I was off for Presidents' Day yesterday. Not sure I've ever had that pleasure, but I'll take it. I didn't have any plans for the day, nor did I make any — I just considered it a freebie.
One of the holidays I got at my previous job was Good Friday. I thought that was a little odd. Easter isn't a federal holiday or anything, so I've always seen Easter as a minor event lumped in there with the likes of Saint Patrick's Day. No offense meant to those who really dig Easter, of course, for whatever the reason. But, yesterday kind of reminded me of that Good Friday holiday — just a spare day off with nothing to do.
Anyway, I spent a good portion of the day ripping CDs to mp3s and copying these (and some others I already had) over onto my mp3 player. One of the greatest things to emerge from the Internet is the big CD database in the cloud. This automagically feeds in artist and title information for a large number of CDs while they're getting ripped, thus enabling proper naming and organization of one's music collection. This is pretty important, as you can probably imagine.
It's been around for awhile, well over a decade and closing in on two — plenty of time for any erroneous entries to get replaced with more correct information. Or so I thought.
So, the data for Bryan Adams's Reckless looks something like this. Though I've listed only one track here, the rest of them are mostly the same — the track numbers and titles change, of course.
| Artist | adams, bryan |
|---|---|
| Album | reckless |
| Year | 1984 |
| Track # | 3 |
| Title | run to you |
While this is all technically correct... well, ick. Lowercase? Alpha by last name? Come on, folks. I know I sound like John Cusack in High Fidelity here, but you know, that's just not right. Lowercase? What am I, a fourteen-year-old girl?
I corrected it, of course. I had to. I can't let that kind of thing just slip through the cracks. Once upon a time you could upload corrections to the master CD database, but I don't know if that's still possible and didn't bother to look into it.
This kind of egregious error is pretty rare, fortunately. Most of the CDs I ripped (about forty in all — it was a very uneventful day) had the right information, just as they should. I did see one instance of "Huea Lewis and News" (misspelled and missing a word) and another instance where the track titles were all in French, but for the most part, everything was pretty clean. Not bad at all for a free collaborative database.
Just a few more bones to pick, not at the database, but at organizing mp3s in general. First: Beatles, or The Beatles, or Beatles, The. Which is it? I say Beatles is correct, because even though they were indeed The Beatles, I'm going to search for them under the letter B instead of T when looking at an alphabetical list of artists (just as I would look under W when searching for The Who instead of T). And "Beatles, The" looks goofy.
Next: Soundtracks. I'm still going around about this, but generally, each individual track should list the artist performing that track, and as for the name of the album, I'm leaning toward having "Soundtrack" as the first word even if it's not properly part of the title. Again, it would make for easier sorting, as all the soundtracks would automatically clump together when sorting by album name. I'm holding back on this because — well, the word "Soundtrack" isn't always part of the title, you know? Using a word which doesn't exist is just as bad as calling someone "adams, bryan" when his name is Bryan Adams. I know the id3 spec (for what it's worth) includes a genre field, and Soundtrack is indeed one of the genres... but if there is a garbage bin in the world of mp3s, it is id3's genre field.
Finally: We've got an area rug in the living room with a pattern of squares on it, and Andrew has this habit of lining dozens of toy cars up along the edges of those squares — all different makes and models, all different colors. And I think I've figured out where he gets that trait. It must be from his mother. After all, he never gets the colors in the right order.