Wednesday, May 5, 2010
I've descended into a kind of madness. My compulsive desire for imposing order on things -- the same one that has been an asset in the academic domain -- can be a liability in my personal life. Take, for example, my mp3 collection: a completist, and also carrying an inordinate amount of nostalgia for the 80s, I long ago made it a goal to have a copy of every song that might have been broadcast on AM radio on American Top 40 during the 80s - often without any regard to whether I like the song.
Of course, as my library expanded, so did the task of making sure that the ID3 tags on my collection were correct and complete. My compulsion has lead me to spend a shameful amount of time on Amazon, looking up release dates for albums, or finding the album on which a single first appeared (it annoys me to have the album entry for half my library listed as permutations of the words "80s", "hits" and "greatest").
Before this week, I would have balked at the idea of going to the trouble of obtaining album art. After all, embedding the images makes the files bigger. And anyways, I don't use an iPod, and if I did, I wouldn't be staring at it while listening to my music. That was before I used Windows Media Player to transfer some of my files to my Sansa mp3 player, a process that mysteriously and automatically found and embedded the correct album art for about a fifth of my files, and set the album art for anything released before 1985 to the cover of Styx's Greatest Hits album.
That's really weird. I don't even have anything in my collection from that album. I guess that speaks to what's going on in the minds of Microsoft developers: the only thing worth listening to prior to '86 was Styx. I wonder what Apple would have done?
So anyways, seeing that album art come up in my media player was starting to give me an eye tic. So whereas other, more better adjusted people might be spending their time on the internet surfing for porn (link does not go to porn, but if you're at work, wear headphones), I have instead been using various tools to surf for album covers.
1 comments:
I too have had this compulsion - but it has been limited to the stuff in my collection that I might actually play on my iPod, which is a limited subset of the collection that seems to be getting smaller. Annoyingly, iTunes *will* get album art for you, but it *won't* actually put the art in the id3 tag as far as I can tell... it just keeps it someplace so it knows about it but the file has nothing to do with it... which is annoying as I have the habit of changing computers now and again, destroying all that iTunes data. And the tags are not complete.
Post a Comment