MP3 Musak

This one is for Jflog. Ok...first let me state that I am not an expert in the area of music organization! If someone is I would also like to hear from them!

We currently have about 4,000 songs in MP3 format. I have ripped most of them from our CD collection so we could store the CDs away...out of the chillin's reach.

I actually used Windows Media Center (MCE on my home theater PC) to rip all of my music. Getting the music in that way is very easy. As long as you have an internet connection...you simply put in the CD and off it goes... It will pull all the album info down from the wibbly-wobbly-web, put the files into directories by artist/album and digitally tag the songs the "default" way. Now...the next part is the hard part and the part where most everything falls apart.

What I do is simply use the MCE interface to change the genre for each album. Some will tag XMAS muzak as "Holiday" some as "Christmas" ... so you need to move all the albums into a common category...in this case "Holiday" since we are all politically correct these days. It took me only about 1 hour to get all of our albums (about 300) into one of ~6 categories...i.e., "Holiday", "Rock", "Religious", "Country", "Metal", etc. That is where I stopped. Trying to do anything at the song level beyond deleting songs you hate is STUPID hard and not worth the effort.

So now, when we fire up the HTPC and play music...we play in shuffle mode by artist, album, genre or all music. It works out well for us. We usually have music playing in our house about 5 hours a day ...

As for the MP3 player....... since I only have a 4G iPod...and our music collection is now over 10G...I need to do a little selecting. This is pretty easy. I tend to just grab by artist or Genre and then let the iPod software (iTunes) randomly select from within those categories to stuff the 4G. When I want something specific, like my audio Spanish lessons, I just grab those and throw them in. Now...let's say that the whif (a.k.a. wife) wants me to generate a custom playlist for working out. This is pretty easy when you only need like 20 or 30 songs...but anything over that I just leave to the genre/artist method. [I should mention that despite the whif wanting me to generate a playlist for her...I still have yet to do that :-)]

Again, it is pretty basic and crude system...but it works for us since we never really want to hear a particular set of songs. We generally just listen to a narrower selection of songs at the artist/genre level for a long time and do not want to hear the same song twice! Trust me...it beats the radio in Costa Rica ;-) Any other bright ideas...I am listening too!