Messing with my Music Collection

Today, I am messing with my music collection. The goal was to get it ready for a massive import into iTunes.

 

Previous System

In the past, I tried to organize my music by putting it into a directory with folders named for major genres. Under those were folders named for artists. Under those were albums and the recorded MP3 tracks were in those folders. For singles, I had an “album” named “Singles” or something like that.

My Jukebox program would read this information into a database and allow me to select and play recordings and groups of recordings. This worked well enough, but was not portable to portable devices.

Another problem was that much or most of my music had been recorded from vinyl. There was no metadata in those MP3 files and iTunes and other library systems depended heavily upon that information.

 

The Music Manager Program

Back in the Spring, I wrote a “Music Manager” program. This program placed information from the file structure of my programs into the metadata. This was a huge step forward.

Yesterday, I copied all my music from its original location in the “M” drive (out in the garage) to directory E:\Music for iTunes. It was still organized by album.

I had already used the Metadata Update feature of Music Manager to insert metadata into the music files based on their file names and where they were on the directory tree.

This morning, I used Music Manager to reorganize this information:

1. If the artist name had a comma in it, I used the Artist Name Update feature (which I wrote this morning) to reverse what was before and after the comma. If there is also an ampersand in it, pause for manual intervention.

1. Rerun the Metadata Update feature to update the metadata to reflect the new artist name.

2. Added a feature to remove track number from the song titles. At the same time, I moved the tracks out of the album directories, putting them in directories directly under the artist.

3. I have not yet processed the JPG and XML files or removed the album files.

 

About Play Lists

This is what I learned about Playlists.

• You can export them by right-clicking into a tab separated value text file.
• I want to add a feature to Music Manager that will copy everything from an exported playlist to a particular disk or SD card location.
• Eventually, I will move the library back to the shared drive so that all computers can access it.
• I will need a feature to “Move” a play list so that it can be used on a computer that thinks the master directory of music is at a different location.
• It would be good to know the relationship between a rating in the metadata(If there is one) and the rating in iTunes. Also, what happens if I import a playlist that gives a different rating to a song than how it is already rated in iTunes. What if I import a playlist with songs that are not already present in iTunes. Would this be a way that I could set ratings programmatically?