My Music Collection

I don't like collecting things. But I like music. Radio is not interactive enough for me. I think within a few years from now (2008) the problem will be solved and we'll all get free/donation-based fully customizable media streams. Until then, I'm not too ashamed to keep a few dozens of gigs of downloaded music. Legally, I own some of it, but only a fraction.

Organization

• /usr/music
  • Artist Name
    • YYYY-Album Name
      • NN-Track Name
• Formats
  • mp3
  • flac (preferable)
  • ogg/vorbis
  • other: aac/m4a

The only way to get into /usr/music is through Picard - the MusicBrainz tagger. If I'm too lazy to add an album to MusicBrainz, it stays in a grabage dump and is not easily available for playback. MusicBrainz is a major PITA to contribute to, but the developers are working on it. Adding a couple of albums is usually a good lesson in perseverance.

Playback

I currently use cmus, but thanks to Picard's careful tagging, all the jukebox players I've tried (amarok, exaile, ...) have no problem providing me with great user experience.

Maintenance

Picard

I really have to write some perl scripts to automate these tasks...

Data in MusicBrainz is always changing. Improving, usually. Once in a while, you have to rescan your whole collection and get all the new metadata. Since MusicDNS database is growing, too, these rescans can be accompanied by mass puid submissions, which are always nice (let's skip the "proprietory bastards" comments).

In theory it's as easy as loading /usr/music/ into picard, getting a cup of coffee (or a few), then hitting "submit puids" and "save". In practice, picard happens to be a buggy, memory-leaking python bastard. The last time around, I had to split the collection into four folders, and feed them to Picard one by one. It worked.

Flac

Flac 1.2.x improved compression efficiency. Fortunately, re-encoding with flac is as easy as

• find . -name \*.flac | xargs flac -f -8

Metadata is left untouched.

• 1.1->1.2 recompression saved 1.9% space (while adding replay gain metadata)

Replay-gain

I don't like the idea of per-album gains yet.

• flac -f -8 --replay-gain
• metaflac --add-replay-gain
• mp3gain -r -k
• ogg...
• aac/m4a?

Tags

• decided to convert all mp3's to UTF-8 id3v2 2.4
  • most tools don't support it
  • libid3tag does, and hence - Picard and musicpd
  • mid3v2 does, through mutagen
  • find . -name \*mp3 -print0|xargs -0 mid3v2 -C -s
    • did the trick
  • I would prefer tags at the end of file (id3v2.4 allows it)
    • but even newest tools are unsure about it
  • dumbfounded to learn there's no good id3v2.4 implementation for perl

Contents

I don't keep what I don't like for very long.

• Original Soundtracks
  • Mainstream
    • Hans Zimmer, ...
  • Japanese
    • Yoko Kanno, ...
    • Anime
      • Macross, Ranma, Final Fantasy, ...
      • Studio Ghibli, ...
    • Classics
      • Kurosawa, ...
• Non-Original Soundtracks (mediocre compilations)
• Pop, Rock, ...
  • Roxette
    • Per Gessle
    • Marie Fredriksson
    • Son of a Plumber
    • Gyllene Tider
    • Micke Bolyos
  • ABBA, Ace of Base, M2M, ...
  • Scorpions, ...
  • 2 Unlimited, Haddaway, ...
• Classics
• Other