[mythtv-users] MythMusic -how do you organize your music?

[Stephen Tait]

At 20:14 14/07/2004 +0200, you wrote:
>Stephen,
>
>thanks a lot for your answer. It contains a lot of good thoughts. The most 
>important hint to me is the "directory" setting for browsing. I simply 
>overlooked it all the time I have spent in the settings...

I missed it first time too, but I'm sure as heck glad some genius thought 
to include it :)


>Naming the files correctly is quite easy: I am using a Mac as my "main" 
>computer and there are some great scripts for iTunes that rename files 
>using a given schema. I then copy the files over to the Linux box. For 
>sure there are similar tools for PCs.

I used a combination of perl rename, Tagger (windows frontend to Tag) and 
EZtag (which are all incredibly fine tools), but it was still a damned 
arduous task. Alot of my early tracks were random downloads off the 
internet, which tend to be named in non-helpful ways 
(01-Unknown-Untitled.mp3 being one of my faves) and with missing, 
incomplete or incorrect tagging information (like extracts from 
compilations were by the artist "Various", singing a track called 
"Underworld-Tin_there", making automated renames practically impossible. 
This was further confounded by the fact that I'd already made some 
half-assed attempts at tagging things, including putting things like 
tracklists into the "comment" box in the ID3v2 tag for dance mixes, which I 
didn't want to lose.

My biggest bugbear (working primarily on a windows system at the time, for 
my sins) was doing a retag from the filename via regexp. but somehow 
inserting the question marks that windows can't handle. And then there was 
the unicode the Linux couldn't seem to handle (since partially remedied). Argh.

I made lots of mistakes, but thankfully I keep my music collection on both 
my workstation, and it's periodically rsync'd to the fileserver, so 
whenever I messed up I could just grab the old copy and start again.

All I can say is, thank heavens for ogg vorbis and ogg flac. The tag format 
is vastly superior to ID3, and doesn't muck up quite so often. 
Unfortunately, my sole online music provider these days (bleep.com - long 
live indie labels!) still only provide MP3's, although they say they've 
been considering vorbis and FLAC if they think people are prepared to pay a 
bit extra for them.


>Just as you I think symbolic links are less confusing than hard ones. I 
>will try to set some up to get even more comfort choosing my music.
>
>So now I will happily organize my files...

Have a nice month or so's spring cleaning :)

I guess it's only a matter of time before a database driven filesystem is 
introduced which'll let us organise music much better. Hopefully.