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.

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.

musicgenretree.com

About a year ago I posted my idea regarding a standard music genre tree.  Since then, I’ve been sketching out my ideas regarding such a tree.  Bascially, my idea is a web application that will allow users to contribute in creating the most complete music genre tree available.  I am debating whether to allow artists or songs to be assigned to these genres – but classifying artists and/or songs is a very dauting task, therefore, this might have to wait.  The most important thing is that I started writing this new web application and will be available very soon.  It even has a domain of its own, now: http://www.musicgenretree.com

Man vs Machine (The Music Recommendation Challange)

Paul Lamere, is a researcher at Sun labs.  More specifically, he is a music researcher at Sun labs.  His latest focus involves music recommendation algorithms.  He has an interesting challange for his readers:  Which one of the following lists of music recommendations ,based on “Miles Davis” as a starting seed, was created by a music expert and which one was created by a computer algorithm.  This is not a trivial questions – I think it can go either way.

one giant leap towards my dream music player

I have been working on a Java Swing music player that is fast and can hold a huge collection of music files. I’ve had a sour taste with all of the music players out there – they behave very slow when all my music collection is loaded. I even have a sourceforge page for this application. I had the initial framework all wired up and was able to go through my folders and play my music files. My application, JMusicFiles, behaved rather fast (if I may say) : ) However, a few days back I bumped into a music player (Jajuk) that was written with the main emphasis of making it fast even for huge collections.

Rather than starting from scratch with JMusicFiles, I decided to put JMusicFiles to rest and start looking into contributing into Jajuk. Jajuk seems rather complete with features such as:

• traverse your collection by physical file structrue or by genre
• create xml reports and charts/graphs of your whole collection
• performs fast with my current collection of about 66GB

I still have many ideas that can still be added to Jajuk:

• suggest songs/artists I might like based on my current collection
• completeness percentage for an artist/genre (how much complete is my Metallica collection, for example. Furthermore, what songs do I need to complete my Metallica collection)
• quickly create a playlist (for example, some uninvited guests arrive at my house, therefore I create a quick playlist: medium to fast english songs with no explicit lyrics and filter out any country and hip hop genre songs)

I need to start going through their open tickets and see if any of my ideas have already been suggested or ideas I haven’t thought of.   I am looking forward to start contributing to Jajuk in the near future.

Erase personal information from DRM-free tracks purchased on iTunes

Privatunes – Software that will remove all your personal info from DRM-free tracks purchased on iTunes.

5 reasons to erase private information from my legally acquired iTunes Plus library:

1. Am I still a child who needs his pencilcase and schoolbag tagged with my name?

2. I bought the damn tune, but someday I may want to sell it (hey, how is it more stupid that selling old CDs ?).

3. I just have a thing for privacy. Is it dirty?

4. How the heck do I know it’s not gonna be shared on P2P networks by my 6 year old step sister???

5. I thought good customer-seller relationship ment something like… how do they say, “trust’ ?

legal P2P, finally ?

Qtrax, a new, legal, P2P service. They are set to launch very soon. They’re list of companies that they have made deals with, is very impressive: Universal, Sony/ATV, Warner Music Group, The Orchard, EMI Music Publishing and EMI Music, TVT Records, Go Digital, ASCAP and BMI.

According to the New York Times:

For years, music labels have been trying to prevent fans from downloading their songs on peer-to-peer filesharing networks. Now, some of them would like to encourage people to listen to music that way — provided they view some advertising first.

Many questions still open:

• Are these DRM-free files that we will be downloading?
• Are these files ours to keep or are they “rented” as Napster and Rhapsody allows users to “rent” songs ?
• Will there be a limit on the number of songs one can “download” ?

update: launch date is sometime in October of this year.

Compare 60GB of files in less than 10 secs!

A few days back, I posted about my backup process. In that post, I described how it takes approximately 2 hours to do this backup. The reason why it took this much is because I would first delete the whole contents of the backup hard-disk and do a complete copy from the first to the second. I always wanted a tool that will compare both directories for differences and allow me to only copy those new files from the main disk to the backup disk.

The first software tool that I tried was Araxis Merge. I had this tool already installed because it works great for file content comparisons. So instead of trying out new software, I decided to try what I already have. I found out quickly that I wouldn’t be using Araxis for my music collection because it was taking a long time to do the comparison – it took so long that I had to cancel the process. After a quick Google search, I found Compare Advance . Compare Advance compared the whole 80GB of my music file directories in less than 10 seconds. I have found a keeper. The price is not bad either – $24.95.

From the above screenshot, we can see the analyis that was done on my collection. Folder 1 (my main hard-disk) contains 10,008 files and folder 2 (my backup disk) contains roughly 300 less files. This means that since my last backup, I have added about 300 files to my collection. The size of the folders compared are roughly 60GB and 57.5 for folders 1 and 2, respectively. The process of backing up my files has just been curtailed to a few minutes from a couple hours. I no longer need to copy 60GB, instead I just need to copy 2.5GB.

Perfect Tool for All Your Music-related notes.

TreePad is offered as a Personal Information Manager. It is an outline-centric text editor. I’ve been using it strictly to organize my music-related notes and it has been working great for this purpose. I am in the process of writing an audio player/organizer application (more on this application later) and ability to take notes and organize in an outline will be one of the features. My application (JMusicFiles) is far from being completed and TreePad is filling this void very well. I am using the free version, but several paid versions with many more features are also available. Since this application can easily be installed on a USB-Drive, you can carry your notes with you to any computer.

Here is a sample of my music notes and how they are laid out in outline format:

• Songs to Get
  • Hip Hop
  • Alternative / Rock
  • Latin
  • Dance
  • Slow / Mellow
• Artists To Get Their Full Collections
  • Hip Hop
  • Alternative
  • Latin
  • Reggae
  • Classic Rock
• FIQL Playlists – Playlists I am compiling to submit to my FIQL.com account
  • Greatest Mash-Ups of All Time Vol 5
  • Isla De La Piedra Vol 2
• My Favorite Songs of All Time
• Personal Playlists
  • Beach Music
  • Favorite Blues Music

10+ years of collecting mp3s down the drain?

No, it did not happen. I did not loose all of my 80+ GB of mp3 files I have collected in about 10 years. However, the though of this occurring is always on my mind. I am taking precautions at this time in case of a disk failure, but I need one more level of security.

Currently, I have two copies of all my digital music files in two separate Western Digital USB external hard disks. One is always connected and the 2nd disk is only connected when backing up the files from the 1st disk. I usually create a complete backup about once a month. The process of backing up the files from disk #1 to disk #2 takes about 2 hours and is not one of my favorite things to do.

I realize that my current backup system is good, but not optimal. I still run the risk of having both disks failed, having both disks stolen, or both disks damaged. The only way I can finally have a peace-of-mind is to have a complete backup somewhere outside of my house – an online backup service. There are only two requirements that an online service must have for me to even concider them: unlimited storage (or at least a few hundred GB) and relatively cheap. A quick Google search landed me into this company: Carbonite. For $49.95 a year I can store an unlimited number of files for online backups. I just have a few questions about this service: I wonder how much time it will take to upload all of my files? would this online system be ’smart’ enough to only grab the new files from my disk rather than do a complete backup each time? I will sign up for the demo and log my experiences here in the coming weeks.