The iTunes Jig
To follow up on my travails with iTunes, I probably should have used the Mac, but I dislike iTunes so much I wanted to keep the purchases sandboxed away from the Mac’s main library of unencumbered and reasonably-sized mp3 files. So, I’m paying dearly for my neuroses.
What’s my workflow? It’s painful. Downloads flow into a folder outside of My Music. Unfortunately, Windows iTunes does not allow its library file to also be located outside My Music, so I still have to delete the iTunes folder each time I close the program despite my caution in tuning the music directory placement.
Anyway, the m4a files are ungodly huge at this point (maybe to encourage sale of larger-capacity iPods to those without interest in video?), so I am doubly motivated to get them into classic 128k mp3.
I wrote a Python script that traverses the current directory identifying m4a files and sending them to ffmpeg for conversion to mp3. Once this is finished, I run the beautiful mp3tag software to clean everything up. It can use several album information databases (most notably freedb and MusicBrainz), and most importantly it’s the only id3 editor I can find that consistently embeds album art in a Walkman-friendly format.
I then use the new and impressive Sony “Content Transfer” application, which should be renamed the Sony “Sorry for Screwing You with Bad Audio Software and Infrastructure for Ten Years, and Especially for ATRAC, Boy We Really Screwed the Pooch On That One, So Anyway This One Works and Doesn’t Lock You Into Anything Or Take Over Your System” software.
I just found this tool today, and it removes all the apparent bugs in the “drag-and-drop” method of loading content (which was used in the marketing literature for the Walkman as a major selling point). In the final result, I can finally now see the release year of my songs, which sounds trivial but has some nice benefits in the Walkman’s software.
I copy my new mp3 versions over to my actual My Music folder and back up to an external hard drive that acts as the authoritative seed for any computer that needs music loaded.
This is painstaking, but, honestly, the tag and file naming quality in iTunes is questionable at times, and this gives me the chance to intervene when necessary and get rid of things like truncated names and those goofy [Bonus Tracks]-type appendages.
In other news, Nickel Creek’s This Side is a surprising but really fun album. Less bluegrass, a little heavier mix toward vocals (Nickel Creek had a really mellowed under-mix of the lead vocals). I hope they start up again, but I really respect the decision to suspend operations when it feels laborious. As close as they are (two of the three are siblings), it’s good to press pause rather than stop.
It’s funny to note the vocal mixing as a standout characteristic, since the side project Mutual Admiration Society was so over-mixed toward vocals you couldn’t even pick up the instruments at times. Of course, the lead singer for Toad the Wet Sprocket has a much “louder” voice than these guys.