Do you CDs! I CDs CDs!
A
few months ago, I had a horrible hard drive crash and lost most of
the horde of mp3 I had build up over the years. Then I realized
that this was the perfect opportunity to start from scratch, making
only legitimate mp3s from my hard earned CD collection. I had
promised myself that I would start paying for music once I had the
money. Well, now I make money. I guess I should start
paying for the music I enjoy.
Thus began the arduous process
of ripping every CD I own (all 143 of them). Then came the
process of fixing the meta data, because I have quite a few CDs that
rip as by “Various Artists”, and I’d like to at least
attempt to give credit where it is due.
The hardest part was
sitting there sorting music into genres. By far the two largest
groups are classical and alt pop/rock. Except most of the music
that I put under alt.pop/rock is pretty much what I get from the
radio, so I curious as to what it’s an alternative to?
Unfortunately, the id3 tag process does not let you include multiple
genres or sub genres, because it would be really cool to have music
that fits in multiple genres to show up in different genre views.
As
I write this, a piece of software that came with my shiny new mp3
player is sorting my music into playlist by analyzing them.
I’m curious to see what it comes up with.
Can’t be any
worse than some of the combinations I used to come up with. I
once made a mix tape that included Boyz2Men, Carmina Burana, Monty
Python’s Spam song, Tori Amos and Disney showtunes.
I
haven’t been able to do quite a good a job now that I’ve moved into
the digital age. I think with the ease of drag and drop, you
lose some of the reflection time you get when going through the long
considered process of analog tape creation.
When making an
analog mix tape, you HAVE to listen to each song as you place them
one after the other. With CD authoring, once can easily just
drag and drop songs after hearing the first few seconds of soundbite,
and you loose the holsitc feel of the mix (the groove) as well as the
beauty of creative transitioning.
I think it also had
to do with the fact that when I was younger, I didn’t have much in
the way of available music. So I REALLY had to like a song to
sit and try to record it off the radio, then try to use the graphic
equalizer on my dubbing boom box to simulate fading out the song.
This translated to tapes chock full of music that I was
really into at the time. And because I was working under the
constraints of 45 minutes to a side (90 minute tapes), I had to be
creative in my song arrangement to fill up the tapes. In analog
it’s also much easier to trim down songs if you start running on too
long.
I think I’ve only made three good mix CDs. One was
with anime music. One was a joke (I tried to fit on every
version of ‘Fly me to the Moon’ I could find on there, with some
other good music in between). One was a complete accident
and turned out to be a good driving/chilling cd. I’ve
unfortunately lost them all, and don’t remember the track list to
recreate them.
So now on to the brave new world of random
songs and playlist arrangement. Apparently, one of the major
selling points of the ipod, when it first came out was serendipitous
synchronicity. An ipod can hold A LOT of music, and many people
would find that by letting it play on a random shuffle that music
would often match their mood and situation. A soundtrack to their
lives.
So what will I do with my newfound
music library? Since this new music player has the random thing
covered, I’m probably going to try to get back into making mix CDs
again. Experiment with random arrangements like I
used to have, and theme CDs that try to express a theme or idea.
Maybe get smaller CD media, put the pressure of a time limit back on,
Time to get some good
headphones and a new stack of blanks. And if you get a CD in the
mail, you’ll know what I’ve been up to.