Clean it all up....
Topics:Arb Thoughts
Anal Retentive Music Organising
Right - so I decided since I was getting the dreaded BSOD it was time to start cleaning up my file system and generally backup everything onto my lovely external hard drive in prep for a hard drive crash/format & re-install. You know. Whichever comes first.
Those that know me, the see that I have my standard moments where I'm lazy and I just do enough to get the job done. However, those that really know me, see that when I get into it, I tend to get a bit anal about how well the job gets done. Doing dishes, house work and what not are prime examples. Cleaning up all the random files (proof of payment to this person, resume, interesting reading that I want to keep at hand, etc...). All these fall into the same category. It takes me a while to get going, but once I get going, those dishes sparkle, and nothing in the house gets left alone till it sparkles a bit.
My music collection is one of those things. I love my music. So of course it disappointed me, a few years ago, to find out that once I'd spend many many precious hours ripping all my hard won music to mp3 to load onto my sparkly new iPod (which is now 2.5 years old.. OMGz) and moving the files OFF of my PC onto the iPod... that there was NO WAY IN HELL to get them off my iPod using iTunes.
*cough*
So of course I did what any geek would do, I dug through hidden files on the iPod. THANK GOD! They were all there intact.... and moved into random stupid directories with weird names. ALL OF THEM. *twitch* (this is a good time to mention a lovely application called "Rockbox" which is great for putting on your iPod and messing around with... however is crap when integrating into your car's iPod interface. Beauty of the this thing is that you can just upload a normal set of files onto your iPod without messing around with this stupid attempt at DRM (BTW - Apple - find a new way of storing songs without irritating your customers who want to save their data in ONE location and have the ability to backup when they want!).
Now while I was busy going through my backup procedure, I decided hell... why not. Lets backup the 'ol iPod. So, tools you need.
Since two and a half years ago, WinAmp has come A LONG way. Plug in your iPod and then select ALL tracks on the lovely thing. Right click, send to local media. YAY!!!!! your iPod dumps itself and all its songs into a lovely human readable file system. Mostly. Now if you are like me, you were lazy way back when and didn't capture all the id3 tags (cause auto FreeDB and the like weren't available while you weren't dialled up on your expensive Telkom line). So of course there's a bit of clean up to be done. Enter Media Monkey. Now Media monkey I first found about a year or so ago when I encountered a similar dilemma when I was stuffing around with the mp3's on my pc that I'd taken to work.
So the issue I had with media monkey was that it was bloaty and big. Now, if I look at WinAmp as a standard media player, I think the same thing. Media monkey however let me get all Anal Retentive on my music collection so load up it up, organise files, then go back go good 'ol WinAmp. Now I'm thinking I'll spend the next few days playing with Media Monkey as a default player. I mean after all. It is as "bloated" as WinAmp is these days. Although its got the extra benefits that WinAmp doesn't. Maybe looking into the "gold edition" would be a good idea.
And there's my vent and tips.