My iTunes Obsession

The image above represents just the music I have in my iTunes library. I've seen larger, but I keep stuff I will actual listen to. My goal is to listen to every song at least once a year.

I have completed a huge project with my iTunes library. Last year, I was loaned a full iTunes library from a friend. Rougly 150GB of content to go through and pillage. A lot of it was just garbage. I ended up keeping only about 6GB of music from it. Keep in mind that it contained both music and videos and I only kept music.

The iTunes folder, when I started the project on 7/26/06, had roughly 5000 or 6000 subfolders to go through. I just finished it today, almost a year later.

I ended up adding about 1140 new songs from this library to mine. I'm very anal about adding music to my collection. Everything has tags that are as accurate as the data on allmusic.com. If album artwork exists, I add it to the track.

I feel a certain sense of accomplishment now. Ahhh...

Awww, fuck.

My iPod just took a shit all over itself. It thinks it has no music, and iTunes agrees. Just great for this to happen with two weeks left here.

All the music's there, but now I have to manually copy it off of the iPod back onto the computer from /Volumes/Swishy McJackass/iPod_Control/Music

Yes, my iPod is named Swishy McJackass.

How big is yours?

Did the subject get you to look?

My iTunes Library size:
8479 songs - 27 days, 20 minutes, and 2 seconds - 37.77 GB

1346 tracks added in the last month alone. (Blame Nicole for most of those.)

Just got done sorting all of the new Nine Inch Nails stuff that got added, and then promptly went and bought most of it (used, of course).

Nicole and I share the iTunes library on a disk with permissions disabled. This allows us to both add music to the library and see it in our own separate user accounts (Mac OS X 10.3, by the way). The iTunes Library is shared, but we have our own preferences for the iTunes app itself. We use the grouping feature to separate tracks by username. It works pretty well, but the downside is that only one of us can really rate music. And, since I already rate everything, Nicole misses out.

Breaking it down a little bit further (I'm a bit obsessive about this, can't you tell?) yields these stats:

38 1-star songs
594 2-star songs
2225 3-star songs
1790 4-star songs
678 5-star songs

5199 AAC encoded tracks
3279 MP3 encoded tracks
1 Audible encoded track

692 tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store (mostly by me)

251 songs have been played in the last day
2358 songs have been played in the last month

Smart playlists are cool.

One cold, calculating motherfucker.

iPod mini - 4GB of storage - $249
iPod - 15GB of storage - $299
iLife - $49 (downloads of iPhoto and iMovie no longer offered)

It's about time that they put the hurt on users for iLife, and I'll happily shell out $49 for iPhoto's speed improvements (it's unbearably slow on a dual 1.42GHz G4 with nearly 2000 photos). GarageBand looks cool, but I'm not much of a musician... playing with loops in Soundtrack is fun, though. I'm still happy to get updates for all the other apps as I use them all. iMovie's currently exporting a video to VCD so I can send it to my Speed TV-less friend up North.

As for the iPod mini, interesting concept, but not quite what I was expecting. I thought it'd be more square-shaped than it really is. As a coworker of mine commented - iPod mini price drops could happen if Apple starts selling a lot of 15GB iPods (and subsequently stops selling 4GB iPod minis). Oh, and Phil Schiller (Apple's Sales/Marketing VP) mentioned that Apple hasn't ruled out the 2GB iPod mini. Interesting.

I'm still in love with my 1st generation (1G) iPod, but the announcement that Alpine would be coming out with a car unit with an iPod control interface might actually convince me to update to a 3G iPod (or use Nicole's 3G iPod in the car ;-).

El Gato's new EyeTV stuff looks cool. They added quite a lot of features in their newer models - MPEG-2, Digital Satellite support, and HDTV. Note that each feature comes in its own unit, but all use a Firewire interface. Unfortunately, there's not one über unit that supports it all. Still, it's better than MPEG-1 from the original USB EyeTV.

Hrm, what else... good on Ten Technology for coming out with a Bluetooth audio interface for the iPod. I'm curious as to how good it sounds. And Griffin's playing catchup now with Belkin as it released a voice recorder for the 3G iPods.

Ha ha!

Nicole forwarded this to me. Ha ha seemed appropriate for all the naysayers two years ago:

http://homepage.mac.com/danbirchall/iblog/C5324992 /E809036430/index.html

This is a bit late, but I didn't want to post something in a 300+ comment article that'd just get lost in the clutter.

I have to confess - I originally put down the iPod when it first came out. $300 for 5GB?! WTF! MP3 CDs RULE! Of course, now I own one (it was a gift, heh) and it's the best damn music player I've ever used. I have some experience with MP3 players - 1st generation Philips Expanium and RioVolt SP90 were the others I've owned. Both served their purpose very well at the time, but I could never get a good mix of music on a 700MB CD.

Back when the iPod first came out, iTunes didn't have a smart playlist feature. Once Apple added that feature to iTunes and the iPod was integrated with that, the allure of the iPod + iTunes increased. Really, if you're on the fence about it, do yourself a favor and at least try one out. And bring your favorite headphones - the stock headphones blow. I'd recommend the Sony Fontopia in-ear headphones... extremely comfortable and excellent bass for such a small phone.

So anyway, if you like music and you have lots of MP3s/AACs on your computer, get a damn iPod already.

Coming soon: If you like TV, get a TiVo. Trust me ;-)

Cool iTunes stuff....

So, since iTunes 4 came out, I've been experimenting a little bit more with smart playlists and converting my lower-quality MP3s to higher-quality AAC files. I found out some cool things yesterday:

1. I created a smart playlist called iPod playlist. I told it to populate the playlist with songs that never had been played before, rated between 3-5 stars, with a maximum playlist size of 4675MB, chosen randomly. Why the size? Simple, for my iPod. That's about as many MP3s I can fit onto it. So, when I play my iPod, the play count for the song will be incremented on the iPod and automagically synched up with my iTunes playlist. Very cool. And because the smart playlist is dynamic, it'll constantly give me new stuff to listen to until I've listed to all of my music. When that happens, I'll configure the playlist to give me stuff I haven't heard in six months or so, keeping it still very fresh.

2. If you're re-ripping CDs to AAC format, replacing the MP3s you have, and the ID3 tags match up with what's already in your library, you'll be given the option to Replace Existing songs. Do it - it preserves the original creation date, play counts, ratings, and any album art you might've added to the file. The only thing it doesn't preserve is the genre, but that's easily fixed.

I'm VERY impressed at how iTunes manages the library. I hope all those Windows users get a good version of iTunes at the end of the year that does all of this stuff.

VBR vs. iPod

I completely forgot to write about one of the biggest problems I was having with the iPod. It seems that the iPod has a problem with certain variable bitrate (VBR) MP3s. If you find that either iTunes or the iPod mis-reports the total track length for a VBR MP3, or that it cuts off a VBR MP3 in the middle of playback, you'll either need to repair its VBR headers with a Windows-only program called VBRFIX or you'll have to re-encode your MP3s. Rather than trying to get a Windows box to do a bunch of crunching on shoddy MP3s, I just decided to re-encode a good portion of my MP3s. I noticed that the MP3s that iPod choked on were ones encoded by N2MP3. So, I went through my entire collection and re-encoded those files. I don't know how many I re-encoded, but it took me the better part of three days. I'm glad I'm done. Eeesh. I'll be glad not to have to do that again.

Merry Christmas to me!

The iPod came today. It's supposedly a refurbished unit, but it's in perfect condition. It's a 5GB iPod, and I'm very happy. I managed to get 786 songs onto it, with 64MB of free space. Not too bad. Now I wait for the PodPac to get here, so I don't have to worry about it getting badly scratched. It looks buff as hell, but I know how badly they scratch (especially the very shiny stainless steel back) and I want to keep mine beautiful.

So far so good with it. Thank you, Nicole :-)

iPod-errific

Just a quick note to say that, hopefully, I'll be getting an iPod. Assuming FedEx doesn't find some way to fuck it up during shipment, it should be here by the time I get home from work tomorrow. Apple was running a special on 5GB refurbished iPods, so I figured I'd snatch one up, on my girlfriend's dime of course. It's her X-mas gift for me...

New music to listen to...

So I'm sitting in front of my iMac, listening to the new Dave Matthews Band album. Not too shabby. This reminds me of the last DMB concert I went to. My girlfriend was under the impression that there were going to be a lot of hippie-like folk there, a la Grateful Dead. I told her to expect a lot of preppies and yuppies. And I was right. She was bummed, but at least the concert was good. It might have been really cold that night at the The Gorge Ampitheater, but it was nice to finally get to see them play live.

So, this week I made a little trip over to Half.com, to get some music. For anybody who wants to get CDs cheap, this is the way to go. I managed to get Enya-Watermark, NIN-Downward Spiral, NIN-broken, and Live-Mental Jewelry for a whopping $18.55 with shipping charges. Pretty nice, eh?

So far, I've received all of the CDs, except for Mental Jewelry. And, one of the ones I had ordered was canceled. Oh well, there're always other sellers to buy from. I cranked up Enya today and really let the subwoofer have at it. The reports of copius amounts of bass in Watermark were not exaggerated, and I enjoyed the floor-shaking, window rattling sounds of Orinoco Flow and Cursum Perficio.

Well, back to listening. I've got enough MP3s now to fill up another CD. I should really get an iPod.