Music Genres on Google Squared

Google Squared is a new Google Labs application for displaying search data in a more organized fashion than those regular ol’ search results.  For music collectors, this tool has the potential of being very useful for discovering musical genres.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to add more Rock to your collection.  A Google Squared search results for “Rock Music Genres” returns with many suggestions in a very organized view.

Having this detailed view saves you some time in cherry-picking through search results.  In a well-organized view you get to see all Rock sub-genres.  You’ll be able to tell from this view which genres you are missing from your music collection.

Good Music is Good Music

From time to time, I may have my music player on shuffle while a group of people listen to it.  Every so often, a song will come up that will make everybody in the room look at me with a quizzical look.  What just happened?  All of a sudden a song considered by many as “not cool” or “cheezy” happened to be next in the shuffle.  My reaction is always the same: hey “good music is good music”.  This is something I have learned to expect when playing my music of every single genre in random fashion for groups of people.

Here is someone else explaining the same situation:

Breaking News (or Twitter notifications) on My MP3 Player.

I consider myself a news junkie.  If there is some breaking news occurring, I want to know what it is, immediately.  While on my computer, I get breaking news alerts by subscribing to @cnnbrk and @breakingnewson on Twitter.  Even when I am out-and-about, I have breaking news sent to my mobile phone via SMS text messages.  The one place where I have no access to breaking news is while driving.  If I get an SMS text message notification, I will not read it because it is very distracting to keep checking my messages while driving.

The technology I have in mind that will fix this problem is very simple: include in internet-enabled MP3 players the ability to speak breaking news as they happen.  The process will work as follows.  I am driving down the highway listening to my MP3 player.  When breaking news is occurring somewhere in the world, my music player will be notified.  When the unit gets notified, it will gradually lower the volume of the music that is playing and then speak the breaking news to me, preferably a short snippet ala Twitter.  After the breaking news has been spoken, the music volume will return to its original state.  Technology-wise, it seems very simple.  So simple that I think something like this may have already been created.  Anyone?

To extend on this idea a bit further.  Maybe I can send selected twitter notifications to my MP3 unit and not only will I get breaking news, but friends’ updates, as well.  Pretty cool, ha?

Vinyl to MP3s even easier

About a year ago, I posted my intentions to rip all my vinyl into mp3s using the ionAudio – Vinyl Recording USB Turntable.  Needless to say, I haven’t even started ripping my first vinyl record.  That might change in the near future thanks to a new turntable that makes it even easier and less time consuming to transfer all your vinyl into MP3s: The LP 2 Flash Turntable made by the same company, ion.  With this new generation of turntable, you simply set the record and forget it.  The turntable will automatically rip and will seperate the record in tracks when it senses silence between tracks.  All I need to do is add the MP3 tags afterwards to all the tracks.

After ripping all my vinyl into MP3s, all that will be left to do is to get rid of it.  I might sell all my vinyl records on eBay.  It seems that there is still a market for them.

120GB Zune

When it came time to purchase an MP3 player, I invested quite some time in researching which was the best player for me.  These were my requirements (in order of importance):

1. Large Capacity

2. Fast Desktop Software (one that will respond quickly even with a large collection.

The only two players I really took into concideration were the iPod 160GB Classic and the 80GB 2nd Generation Zune.  I ended up picking the Zune.   Even though, both players were similar in pricing, I ended up with the lower capacity Zune 80GB.  What really convinced me was Zune’s desktop software more than the player itself.  The desktop software is very fast with my current collection size (at about 70GB, I have way more than that, but i only import to the Zune player my tagged files).  It is also easier to import songs into the Zune software than the iTunes.  You merely place the file into the Zune folder and the software will automatically import it.

My current dilemma is that I am about 6GB shy of filling up my 80GB Zune.  I prefer to have *all* my files with me all the time.  Therefore, I will have to upgrade to a higher capacity player.  Just in time, I hear news that Zunes will come in 120GB in the near future.  Not a really big jump from 80GB, but at least it shows that they’re working towards higher capacity players.  I probably won’t invest in a new player for just 40GB – so I still have the problem in excluding some tunes from being synchronized with my player.  I will just have to wait to at least a 160GB Zune player before I concider replacing my 80GB one.

Not one genre for Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.

I was randomly listening to my music collection when the next song in the queue came up to be: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.  I currently have this song under my “Rock” genre.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I assigned “Rock” for this song.  Anyways, my first reaction was to move it from rock to …. – then, i froze.  What genre is this song, really ? It has a dance groove, but the vocals are heavy on R&B, hmm…

After a quick google search, I found an article that decomposes this song and mentions its genre:

“Crazy” is not really gospel, that “Ha ha ha, bless your soul” line notwithstanding. Nor is it disco (despite the undeniable groove), or hip-hop (despite the presence of a rapper and a DJ), or a pure pop song (despite the monumentally catchy chorus). In fact, “Crazy” seems to float outside genre altogether, which helps explain its wide appeal—most every musical constituency feels comfortable claiming it. “Crazy” has landed on the pop, R&B/hip-hop, adult contemporary, and modern-rock charts. No other hit in recent memory has crashed as many radio formats.

heh.  I knew I wasn’t alone.  There are very few songs that are released nowadays that have a great appeal to audiences from multiple genres.  Popular music is more than 50 years old and many music variations have been tried.  It takes songs like “Crazy” to prove that there is still room for uniqueness in the music industry.  It’s no surprise this song made a huge impact in 2006  (#7 top song of the year).

As to my personal dilemma in assigning a genre to “Crazy”, well I just left it at Rock, for the moment.  As I have mentioned before, I don’t place much emphasis/time in genre associations in my digital music collection – I just pick whatever makes sense at that moment.

How I Managed to Tag 70GB of MP3s in a Few Months.

First, let me start by saying that I never bothered tagging any of my MP3s until about a half a year ago when I bought a Zune (in another post, I’ll explain why I picked the Zune over an iPod).  I used to listen to my MP3s straight from the folders themselves independent of any player, so I had no reason to tag my MP3 files.  In fact, I always thought that tagging more than 80GB of MP3s (more than 10,000 songs) would be a very daunting task that will take years.  However, when I realized that in order to get the most out of my Zune player and Zune desktop software, I would had to tag all my music.  At that point, I had to bite the bullet and tag all my music, otherwise I won’t be able to have a pleasant experience using the Zune player or the Zune Software.

This is how I managed to tag almost 90% of my collection in a few months.

The first thing I did was to create three folders,  “unorganized”, “organizedUntagged”, and “tagged”.  All my music was initially placed into the “unorganized” folder.  All new music that I will get from this point on would always go into the “unorganized” folder.  Even if the MP3s came from legitimate sources, such as Amazon or eMusic, they would still go into the “unorganized” folder.  Even though files from legitimate sources would be properly tagged,  they were not necessarily be tagged in my own personal standard.  For example, I don’t always agree with the ‘genre’ tag given to some songs.  Basically, the main goal was for me to move all my music from the “unorganized” folder into the “organizedTagged” folder where the files will be grouped by genre.  Finally, I would move the files from the “organizedTagged” folder into “tagged” folder where the music would be properly tagged and organized by genre.

unorganized to organziedUntagged

The “unorganized” folder does not have any sub-folders.  The “organizedUntagged” folder has a sub-folder for each genre.  The first task is to move each file into the appropriate genre in the “organizedUntagged” folder.  Many times, this can be done without listening to the songs – just simply cut-n-paste.  Sometimes, when I don’t recognize the song, I must listen to a few seconds of the song.  I don’t spend a lot of time determining the exact genre – I just quickly pick the best genre.  The key to quickly sort all music by genre is to just pick the best possible genre and don’t overthink the proper genre – this decision is not final, you can always change the genre if you feel you’ve assigned the wrong genre to a song.

organizedUntagged to tagged

When I get songs of the same genre in one folder, then I can use Mp3 Tag Tools to fix the tags in each folder.  With Mp3 Tag Tools I get a spreadsheet-like view of each folder, where I can edit each tag in every file in the folder quickly and easily.

Example of a folder before any tagging is done (click to enlarge):

Notice that most of the songs in this view have an incorrect value for Title, Artist, and Genre.  At this point, I don’t think about genre at all because I am looking into all the files in one folder, hence they belong to the same genre.  Therefore, at this step, I simply add proper Title and Artist tags – so the process goes rather quick.

Example of a folder after all tagging is completed (click to enlarge):

a few notes regarding these screenshots:

• I do not fix any album data, I figured that the time spent looking up album information is not worth the benefit of having it.  If I were to supply album information per song, then I would be taking a lot more tagging my files.
• I am also ignoring any album art, track number, comments for the same reasons for ignoring album name.
• Basically, the only tags I fix are: Title, Artist, and Genre.
• Since all files reside in same folder, this means that the genre is the same for every track.  Therefore, when I am finished with a folder, I can quickly copy-and-paste all the files into the folder with the same name in the “tagged” folder.
• I am using the ID3 v2 as the tagging mechanism.  ID3 v2 has a couple of advantages over ID3 v1 such as: not limited to a finite set of genres and tag fields are not limited by number of characters.

Pretty much that is all.  I have my Zune desktop software point to my “tagged” directory and the software automatically imports every song that exists within that folder.  Basically, every time I cut and paste files into my “tagged” directory, they automatically appear in my Zune software and, subsequently, my Zune portable player.

As you can see, tagging my MP3 files was not a daunting task as I initially thought.  The time spent tagging these files is well worth the benefit.  Having every single track properly tagged greatly improves the way I interact with my music collection.

Information

Nothing to do with music, but an entertaining video about the evolution of information.  I’m glad to be part of the geneneration that made (and continues to make) this possible.

Java and Music

After close to 2 and a half years and close to 2000 bookmarks I’ve added to the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. I took a look at my top tags and no surprise there: Java and Music appear as my first and second top tags, respectively.  Tag statistics is a very good indication on what I’ve been up to during this time.  I wonder if these would change in 2 more years, 5 years, or maybe 10 ? Have you taken a look at your top tags, lately ?