toine:
I’m kind of curious why artists or labels or whoever continues to do “albums” or collections of a certain size. Why not just release what you got when the moment seems right?
It’s kind of like the way broadcast TV series have to have x episodes and y seasons. The story needs seven episodes? Okay, do seven. This one is good for two seasons? Do two seasons. Cable, netflix, amazon, etc., have really helped in this regard.
Lavocat
You great misanthropic bastard!
How I miss you.
And, yeah, Cole, right fucking on! I feel EXACTLY the same way.
burnspbesq
@DavidC:
Bingo. Side benefit: if you point to the image on Amazon and click on “copy image,” you get a .jpg file. ITumes gives you .png files, which most other player software (Amarra and Audirvana for sure) won’t display.
Lavocat
@p.a.: Ah, yes, the wonderful female form. Brought that music up to a whole new level of “Oh, yeah!”
Mom Says I'm Handsome
@DavidC: I also get most of my covers from Amazon, and make them available to display in MediaMonkey (yes, managing artwork in MM is as easy as managing the audio media; you can store the front, back, and alternate covers).
Another good source for artwork, and a ton of other useful info (recording & release dates, band personnel, and crowd-sourced song titles [so you can trust they’re mostly correct]), is the artist’s Discography section on Wikipedia. Cuz let’s face it: You’re a collector — you obviously love the music — but you also love the collecting: putting them in order, making sure the tags are correct, filling in gaps in your collection like it’s Christmas. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.
I’m wrestling with the way people consume music as I watch my kids get into it. They don’t care about albums; for them it’s about the latest pop track, and that means on-demand, and that means streaming. They couldn’t give two shits about liner notes or the alternate Japanese release with single-bit mastering.
burnspbesq
@Another Scott:
All streaming services fuck the artists out of substantial amounts of money. If you hear something you like, BUY IT.
HeleninEire
@raven: OK That comment made me fall in love with you all over again. A+ professor.
Another Scott
@burnspbesq: I do. The $7 a month is mostly to keep my stuff in the cloud, not to play new stuff for “free”.
Cheers,
Scott.
BruceJ
Exile on main street: Open up web browser. Search for ‘Exile on Main Street cover’ Click on ‘Images’ (or whatever shitty option your non-google search engine offers, bing will probably bring up collection of bill gates head shots and duck duck go will probably offer up an instagram photo of a hamster and some lug nuts.) find one you want. copy it to your computer. Open iTunes, find EOMS in your library, do ‘Get Info’, click Artwork, and click the add artwork button. tedious, but the only option for rare stuff, or apparently, the Rolling Stones.
That said, my itunes music library has existed since itunes (which long predates the iPod, iPhone or even OS X) on roughly 14 versions of the mac OS, 5 or 6 different computers, two entirely different computer architectures and I’ve never had it delete a single song. But then I didn’t sign up for music match, or synchronize my things in iCloud or or or.
J R in WV
I have 471 album files on this laptop, ripped CDs all. Now I burn playlist CDs, mostly classical, so I have CDs like Yehudi Menuhin greatest hits – chamber music and concertos, runs for hours. You can get 9-11 albums of MP3s on a single CD. Same for Samuel Barber, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, etc.
I built a CD of Glenn Gould piano work, and decided it was cold and lifeless, no emotion, just perfect notes one after the other, boringly. Give me a live recording with a big orchestra playing with a pianist everyone full of emotion, if there’s the odd rhythm not quite perfect or a wrong note, NBD, but Gould’s fascination with using technology to erase technical errors also erased the emotions.
The external HD has most of the albums on it, in various backup files from dates back when. I haven’t gotten the vinyl from the old days onto disk yet, they’re in the basement in milk cartons, several hundred of those. I have a B&O turntable and a MacIntosh amp, neither plugged in.
Right now we have a tiny Danon CD/tuner stereo in the bedroom, listen to music to go to bed by, it helps cover the tinnitus ringing in your ears, also the snoring and dogs dreaming about chasing squirrels. Family practice Dr recommended it as the best solution to tinnitus, which they don’t know how to treat, or even what causes it.
Raven
@HeleninEire: just one of the fellas
Jay Noble
@donnah: Those lyric sheets . . . Guess how European teens (including those behind the Iron Curtain) learned non-British-English?
oldswede
There is a program called Music Collector at Collectorz.com that will create a great database for you. I have used it for a large cd collection and it makes life much simpler for me.
It’s free to try. Check it out and de-stress yourself.
oldswede
joel hanes
Righteous rant. Right on, man !
Brautigan
This astounds me. You aren’t old enough to be a hippie, and when young, you were a Republican — how can you know anything about Brautigan ?
Want a laugh? Read the title story in The Revenge Of The Lawn
John Revolta
A lot of my favorite albums are live albums. They function as “Greatest Hits” albums only better.
I remember some of the pix on the “Exile” cover as being potentially……problematic. I wonder if there’s some sort of (well-meaning) suppression going on?
craigie
Spoken like a true old person. Well done!
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@HeleninEire: You and me both, sister.
I commented about Cole’s music import woes at his twitter timeline so people can see my new avatar that I copied from somebody at Schindler’s (that asshole).
mattH
@BruceJ:
Only funny because it’s true.
@craigie:
Some people are old at heart, some young. Pretty sure JC is both. ;-)
NotMax
Hire a 12-year-old. They’ll have the whole thing done in jig time.
;)
Earl
John — safeguard against anything fucking up your music library. Back it up.
Buy a copy of Arq Backup ($50). Get a free google cloud account, and back everything up to google cloud ($0.01/gb/month; or $120/tb/year). You’ll have offsite backup in case anything breaks your shit again.
Ping me at the email address I presume you can see if you need help setting this up.
Fair Economist
I also hate autoshuffle. No, I don’t want to hear an atonal Scriabin Sonata when I’m listening to big band swing. No, I don’t want dance music interspersed with dark ambient. I don’t see how anybody could stand autoshuffle unless they have very narrow musical tastes. If you’re a teen and all your music is recent popular stuff, maybe. But otherwise – blech.
Fair Economist
What the heck did *that* go into moderation for?
Paul T
MP3 Tag
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
Automates lots of the frustration
Fair Economist
@bystander:
Also true of all the streaming services I’ve seen. They all play just individual movements. Sometimes that’s OK, but most classical works are written to be heard as a whole and it just doesn’t work. Even Pictures at an Exhibition gets broken up.
Steeplejack
@Fair Economist:
“Ambient.”
Splitting Image
Slightly off-topic:
Can anyone suggest an alternative to Itunes which can import an Itunes library with the play counts intact?
I’ve never had Itunes wreck my library but the need to update the program every so often worries me, plus the fact that it serves a number of other functions within the mac ecosystem makes it look to me like the Apple version of Internet Explorer. I do have a couple of alternatives on my computer, but none of them will keep my play counts intact if I switch and I’m rather keen on not losing them.
Juju
I had never heard of Cypress Hill before today. I had to look it up and listen a bit. I think we have about a 10 year difference age wise, and that’s probably one of the reasons I’ve never heard of them, plus I’m really a dorky person. The album cover art is the sort of subject matter that would have given me nightmares as a child. It does seem to be the sort of imagery that I guess would appeal to a teenage boy. It’s fascinating to me that you like Cypress Hill and Peter Frampton. I know I feel like you do about Peter Frampton’s live album.
For me, if I’m familiar with a novel, I will skip to chapters or passages I like, sometimes just to reread a clever turn of phrase or reread a part I really liked. I do read a novel from start to finish the first time, as I listen to albums start to finish the first time. After that, I see nothing wrong with listening to songs you like by themselves.
Also, I loved Al Stewart album art and his lyric sheets that came with the albums. Say what you will.
redactor
Wait until you try using your iTunes library to serve music to Sonos. No problem with the music, but the album art seems to appear inconsistently unless you manually add it in iTunes. Technology!
Tokyokie
I sympathize with you, JC. I use iTunes to organize the collection of DVDs/Blu-rays I’ve converted into .mp4 files so I can use AppleTV to play them on the living-room TV. (I have refused to embrace steaming because I believe that the day is fast approaching on which Republicans will dispense with Net Neutrality altogether and streaming will become prohibitively expensive. Besides, a movie library that I have assembled will better reflect my tastes than one featuring Star Wars and Adam Sandler movies.) But being an anal-retentive bastard, I need, in addition to a plot summary and credits and the like, a .jpg of the poster for the movie. And it has to be the poster from the country of origin. (You have any idea how difficult tracking down posters for Nikkatsu exploitation films from the ’60s can be?) And after I find the .jpg file for the poster, I’ll retouch it the best I can using Photo Shop. And as HD .mp4 files take up a lot more room than music files, the library is currently spread across 5 external hard drives and currently takes up 15-20 Tb of space. (And I need to add a couple more hard drives to keep things tidy.)
Anyway, when I moved from a Windows laptop to an iMac, I had to start over in building the iTunes library, and then about 3 months ago, the library croaked on me, and now I’m reconstituting it again. So I know how much of a pain in the ass this can be. And with video .mp4s, I check every one of them to make sure they play properly (not always the case with iTunes, and after importing a title, I have to change where iTunes looks for it, since I don’t have nearly enough room on my internal hard drive for the collection.
So been there, done that. But I need to go retouch the .jpgs for a couple of French-language movies I’m ripping. At least this keeps me off the streets and out of more trouble.
And iTunes updates managed to eat most of the ringtones I made myself from movies, like Bill Holden saying, “If they move, kill ’em,” in The Wild Bunch or The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down from Looney Tunes. Bastards.
J R in WV
Hey, John!!!
I was drifting through some amusing philosophy, and came across one that speaks directly to your problem here: techno music.
Hope you at least get a giggle out of it! I have real problems getting my music to play once it’s ripped to my hard drive(s). I haven’t found a program that simply allows me to pick a group of songs OR albums and just plays those songs or albums. They want to keep going with other stuff I like but DON”T want to hear now. Or just play the first few songs I selected, then start playing other stuff I like but don’t want to hear now!
I guess you get what you pay for??!! But I’ve paid for winamp at least a couple of times, and it works until it doesn’t. Hard to beat a good turntable, amps, speakers.
I’m quitting now. No one is interested in my fussing about digital music players. But last thing, suggestions welcome. Must work on Linux without much tinkering, I don’t have the patience for that any more.
Death Panel Truck
@joel hanes: Can’t imagine why you’d be surprised. I learned about Brautigan in my English 101 class at Yakima Valley Community College in 1987. I was 24 years old then, far too young to have been a hippie, and completely apolitical at the time. The professor was Danish, and she introduced us to Trout Fishing in America, and to Raymond Carver. For that I will be eternally grateful.
cleek
the worst is that even if you get all those covers uploaded and set, iTunes will, for no fucking reason at all, start losing your covers.
cleek
@BruceJ:
on Windows, you can shorten that to:
1. find the pic on the internet (either Amazon or Google will probably have it)
2. right click on the image and “Copy image location” / “Copy image address”.
3. in iTunes, Get Info, Add Artwork.
4. paste the image URL from step 2 into the file browsing box, click OK..
Windows will automatically download the file from its URL into a temp location, and then it will give the temp file’s location to iTunes.
in other words, Windows standard file browsing dialog is smart enough to download files from URL automatically and then give the temp file’s location to whatever program is doing the file browsing. it works in any program that uses the standard file dialog.
Raven Onthill
This is more of the “We’ll get the public to do it for free” that makes Wikipedia such a reliable source. If you want quality in your database, you have to pick good editors and art directors, and you have to pay them; knowledgeable people mostly expect to get paid. It’s a lot like comment sections; without moderation, your comments turn into a garbage dump.
Bonnie
I was intrigued with the iPod because it was the first time I could play Mozart-Motown-and Mick on the same play list. However, every now and then, the list of songs on my computer is not the same as on the CD. Yet, when I play it, it is, which makes it difficult to find the particular song I want. As long as albums have existed, there has always been at least one sometimes two or three songs on an album that I absolutely hated. I usually got up and moved the needle manually to the next song. The iPod gave me the opportunity to not even put those on the iPod. I am not as tech savvy as I used to be and do not care to be tech savvy in my 70s; thus, my iPod is the first and last one I hope to buy. I bought it in 2009.
Juju
@Bonnie: you sound adequately tech savvy to me. I wish my mom knew how to use the music app on her phone, or iPad. When I explain again and again, it just gets to a point where I want to bang my head against a brick wall until I pass out. My mother once deleted almost all of her music off her iPad while trying to listen to it. It’s a good thing she has the cloud.
I like to skip the songs I don’t much care for and I’m not in my 70s. I love the little fast forward button if I’m not in the mood to listen to a particular song.
low-tech cyclist
Maybe because that’s not the name of the album?
No, seriously: the name of the album is “Exile on Main St.”
(Says the guy who could care less about the Rolling Stones, but at least knows this bit of rock trivia.)
Try that and see if it helps.
ted mills
My brother in arms!
I too spend a lot of time re-tagging iTunes music and yelling at the numbnuts who can’t get basic stuff right.
Damn you all to hell those who:
1) Use the compilation publication year and not the song’s year
2) Put “blues” as the genre because it’s the first alphabetically not because it’s blues
3) Put a random number as genre (wtf? is there a reason?)
4) Think 175 x 175 pixels is okay for artwork
5) Don’t use correct capitalization rules
6) Write The Beatles as “Beatles, The” without knowing iTunes has figured that out
Damn you!!!
fuckwit
@raven: its 2017. Bud does not have seeds to clean
Mo MacArbie
I only use itunes for syncing the ipod with the lossy conversions of the main flac collection. For the latter, foobar2000 suits me fine. One can really go down the rabbit hole customizing the thing, but there are so many wonderful plugins. SQLTree organizes the library any which way you want, WaveformSeekbar is cool and functional too, though there’s one glitch with Windows 10 I haven’t been able to fix. There are even plugins to autotag from discogs or musicbrains. There’s a library of functions for manipulating tags in bulk, so that one can quickly remove the ” (Live)” from the end of every song on some live albums that some tagger not-so-helpfully put there, for instance.
AlbumArtExchange is a good place for getting art, but one must register to avoid getting watermarked images. I’ve been slowly upgrading the artwork to bigger pictures, since the TV at home really reveals the shortcomings of the 200-px images that are fine on an ipod.
I like to do the mad shuffle when at work, driving, or otherwise killing time. However, I’ve gone back to listening to whole albums when listening more recreationally. There’s a gap in my mind where the albums I acquired during my all-shuffle-all-the-time years really haven’t gelled.
worn
Just driving out of the Sierras after a long & beautiful weekend, so what I write will probably be too late to be of much good. But I am exceedingly anal about album artwork. I don’t autotag anything & in fact will search down original 78 labels instead of opting for ‘cd collection’ artwork for the really old stuff.
That said, albumartexchange.com is pretty invaluable (& definitely register an account). They have standards and the majority of the artwork is top notch quality.
It’s where I got my cover for Exile, among many, many others.
rmthunter
If it’s any consolation (probably not), I have the same problem with Windows Media Player, with the added complication that I can’t find a way to put in the right metadata manually (except for editing each field, except that doesn’t seem to work for cover art, only track listings and headers). And the “find album info” feature is a joke.