Warning: this is long and quite geeky.

I’ve always been a little bit obsessive about music consumption. I love records and I have a large mp3 collection. They suit different purposes – and the best way I describe the difference is that I say that mp3s are for having on, while records are for listening to.

But that overlooks the fact that I will quite often pay a good deal of attention to my digital music files. And of course, music consumption is about far more than just buying and listening to music. Anyone who’s ever put their records in alphabetical order will tell you that.

So while I obsess more over my vinyl, and treasure it more highly than my digital music collection, there’s a hell of a lot more music in the mp3 collection than the record collection and I take it pretty seriously. Roughly 5,000 albums in the iTunes library – and it needed a bit of a spring clean.

Phase one: Consolidation
First of all, thanks to various computer crashes and changes of system, the files were in a mess. There were thousands of duplicates, a whole lot of albums with tracks missing (thanks, Windows operating system!) and a whole bunch of individual tracks I’d downloaded off mp3 blogs in the past.

So first job was to make sure I had all of the music that had not been lost to the vagaries of Windows back into the system. I’d taken DVD backups of what remained of my collection after the last serious crash, so for the past couple of months, Jake and I have been importing the tracks back in as and when we remembered. This, of course, created a whole lot more duplicates.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone through the iTunes collection removing these duplicates, deleting partial albums and orphan tracks. I now only have full albums. I don’t mind duplicate tracks, of course. A song can appear on an album and on a best-of compilation and that’s absolutely fine. It’s when I have three copies of the best-of compilation that I get busy with the delete key.

Of course, because of audio fidelity – and because hard drive space is not the issue it was for me when I started ripping my CDs 4 years ago – I now favour the higher bit rate files. If I have an album at 128k and at 320k, it’s the former that gets binned.

Incidentally, I’ve said it before but it’s worth mentioning again – this is also a physical storage space solution. CDs get discarded once they’re in the system unless the object has particular personal significance (gift, autograph, a mention in the liner notes, etc.).

Phase one is complete

Phase two: Primary metadata

It’s important that the metadata is correct. Name of song. Name of album. Name of artist. Spelling, capitalisation, and naming conventions are all important. The Artist field on a single track cannot be ‘Various’ and shouldn’t be ‘Unknown’. If I don’t know who the artist was, I go digging and I find out.

There’s an exception to this. A rare compilation of rare music put together by Quantic for which I’ve only been able to locate about half of the track titles, let alone artists. If it was anything else, I’d delete it because it messes with my ordered system – but it’s just awesome.

Oh yeah – I’ll usually happily delete music I like if the metadata is irresolvable. My music collection activities prioritise systems and conceptual mapping over aesthetics of the audio itself. I don’t tend to keep records without sleeves either. Why would you?

Consistency is also important. If I have albums by ‘Cinematic Orchestra’, ‘The Cinematic Orchestra’, ‘Cinematic Orchestra, The’ and ‘Cinematic Orch.’ – then I’ll make sure they’re all called the same thing. This practice also reveals some more duplicates. I had the following albums:

Every Day by Cinematic Orchestra
Everyday by The Cinematic Orchestra

Clearly the same recording. I made my choice (easy – one was at 320k and the other at 192k) and I rationalised my collection a little further. Changed the name to what I consider to be the correct one – and the universe was put right again.

Phase two is complete

Phase three: Secondary metadata

Okay – so my music collection only contains full albums. There’s only one copy of each. The key information about those albums is well-presented and ordered. I can sort the collection by album and artist. But there are three other bits of metadata that are important to me and still need work.

1) Genre
I currently have music listed under 142 different genres. This is the unfortunate side effect of user-submitted database information on CDDB – that clever thing that iTunes checks with for song titles when you put a CD into your computer. I can’t make sense of 142 genres, and – in fact – genre barriers are so grey and mutable that they don’t really help. I mean, where do you draw the line between Alternative Rock and Indie? Hip Hop and Rap?

My solution here is to use the genre tag in a different way. I think of it in terms of sections in a large record shop. The classical stuff all goes together in one section with things ordered alphabetically regardless of whether it’s Baroque or Romantic period music. Pop and Rock go together. Electronica and Ambient. Soul, Funk & R&B. Folk & Country.

You may disagree with my compartmentalisation – but this is my conceptual record shop and I’m its only customer, so I can live with that. I have 25 sections. And I’m working on filing all of those albums into these sections. An album cannot be split across sections. Even if track one is clearly hip hop and track two is clearly jazz – it’s the album that gets filed. This is purely in the interests of time-saving and tidiness.

2) Date
The year in which the album was released – not the year in which the track was recorded. This is a purely practical solution to the problem of retrospective compilations. I don’t have time to go and research each individual track on a Prince or an Elvis best-of album. It does make the field a little less useful as a search tool – I mean, it’s nonsense to have a Beatles album from 1996. What does that mean? But let’s not be too fussy. I may be obsessive, but I’m not a complete perfectionist…

3) Artwork
All albums must have artwork. Simple as that. If no artwork exists for an album (for instance, a compilation made by a friend, or a radio mix put together by a DJ), then I improvise. A photo of the person who made me the compilation will do the trick. But these exceptions are the vast minority. If it’s an album, typically there’s album artwork and I’m going to find it and put it on so it will display nicely on my computer and iPod.

This is a bit of a research job, because I have a lot of albums that are not on Amazon or in the iTunes Music Store. I rely on other music fans (particularly for the NZ records) who have scanned and uploaded images.

There’s another piece of secondary metadata that I used to pay attention to but have now given up on. It’s the Comments field. I once listed the record label on which the album was released in this field. I don’t care anymore. Too much like hard work and I’d only managed about a third of my collection. Besides, that field is now used by a piece of external software… which I’ll come to shortly.

Phase three is in progress. Might take some time…

Phase four: Volume

There’s no point going to all this trouble making the information about the music consistent and nicely presented and not spend some time working on the music itself. It has to be a pleasurable experience to listen to on the computer, the portable player and the home stereo. And one of the biggest problems has to do with consistency of volume.

Some things have ended up on the computer at a whisper, and others at ear-bleeding levels. I’ve tried a number of systems to make a good sounding, consistent listening experience that doesn’t have me reaching for the volume knob every second song. Some of these systems have introduced distortion and others have solved the problem by turning everything down. Not ideal.

So I’ve found a three-tiered software approach that makes me happy.

Now, if you’re a hi-fi nut, chances are this is going to make you crazy. I’m not a fanatic about the Loudness War. A little bit of compression – especially in non high-fidelity listening environments (eg: headphones on the bus) – can be a welcome thing. Dynamic range is not the only important thing in music listening.

But do bear in mind that I do my ‘proper listening’ on vinyl, seated at one point of an equilateral triangle between speakers positioned at head height. I get my music fix without the evils of hyper-compression. Mostly jazz records from the 60s. I know what the issue is – and for digital music, I don’t think it matters as much as some people do.

Here’s the software I use:

1) iTunes Sound Check
This, by itself, is next to useless. It looks at the peak level of the tracks and adjusts so they’re at the same height. But it has to be turned on for this system to work. You get to this by going into Preferences > Playback in iTunes itself. More info about Sound Check.

2) iVolume
A piece of third party software that uses the iTunes Sound Check tag, but which actually calculates the perceived volume of the track and adjusts accordingly. You can adjust albums as a whole, which is a good idea, because it keeps the relative levels between tracks as they were intended, but still makes all albums seem to be at the same consistent volume. Very nice.

This is the bit of software that uses the comments field. It writes a little thing in there that tells your iPod to play it at the correct volume. Pretty clever – and far more useful than my previous ambition of having all of the label information in the comments field.

Good bit of software. You have to pay a little – but I recommend you download iVolume.

3) Volume Logic
An iTunes plugin that actually uses multiband audio compression, limiting and Auto Gain Control to make the music sound consistently bright, loud, punchy or just at a decent, consistent level.

Audio purists will be horrified at the thought, but audio purists aren’t listening to mp3s on computer speakers – even half-decent JBL ones like the ones I use. This is the secret sauce – the magic ingredient that makes it all sound great (relatively speaking). I love it to bits. Download Volume Logic (Mac).

Phase four is in progress. iVolume is still processing.

While I’m sorting out these four phases of my digital music library organisation, there are several other considerations that are related to this activity that I need to be thinking about. One of them is, of course, about the discovery and acquisition of music. That’s a whole different blog post in itself – and this one’s plenty long enough as it is. But I thought a quick mention of backup, networking and portability was in order in this context.

Backup

Having gone to all this trouble, you’d want to know that your music is safe from accidental erasure through computer mishap. Hard drives fail. Trust me on this. So I use SuperDuper – a backup system that I think is superior to the Mac Time Machine system – though don’t test me on that. I use it because I like it, not because I’ve done exhaustive comparative research.

Every night, at around 3am, the computer whirrs into action and makes a duplicate of itself on an external 1TB hard drive. If the worst happens, then I still have a completely up to date copy of everything.

Actually – the computer frying itself is not the worst, is it? Fire or break-in could dispense with my computer and my backup in one go. Off-site backup is the next thing to investigate. But in the meantime, I feel broadly confident that the music collection’s not going anywhere.

Networking

Of course, sometimes you don’t want to sit at your computer in order to listen to music. And nor do you want messy wires lying all over the place. My simple solution is to use an Airport Express. This little device, for Mac or PC allows you to stream your music wirelessly to any stereo in the house straight from your computer.

My computer is upstairs, my stereo is downstairs. I press play upstairs and then I go and listen to music. Not convenient enough? I open my laptop, connect to my main iTunes library over the wireless network, choose songs and press play from the comfort of the sofa. Laptop acts as remote control that sucks music from the big hard drive upstairs and sends it to the little white box attached to the back of the stereo. Nice.

Portability

And finally – to take the music with me when I go, I conform to the stereotype and use an iPod. I don’t have a large one any more. There’s no point. There exists no iPod onto which I can put all of my music. So I go for pure convenience, and use a Nano.

I’m never going to be away from my computer long enough to get bored with 8GB worth of music, and it’s so slim and tiny, it’s actually genuinely a pocket device. Like jeans pocket – unlike the larger iPods (Classic, iPod Touch, etc) which kind of have to have a particular type of pocket in order to fit.

Of course, you can throw away the headphones that come with it and get something that does a bit of external noise blocking. I don’t have expensive Bose noise-reduction headphones (one day…) but the cheap Koss earplug headphones get rid of a substantial amount of background noise for pennies. I like them a lot.

You freak, Dubber…

So yeah – that’s how I spend my spare time. I don’t build model airplanes or collect stamps. I don’t make intricate buildings out of matchsticks or write down bus numbers on a clipboard. I am a music consumer – and music consumption is not just about purchasing and playing. In fact, it keeps me pretty busy.

So I guess that makes me a hobbyist when it comes to this stuff. And like all hobbyists, I find it interesting, and so I quite like talking about my hobby, hence the length of this blog post. But my suspicion is that there are other hobbyists out there who like talking about it too. And that’s even more interesting.

So if that’s you – how do you consume music?