I am inspired to make my music collection make sense (at least kindof sense). This is less about sessions than about listening to trad music, i.e. I don't have a backlog of digital recordings of sessions I've been to, don't even have a recorder, so I'm not trying to handle that, just trying to be my own librarian as I rip my CDs to put on my brand new iPod.
An example of what I'm talking about: http://playlistmag.com/features/2005/03/tagclass/index.php
This article on classical music is a nice discussion of the way an atypical music collection (and heck, for all I know, even a typical one) will automatically spring into half-organized poorly-labelled form as you rip CDs and create an MP3 library.
Trad music is probably easier to organize than classical music, but makes for a great example. Of course, I-Tunes doesn't know the difference between a tune and a song. And the "Celtic" genre doesn't distinguish Enya from Michael Coleman, much less Scottish from Irish.
So this is kind of a poll -
* How specific have you made your track tags?? Do you distinguish vocals from instrumentals? Do you separate the "tune-learning" albums from the "listening" albums? (i.e. those old old trad albums that are really cool archives but not exactly the most pleasant dinner music) Mark slow airs so you can either find them or ignore them to suit the mood?
* How specific are you - if a track list has "5. Amy's Banjo Reels" do you dig into the liner notes and label it "5. Trip to Durrow/Wise Maid/the Poltergeist"? This would be a pain in the butt sometimes, but imagine saying "oh, you play Trip to Durrow like *that*?" and you go home and look it up and immediately find all 6 recordings you have of it, and realize there are about 2.5 standard ways of handling the B part(s).
* How complete is your collection? I've got a few albums that I love the tunes, but the band has clearly caved into pressure to keep a vocalist for crowd pleasing, and bless their hearts, the songs just stink... but somehow I can't bear to just not rip those tracks at all, it seems so... final... Do you bother with the "favorites" rankings?
* Does it work, or do you have a system that you put in place but haven't really kept up with?
And believe me, I'm not really totally obsessive, and if I made a complicated system it would probably fall apart quickly, as I wouldn't manage to apply it to the whole library before I lost interest.... so mostly just curious as to what others have done.
I don't have an iPod; I keep my collection of Trad (and non-Trad) tunes on my laptop and either play them there or download to my 1G iriver.
When I rip CDs, I generally just use Artist, CD Name, Track Title for the tags and almost everything ends up just "celtic" as far as genre goes. When I download music, I just make sure that the basics of the tags are correct.
However, I organize my tunes/songs by creating lots of playlists. I've got a fiddle music playlist, song playlist, session favorites playlist, tunes to learn playlist, etc.
Every once-in-a-while, I rate all of my tunes over the course of a couple of days and come up with new "favorites" playlists and sometimes delete the files that come up with very low ratings ... why keep music I don't like!
I keep a couple thousand tunes on an iPod-like thing (an iRiver iHP-120, to be precise). I have albums in folders, under a general category (Irish, Jazz, Old-Time), and under a primary artist where relevant ("Open House" goes under "Kevin Burke").
Filenames have track-number, and some track title (though it's only partially useful). In the ID3V2 tag for each sound file, I keep:
1) The names of the tunes on the track (helps for when you want to look up a particular tune)
2) the artist(s) performing on the track (including guest artists).
3) A genre that I defined for my own files that represents what *I* think the genre is ("Irish Traditional", "Cape Breton Traditional", etc). This helps for those times when I'm in the mood for a cohesive listen...
4) The track number (for sorting according to album order)
As for ripping, I rip the entire album, including tracks I don't like, since I often find they might grow on me later.
I use ID3-TagIT to bulk-edit ID3 tags. It's very useful. I also use WinAMP to listen to them on my computer, since you can filter your playlist in a number of convenient and interesting ways (without thinking, I once sorted my collection by tune title--which resulted in hearing the dozens of the same tunes played in several different settings right next to each other... interesting!)
I'm not terribly obsessive either. Once in a while, I'll spend an hour updating tags, but other than that, most of the work is pretty quick.
Things I can't be bothered to do:
1) Keep a favorites list
2) use Irish spelling for tune titles otherwise written in English (it's just me, but I find it really slow to type in all those accents and unfamiliar spellings).
3) Liner notes. I have the CD. If I want to read the liner notes, I'll go grab the CD. If I don't have the CD, I'll buy it.
Godfather is a great program for editing the ID tags on MP3's and it's free. I would say that ideally it is best to put as much info as possible into the ID tags so that later when you are listening it won't drive you crazy wondering what it is.
I've gone for broke with a 40gig iRiver and so far have got to about 4gigs. But I can store photos as well on this
Don't have an i-pod so "The" has to be removed. That is always Task 1.
Example: Miss Monaghan, The Yew Tree, Tim Maloney's becomes:
Title: Miss Monaghan/Yew tree/Tim Maloney's
Artist: Kilfenora CB
Album: Fabulous Kilfenora Ceili Band
Genre: Reels
Trad songs are in my Genre "Song" and different time signatures e.g jig leading to a reel are in the Genre "Medley".
I have a Creative Zen Nomad, which allows me to create my own genres.
" How specific have you made your track tags?? Do you distinguish vocals from instrumentals? Do you separate the "tune-learning" albums from the "listening" albums? (i.e. those old old trad albums that are really cool archives but not exactly the most pleasant dinner music) Mark slow airs so you can either find them or ignore them to suit the mood?"
I do make all those distinctions, but I make them in playlists, not in the track tags, and I'm not obsessive about applying them to all the cd's I've ripped.
*" How specific are you - if a track list has "5. Amy's Banjo Reels" do you dig into the liner notes and label it "5. Trip to Durrow/Wise Maid/the Poltergeist"?"
Yes. And then, if I'm ever listening and hear a tune I recognize under a different name, I'll put that name in parenthesis in the track list, precisely because I love doing a search for a particular tune title and getting to listen to lots of versions of it. I'm constantly updating track titles with alternate names and corections just to make the search function more powerful, important to me since I work with the slowdowner so much.
* "How complete is your collection? I've got a few albums that I love the tunes, but the band has clearly caved into pressure to keep a vocalist for crowd pleasing, and bless their hearts, the songs just stink... but somehow I can't bear to just not rip those tracks at all, it seems so... final... Do you bother with the "favorites" rankings? "
Until I start running out of space (I have the 40g) I'll rip the whole thing. I did finally start bothering with the favorites ranking, so I could make a "5 star" smart playlist and not always have to scroll through the album list to find the 4 or 5 I listen to most.
" Does it work, or do you have a system that you put in place but haven't really kept up with? "
Yes it works and it's done wonders for my playing. About playlists: I have a "jigs" playlist, and "hornpipe" and "polka" and "slide" playlists, and listening to those has helped me get a more intuitive sense of how the tune types are supposed to sound apart from the minor differences that can be notated in sheet music. I have a "kerry" playlist and a "west clare" playlist, and listening to those lets me form my own opinion of how much those players do or don't have in common. Then there's the "tunes to learn" playlist and the "sean nos" playlist and the "airs" playlist. I've also put together playlists of certain musicians, since sometimes just isolating the artist in the 'artist' list will give funny results.
I do change the "genre" listing to be precise - world, celtic, and folk don't do it for me. I prefer irish, scottish, norwegian, cuban, old-time . . .
It did take some time to set it all up, and I've never managed to get through the whole library like that, just the really good stuff, but it's been very worth it for me. No matter where I'm stranded, as long as I have my iPod with me, I can be using that time to learn more about the music I love -- listening and thinking about what makes an individual fiddler or piper stand out, what's the difference between how player x treats slides vs. jigs, how do this person's ornaments compare to that persons ornaments, etc etc. I'm somebody who can get really annoyed at forces beyond my control causing me to lose hours of my life (a late flight, for instance) and this is a great tool for keeping my calm in those situations and even feeling good about what I've accomplised.
Thanks all, esp. Lia! There's good advice here, and it'll just be the challenge to get enough of my stuff in shape that I can see how I like my system.
i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
I am inspired to make my music collection make sense (at least kindof sense). This is less about sessions than about listening to trad music, i.e. I don't have a backlog of digital recordings of sessions I've been to, don't even have a recorder, so I'm not trying to handle that, just trying to be my own librarian as I rip my CDs to put on my brand new iPod.
An example of what I'm talking about:
http://playlistmag.com/features/2005/03/tagclass/index.php
This article on classical music is a nice discussion of the way an atypical music collection (and heck, for all I know, even a typical one) will automatically spring into half-organized poorly-labelled form as you rip CDs and create an MP3 library.
Trad music is probably easier to organize than classical music, but makes for a great example. Of course, I-Tunes doesn't know the difference between a tune and a song. And the "Celtic" genre doesn't distinguish Enya from Michael Coleman, much less Scottish from Irish.
So this is kind of a poll -
* How specific have you made your track tags?? Do you distinguish vocals from instrumentals? Do you separate the "tune-learning" albums from the "listening" albums? (i.e. those old old trad albums that are really cool archives but not exactly the most pleasant dinner music) Mark slow airs so you can either find them or ignore them to suit the mood?
* How specific are you - if a track list has "5. Amy's Banjo Reels" do you dig into the liner notes and label it "5. Trip to Durrow/Wise Maid/the Poltergeist"? This would be a pain in the butt sometimes, but imagine saying "oh, you play Trip to Durrow like *that*?" and you go home and look it up and immediately find all 6 recordings you have of it, and realize there are about 2.5 standard ways of handling the B part(s).
* How complete is your collection? I've got a few albums that I love the tunes, but the band has clearly caved into pressure to keep a vocalist for crowd pleasing, and bless their hearts, the songs just stink... but somehow I can't bear to just not rip those tracks at all, it seems so... final... Do you bother with the "favorites" rankings?
* Does it work, or do you have a system that you put in place but haven't really kept up with?
And believe me, I'm not really totally obsessive, and if I made a complicated system it would probably fall apart quickly, as I wouldn't manage to apply it to the whole library before I lost interest.... so mostly just curious as to what others have done.
# Posted on December 6th 2005 by concertinette
Re: i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
I don't have an iPod; I keep my collection of Trad (and non-Trad) tunes on my laptop and either play them there or download to my 1G iriver.
When I rip CDs, I generally just use Artist, CD Name, Track Title for the tags and almost everything ends up just "celtic" as far as genre goes. When I download music, I just make sure that the basics of the tags are correct.
However, I organize my tunes/songs by creating lots of playlists. I've got a fiddle music playlist, song playlist, session favorites playlist, tunes to learn playlist, etc.
Every once-in-a-while, I rate all of my tunes over the course of a couple of days and come up with new "favorites" playlists and sometimes delete the files that come up with very low ratings ... why keep music I don't like!
# Posted on December 6th 2005 by KeepFiddlin'
Re: i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
I have two playlists: "Diddley" and "non-Diddley". Why would you need anything else?
# Posted on December 6th 2005 by JerryH
Re: i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
Most tune sets on trad albums use slashes (/) to separate tunes:
first tune/second tune/third tune
Occasionally you'll get track listings that use semi-colons (or at least that's what comes back from the CDDB), but I usually change them to slashes.
I have all my trad albums in the "Folk" genre.
In iTunes, you can create smart playlists, I've made one called "Tune sets" matching all of the following criteria:
Genre is Folk
Name contains /
Live updating
Voila! Instant playlist of tune sets. Currently there are 242 tracks from 37 albums from 43 artists. It's 15 hours and 40 minutes of non-stop tunes.
# Posted on December 6th 2005 by Jeremy
Re: i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
I keep a couple thousand tunes on an iPod-like thing (an iRiver iHP-120, to be precise). I have albums in folders, under a general category (Irish, Jazz, Old-Time), and under a primary artist where relevant ("Open House" goes under "Kevin Burke").
Filenames have track-number, and some track title (though it's only partially useful). In the ID3V2 tag for each sound file, I keep:
1) The names of the tunes on the track (helps for when you want to look up a particular tune)
2) the artist(s) performing on the track (including guest artists).
3) A genre that I defined for my own files that represents what *I* think the genre is ("Irish Traditional", "Cape Breton Traditional", etc). This helps for those times when I'm in the mood for a cohesive listen...
4) The track number (for sorting according to album order)
As for ripping, I rip the entire album, including tracks I don't like, since I often find they might grow on me later.
I use ID3-TagIT to bulk-edit ID3 tags. It's very useful. I also use WinAMP to listen to them on my computer, since you can filter your playlist in a number of convenient and interesting ways (without thinking, I once sorted my collection by tune title--which resulted in hearing the dozens of the same tunes played in several different settings right next to each other... interesting!)
I'm not terribly obsessive either. Once in a while, I'll spend an hour updating tags, but other than that, most of the work is pretty quick.
Things I can't be bothered to do:
1) Keep a favorites list
2) use Irish spelling for tune titles otherwise written in English (it's just me, but I find it really slow to type in all those accents and unfamiliar spellings).
3) Liner notes. I have the CD. If I want to read the liner notes, I'll go grab the CD. If I don't have the CD, I'll buy it.
# Posted on December 7th 2005 by Georgi
Re: i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
Godfather is a great program for editing the ID tags on MP3's and it's free. I would say that ideally it is best to put as much info as possible into the ID tags so that later when you are listening it won't drive you crazy wondering what it is.
I've gone for broke with a 40gig iRiver and so far have got to about 4gigs. But I can store photos as well on this
# Posted on December 7th 2005 by Donough
Re: i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
Don't have an i-pod so "The" has to be removed. That is always Task 1.
Example: Miss Monaghan, The Yew Tree, Tim Maloney's becomes:
Title: Miss Monaghan/Yew tree/Tim Maloney's
Artist: Kilfenora CB
Album: Fabulous Kilfenora Ceili Band
Genre: Reels
Trad songs are in my Genre "Song" and different time signatures e.g jig leading to a reel are in the Genre "Medley".
I have a Creative Zen Nomad, which allows me to create my own genres.
# Posted on December 7th 2005 by lukegarry
Re: i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
Oh my, a favourite subject . . .
" How specific have you made your track tags?? Do you distinguish vocals from instrumentals? Do you separate the "tune-learning" albums from the "listening" albums? (i.e. those old old trad albums that are really cool archives but not exactly the most pleasant dinner music) Mark slow airs so you can either find them or ignore them to suit the mood?"
I do make all those distinctions, but I make them in playlists, not in the track tags, and I'm not obsessive about applying them to all the cd's I've ripped.
*" How specific are you - if a track list has "5. Amy's Banjo Reels" do you dig into the liner notes and label it "5. Trip to Durrow/Wise Maid/the Poltergeist"?"
Yes. And then, if I'm ever listening and hear a tune I recognize under a different name, I'll put that name in parenthesis in the track list, precisely because I love doing a search for a particular tune title and getting to listen to lots of versions of it. I'm constantly updating track titles with alternate names and corections just to make the search function more powerful, important to me since I work with the slowdowner so much.
* "How complete is your collection? I've got a few albums that I love the tunes, but the band has clearly caved into pressure to keep a vocalist for crowd pleasing, and bless their hearts, the songs just stink... but somehow I can't bear to just not rip those tracks at all, it seems so... final... Do you bother with the "favorites" rankings? "
Until I start running out of space (I have the 40g) I'll rip the whole thing. I did finally start bothering with the favorites ranking, so I could make a "5 star" smart playlist and not always have to scroll through the album list to find the 4 or 5 I listen to most.
" Does it work, or do you have a system that you put in place but haven't really kept up with? "
Yes it works and it's done wonders for my playing. About playlists: I have a "jigs" playlist, and "hornpipe" and "polka" and "slide" playlists, and listening to those has helped me get a more intuitive sense of how the tune types are supposed to sound apart from the minor differences that can be notated in sheet music. I have a "kerry" playlist and a "west clare" playlist, and listening to those lets me form my own opinion of how much those players do or don't have in common. Then there's the "tunes to learn" playlist and the "sean nos" playlist and the "airs" playlist. I've also put together playlists of certain musicians, since sometimes just isolating the artist in the 'artist' list will give funny results.
I do change the "genre" listing to be precise - world, celtic, and folk don't do it for me.
I prefer irish, scottish, norwegian, cuban, old-time . . .
It did take some time to set it all up, and I've never managed to get through the whole library like that, just the really good stuff, but it's been very worth it for me. No matter where I'm stranded, as long as I have my iPod with me, I can be using that time to learn more about the music I love -- listening and thinking about what makes an individual fiddler or piper stand out, what's the difference between how player x treats slides vs. jigs, how do this person's ornaments compare to that persons ornaments, etc etc. I'm somebody who can get really annoyed at forces beyond my control causing me to lose hours of my life (a late flight, for instance) and this is a great tool for keeping my calm in those situations and even feeling good about what I've accomplised.
# Posted on December 8th 2005 by Lia Zito
Re: i-tunes, track tags, MP3 organization, etc.
Awesome!
Thanks all, esp. Lia! There's good advice here, and it'll just be the challenge to get enough of my stuff in shape that I can see how I like my system.
# Posted on December 9th 2005 by concertinette