The ByteBaker

I just received an email from the founder of Pandora asking for support in bringing a halt to the RIAA’s attempts to gather more royalties from online music broadcasters at rates which would effectively bring online radio to an end. I’m personally a big fan of online radio and I would be really sad to see it come to an end for no reason other than pure and simple greed. The entertainment industry, especially music is at a very important point. The monopoly held by record and broadcasting companies is gradually being brought to an end by the growing prevalence of technology and the sophistication of media recording and editing tools available to the common man. Of course the industry isn’t about to let go of its major streams of income without fighting tooth and nail for it. The result is the proliferation of techniques and technologies which have no other purpose than restricting how consumers can use the media that they have legally bought.

Apple’s extremely successful online iTunes store uses digital rights management and a patent-licensed, non-free file format to prevent copying music. However the result isn’t really the stopping of privacy, but growing inconvenience for the user. You can’t officially use software other than iTunes to transfer music to your iPod and music bought on the iTunes store can’t be played without iTunes or some sort of unauthorized, unsupported plugin. I feel that DRM is quite simply an injustice to honest paying customers. While I do not support piracy and feel that musicians should be adequately compensated for their work, I don’t think any authority has the right to tell me what I should do with music that I have paid for. The RIAAs claims that storing my music on an online backup system like MP3Tunes or even on multiple CDs is illegal. Excuse me if I disagree.

The strangest part of this whole affair is that it is technologically impossible for any authority to regulate copying the way that the industry wants to. If you can create software to lock down particular media files, it is also possible to create software to open those locks. Of course the easiest thing to do, as a consumer is to simply not buy music or other media that is crippled by DRM or other restrictions. Music CDs are one way to go. However, if you are the type who prefers to buy music in a purely electronic online, you don’t have to turn to Apple’s DRM’d iTunes store any more. The recently launched Amazon MP3 store has a large and growing collection of DRM-free 256Kbps MP3 tracks for download as soon as you have paid. These are plain old MP3 files that can be copied and transferred without limit and loaded onto any MP3 player. I’ve been considering buying music online, and though I would still pay a little extra for a CD, I think Amazon’s store is a much better option than the iTunes store and it’s a great way for conscious consumers to vote with their wallets.

My own music collection is purely MP3, ripped from the CDs. I do use the iTunes/iPod combo, because it works for me. However, I do maintain separate backups of my music (on a separate computer and on DVD). The recent attempts by Apple to prevent the use of the iPod with iTunes MP3 players has disturbed me somewhat, but for the time being, I am content to tolerate it. At the same time, I don’t use the non-free AAC format (which is default for iTunes). Since the MP3 is not actually free or open, I have considered changing my music to something that is, such as Ogg Vorbis. However, I think that at this point that would be rather inconvenient for me. Most importantly, I use my iPod a lot and the iPod doesn’t support the Ogg Vorbis format. The Rockbox firmware for iPods and other players allows playing Ogg Vorbis files, but it only supports older iPods. When it becomes available for newer iPods, I will seriously consider a switch. In fact, I have been looking around for an older iPod that I could get for cheap to try Rockbox on it.

Though I’m content to use the iPod/iTunes combo for the time being, if Apple were to try to lock me in to its proprietary format, I would not hesitate to switch to a less restricted player (and Ogg Vorbis while I’m at it). I suspect that many other people would do the same, especially tech-savvy early-adopters. And it’s probably not a good idea to get the early adopters unhappy.

Edit: I had incorrectly referred to AAC as Apple’s proprietary format. Thanks to the first commenter below for pointing this out.

If you own a computer, chances are you have a music collection weighing in at a good few gigabytes. My own collection is currently 5.3GB and that’s not counting the dozen or so CDs that I will rip before moving to college. The problem is that it can become very hard to find something that you’re looking for if your collection is not organized properly. If your music has lots of different sources, i.e. songs you’ve ripped yourself, songs your friends have given you, songs you’ve downloaded off the internet, you could find that there is very little order running through how your music files are named and organized.

It will take some time and a fair bit of manual work to get your collection sorted out, but you will probably find that it is worth it in the long run. Since most people tend to have primarily mp3 collection, I’ll make this mp3-centric. There are two aspects of an mp3 file that can be used to keep things organized: The file name and the Tag information. While most music players will give preference to the tag information, your filemanager probably cares more about the filename, so it’s a good idea to have them both in shape. But before you start diving in and renaming files, you’re going to have to decide on a proper organization scheme. One of the simplest and most effective ways is to organize by artist and then album. You create one big folder for all your music, inside which are subfolders for each individual artist. Inside each artist’s folder, you have one folder for each album. If you have a lot of singles or a lot of songs from various artists, you might want to create a Singles folder for each artist or one big Miscellaneous folder.

After that it is time to decide on a naming convention for your music files. There is a lot of information you would want to store about a file, but the filename isn’t the best place for it, that’s what Tags are for. One thing you would certainly want in a filename is the name of the song. After that you could add the artist name, but if your collection is already organized by artist, that could be redundant. On the flip side, if you move files around a lot, artist name could be a life saver. I personally put in the track number followed by the song title to make sure the files are properly sorted in the filemanager itself. If you’re going to be using track numbers, please make sure to use 2 digits otherwise the filemanager will probably show track 1 followed by track 10, 11 and so on until 19, 2, 20 etc.

A far better way to store data regarding your mp3 music is in the file’s ID3 tag. You can put in a variety of information including title, artist, album, track number, year, genre as well as comments. This information becomes part of the file itself and most media players use this information to sort playlists. Many media players include a way to edit these tags (so do some filemanagers). But you will probably want a separate editor program (I recommend mp3tag for Windows), especially if you want to change a lot of tags or exchange information between the tag and filename. Each editor generally has a slightly different way to edit tags but one feature many of them have is the ability to either rename the file itself using tag data or gather information from the filename and place it in the appropriate tags. It would be a good idea to learn to use these features as they can save you lots of time. In case your ID3 tags are very incomplete, many editors also allow you to lookup appropriate tag information from the Internet. Just make sure that you very what information has been retrieved before committing to a change, or you could end up with hopelessly incorrect tags.

I’ll end this post with a word about the Library feature provided by most modern players. These libraries generally use ID3 tags to organize your music, so it’s a good idea to make sure the tags are correct before relying on a library to manage. Some players like iTunes allow a lot of abstraction regarding exactly where in the filesystem your music files are located. While this may not be a problem if you use iTunes exclusively, you should probably take the time to find out where they are located in case you ever need to use your music collection without using the player. That being said, modern players provide a lot of additional features to organize your data (including my favourite: smart playlists) so by all maeans make the most of them. And let me know if you have any novel ways of organizing your music.