orangeek's blog

Since the beginning of P2P Era, I've to fight daily with the overload. As if the RSS overload isn't enough, another issue is related with music files, mp3s.

My personal strategy, that I just began a couple of months ago, is to separate music files between "Library" and "Favorites".

[ "Information Overload", CC licensed picture from monster ]

So, the problem is that I've around 35GB of music, legally bought of course.
My iPod is an old (well, two years...) 20GB and, then, I've no way to keep in sync my music folder at home with the ipod. Every time I want to fill the ipod, I've to browse for tons of folders, select the albums I want and transfer those via usb.
Because of the p2p, when I want to listen to something new (or, even if not new, never heard enough by me: say, for example, Genesis), I go to miniTunes and I download some stuff. If I don't know which is the best album by Genesis, I normally look for discography and download a bunch of albums at once.

So, I begin to listen to and, after that, I realize that I don't want 2,1GB of Genesis: I like that music (and Phil as a drummer is amazing): I would just to store the "best of" and that's it. Or, save in different places of the hard disk the entire discography (say, in the folder "Library") and the "Favorites" or the Best Of (LIbrary/Favorites).
This last way (suggested by Pippunia) is the way I'm using actually.

I'm going through my id3-well-compiled mp3 library, selecting my favorites songs and moving those to the "favorites" folder.
When I will be done, I will transfer that folder to my ipod along with other albums taken from the "Library" folder.

I know that I could do everything with media player (like itunes) that supports "rating system", but:

• I'm not using such software (xmms is considered "fine" here)
• physically moved files are something that will last for years (disaster excluded, of course)
• I can't say the same for metadata and DB used by itunes (or similar); when you've to install a fresh system or disinstall that software is likely that you'll lose all those fancy rating and you can't use this data with another platform or software.

So... Do you have any smarter way to organize your music library?

PS I re-read the post through and I've to say is pretty boring. Ouch.