Apropos of nothing, I've been reorganizing my iTunes collection - I work from home, and I have all my CDs ripped (Apple Lossless format) to a Linksys DNS-323 NAS (mirrored 500GB drives). The 323 has a built in iTunes server, and I connect to it with my Roku Soundbridge - it's great. Have you ever put your entire CD collection on "shuffle"? You get some very odd juxtipositions between songs, if your collection is anything like mine.
Anyway - having spent a considerable amount of time fixing meta data on all these songs, I have some gentle words of advice for the kind souls who enter meta data on gracenote or freedb...
1) Not everything is a compilation. Just because there's a guest artist on the album (e.g. Gwen Steffani sings along on one song on Moby's "Play") - doesn't mean it's a compilation. My modest proposal for a compilation is an album compiled of various artists - that has no other logical location in which to reside. "Play" is still a Moby album, right? You'd still file the physical disk under "Moby". This also applies to "Greatest Hits" albums - even 54-40's "Sweeter things - A Compilation" is not really a compilation in the sense that iTunes uses. And McCartney's "Band on the Run" just isn't a compilation in any sense of the word - but that's where iTunes put it, so somebody had to have thought that was appropriate.
2) Spelling counts. "Bruce Springstein"? Really?
3) A place for everything and everything in its place. Don't put the name of the artist in the Album title. Name your physical files however you like, but calling an album "U2 - All that you can't leave behind" just creates a new album, right next to the one called "All that you can't leave behind".
4) Guest artists should be listed per song. I know I'm out of step with a lot of people on this one - including MuchMusic - but when you label Peter Gabriel's "Shaking the Tree" as being "Peter Gabriel feat. Youssou N'Dour", you create an entirely separate directory for ONE SONG. If it's an album of duets, you'll create 10 separate directories - one for each song. My modest proposal: label the song. "Shaking the tree feat. Youssou N'Dour" is just as descriptive, and leaves the song filed under Peter Gabriel (where it belongs).
5) Multiple CD releases are still just one album. It's The Beatles "White Album" - it's not "White Album (CD1)" and "White Album (CD2)". (This actually raises some interesting issues about what constitutes "the album": the content, or the delivery mechanism? Or a combination of the two? Does the album experience change when you don't have to flip to side 2?) In any case, the disc number is not part of the title any more than the side of the vinyl LP was.
What does any of this have to do with pipelines? A lot, actually. When you have a system that's in use by a lot of people, that organizes data in such a way that people need to be able to find it, and you leave the organization up to the aggregate efforts of those people, you need very clearly and well-thought-out rules for organizing that data, or stuff will wind up all over the place.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
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