One of the great joys of record collecting is the process of sitting down and sorting out. That scene in High Fidelity with John Cusack sitting surrounded by piles and piles of records is not some writer’s flight of fancy. That’s what we do.
We lost some of that with CDs. The clack of plastic is nowhere near as satisfying as the sensory pleasure that large piles of vinyl and cardboard can give you.
Whether alphabetical, chronological or autobiographical, the process of organising a collection, based on the album (rather than the song) as the individual unit of representation, is a time-consuming pleasure for the hobbyist that should not be underestimated as part of the music consumption process.
For the past week or so, I’ve been using the new version of iTunes. Previous versions have until now been what I consider to be the best of the digital music collection management systems. iTunes 7 is both a great leap forward and a real treat to the traditional record collector.
Although online music shopping has threatened the notion of the album as the primary unit of purchase, iTunes 7 re-prioritises the album as the core unit of consumption.
Album artwork is given pride of place — and in what I consider to be the main view of the three offered, long lists of songs are replaced by album groupings separated by a space and a line.
The fan in me has taken this as an opportunity to completely readdress my music collection: something that happens for various reasons every few years.
Having made safety backups all my music onto DVD-ROM, I erased the hard drive on which all of my music was stored. I set about re-adding the music from those DVDs, paying particular attention to the completeness of albums, ensuring I had artwork for each, and tidying up all of the metadata tags.
My first issue was one of genre. I have reduced the number of genres represented in my collection from hundreds down to 15. Those 15 are extremely broad categories, but if I am to play a random mix of music from within the genre, they will at least sound thematically linked.
The next issue was one of selection. Over the past few years, I have accumulated a great many sample tracks, partial albums, and odd bits and pieces that don’t fit into my new categorisation. I have simply left these off my new iTunes library. I still have them of course, but they can remain on the backup DVDs until needed.
I’m also going through and making sure I have the dates correct for each of these albums. The metadata tags that an MP3 collection provides is a surrogate for sleeve liner notes. Having that information correct not only allows you to sort your collection chronologically, or even chronologically within each artist (which are then sorted alphabetically), it also gives you little bits of information on which to hang knowledge about timelines, career trajectories and likely influences.
Then there was the issue of bit rate. About 2 1/2 years ago, I embarked upon the project of digitising all of my CDs. At the time, space was a premium, and the conditions under which I would be listening suggested to me that 128 kb per second would be a sufficient sample rate for the vast majority of my collection. Those works that I enjoyed for the audiophile qualities were ripped at 256 or 320.
I should have listened to Richard Phelps, who warned me at the time that 128 would be ultimately unsatisfying. He was absolutely correct. Sourcing higher bit rate versions of those albums is now part of the process of reintegrating them into my collection.
Finally, I’m going back through every one of those files on a piece of software called MP3 Gain. It’s an open source bit of software that sets a standard output level of each of those songs so you’re not forever running to the stereo to turn it down when a particularly loud track comes on. I thoroughly recommend it – but I do warn you: leave it on the default settings.
The whole process has been a lot of work, and I’m less than a tenth of the way through it so far. But it’s the same kind of work and the same kind of satisfaction (though admittedly to a lesser degree) that sitting down on a wooden floor surrounded by piles of records will give the music collector.
It helps refamiliarise you with your collection, brings to light forgotten treasures, builds a framework for understanding taxonomies and connections, and generally deepens and enriches the enjoyment of the music itself.
Above all, the new version of iTunes re-establishes the album as a serious unit of consumption. People still seem to like to buy them, and people still like to make them. The Apple people seem to have finally factored this in when updating their music playback and management software.
It was already the best — but now it leaves the others in the dust. And not simply because it’s given me an obsessive hobby activity to occupy my attention for the next few months…
I think you might be in a minority, not just in wanting to meticulously organise your music collection but also in having the time and patience to do it.
I’m also not entirely convinced about the value of the concept of albums. I think albums exist largely as a way of packaging music into a convenient-sized “chunk”. This has been enforced by the medium, but holds true to a lesser extent in online music stores – because of the effort required to find music you actually like, it’s more rewarding to be able to buy a decent-sized portion when you find it. As you suggest, it’s also a useful unit for organising and navigating your collection – and as such, it’s odd how media libraries have largely ignored it without providing a usable replacement.
For many artists though, albums can be particularly inconvenient. First, they’re quite long, and “EPs” are considered the album’s poor cousin, perhaps in the same stable as a demo tape. So they have to record a large amount of material, which takes a lot of time, effort and possibly money – and who knows if their fans will like it or will even remember them by the time it’s finally released.
Also, musical genius generally only happens in small quantities, which is then stretched out into a track that’s a few minutes long. Stretch any further and the stretch-marks are going to show, so instead bands have to wait for the tracks to collect up until the ensemble becomes a length that suits the medium (or the customer’s exectation). That “collection” then has to put into some kind of aesthetically-pleasing order, a challenge in itself. Even more painfully, some tracks will probably have to be binned just because they don’t “fit”.
Your post reaks of nostalgia-laden vinyl. Those days are over, Dubber, leave your rose-tinted spectacles on the gramaphone and look at all the ways that computers can improve your music experience by forgetting all that outmoded junk.
I like it a lot too Andrew but there seem to be some serious bugs in the code which piss me off. It loses my library from time to time, and it freezes on after I bring my system out of hibernation, forcing me to restart iTunes. It also seems to have developed a playback crackle from that comes and goes and was not there before. The same tracks played via other players don’t have the crackle.
Me thinks that Apple may have done a MS and released a program before it was absolutely ready.
hi Dubber. so what kind of files are you now running? surely not MP3s… what is it, c’mon? better than 128kbps, is it as good as CD? afraid I’m not actually techie enough to know what 128 equates to, worse than CD right? which is I think 44.1khz, 16-bit, eh.
am not sold on the Apple music solution, gimme big fat files that sound as good as the albums they come from, ta. though apparently one can set the ratio to full size? yet nobody does…
cheers
RW
What a shemozzle. Until I read this entry, I was blissfully ignorant about iTunes 7. But now I’ve downloaded it and have experienced firsthand all its awesomeness.
My new project was going to be entering in all the missing album titles for all the lone tracks, but then I realised the power in being able to sort by year, so that’s going in too.
But what’s worse is I’m really looking forward to doing it.
Nice to know I’m not the only one who tags my tunes… We must surely be the most anal iTuners in the wild west… ;)
Hi Andrew
Loved your piece and it came just a few days after we were reading a piece about record collecting and one about the iPod in the graduate class.
I’m struck by how much the ‘old’ media like records are being vigorously remediated in the ‘new’ media of the computer age. All those pictures of record covers and the labels of the discs themselves in programs like iTunes and audioblogs respectively. It’s also great to hear the scratchy vinyl from old 45s, even on an MP3.
I have to say I’ve always been a singles and compilation/mix fan rather than an album afficionado, so I’m not that invested in the music industry wanting me to buy albums.
I’ve really got into audioblogs over the last few months. They’re a new way of contextualizing music, and potentially offer different ways of collecting, categorizing and writing about music that escape the cliches and tired postures of music journalism.
However the more I listen to MP3s, even when my laptop is hooked up to the stereo, the more the sound quality of most of them bugs me. And I’m no hi-fi audiophile. They just sound super tinny and bass rumbly. Top and bottom ends dominate and the richness is lost. Compression sucks in this respect. I guess I’m going to have to import all that stuff again with a 320 rate if possible. How does one find the time though? I guess it’s analogous to back in the day getting a chrome cassette rather than your standard ferrous oxide number to record that really great album from the local library that you couldn’t afford to buy or couldn’t find.
I’m pleased that sites like bleep.com offer high quality MP3s without DRM and hope that’s the way of the future. Some bloggers on the other hand justify the low sound quality of the MP3s they temporarily post by arguing that it will encourage listeners to go and buy the high quality CD. Hmmm.. Not sure about those ‘worthy ethics’.