Hi,
I am a somewhat new Mac user just starting to get the hang of iTunes. At first I didn't like it, because most of my MP3s had weird/no ID3 tags, but now that that's close to being fixed I can see its power. My music collection consists of:
- My own ripped CDs
- Full concert bootlegs
- Miscellaneous individual songs from concerts
- Miscellaneous other songs, including collaborations between artists/bands, demo songs, unreleased songs, b-sides, etc.
I am fairly anal about classification. I try to preserve as much information as I can about each concert, including date, song order, venue, city/state/country, whether it was an audience or soundboard recording, sound quality grade, whether it has any unofficial titles, etc. (It annoys me to no end when people trade live recordings of individual songs and do not attach the date & venue on/at which they were played - how are you supposed to tell where they came from?) Before I used iTunes, I would classify my music inside a directory (folder) hierarchy like so:
Artist/live/1998-04-25 Blahblah Tour - Melbourne, Australia - Waverly Park - "Unofficial Bootleg Title"/01 - First Song.mp3
Artist/albums/Blahblah/01 - First Song.mp3
This had the benefit of making everything all nice and organized, but it was not easy to browse without an abstraction layer (such as iTunes) involved.
My problem is that iTunes of course uses ID3 tags to store its metadata, and these ID3 tags do not seem to be robust enough for me to store all the information I want to store. There is an Album field and a Comments field, but they are both too short and that doesn't seem to be enough fields anyway. Basically I would like to hear from others in a similar situation to mine who have converted to iTunes and have managed to preserve all this stuff somehow. How do you manage your digital music? What classification system do you use? How much trouble is it? Don't you hate it when people put things in their ID3 tags LiKe tHiS?
Thanks and mad props in advance, or something.
Alex
I am a somewhat new Mac user just starting to get the hang of iTunes. At first I didn't like it, because most of my MP3s had weird/no ID3 tags, but now that that's close to being fixed I can see its power. My music collection consists of:
- My own ripped CDs
- Full concert bootlegs
- Miscellaneous individual songs from concerts
- Miscellaneous other songs, including collaborations between artists/bands, demo songs, unreleased songs, b-sides, etc.
I am fairly anal about classification. I try to preserve as much information as I can about each concert, including date, song order, venue, city/state/country, whether it was an audience or soundboard recording, sound quality grade, whether it has any unofficial titles, etc. (It annoys me to no end when people trade live recordings of individual songs and do not attach the date & venue on/at which they were played - how are you supposed to tell where they came from?) Before I used iTunes, I would classify my music inside a directory (folder) hierarchy like so:
Artist/live/1998-04-25 Blahblah Tour - Melbourne, Australia - Waverly Park - "Unofficial Bootleg Title"/01 - First Song.mp3
Artist/albums/Blahblah/01 - First Song.mp3
This had the benefit of making everything all nice and organized, but it was not easy to browse without an abstraction layer (such as iTunes) involved.
My problem is that iTunes of course uses ID3 tags to store its metadata, and these ID3 tags do not seem to be robust enough for me to store all the information I want to store. There is an Album field and a Comments field, but they are both too short and that doesn't seem to be enough fields anyway. Basically I would like to hear from others in a similar situation to mine who have converted to iTunes and have managed to preserve all this stuff somehow. How do you manage your digital music? What classification system do you use? How much trouble is it? Don't you hate it when people put things in their ID3 tags LiKe tHiS?
Thanks and mad props in advance, or something.
Alex
