Tonight I am taking a break from CD ripping. Instead, I am preparing to do something that I haven’t done in a couple of years now… wipe out the iTunes library on my main computer.

I used to wipe the library out every six months or so. It was a way to keep new music coming on and rotating off anything that I had gotten a little stuck on. But this slowed down a couple years ago when I joined eMusic. Before eMusic, everything on my computer was represented with an actual physical disc in my house. I never got into the torrent / file sharing thing, so I was never in a situation where there were gigabytes of music on my computer that I didn’t actually have. So a couple times a year, I would just erase everything and have a good time going through the CD shelf and finding music I hadn’t heard for some time. But with months and months of purchases on the computer that I hadn’t burned to disc, a simple ‘select-all – delete’ wasn’t really possible. So I have spent a good chunk of time tonight going through my main computer’s iTunes library, and copying files over to DAC. 10 gigs down, about another 30 to go.

One thing I noticed quite quickly while doing this is how much classical I have purchased over the past two years. Especially early music from the ars nova and renaissance. Luckily eMusic sells pretty high quality VBR mp3s, but as I look at what I have been purchasing, I really wish they had a lossless option. At the same time, this is also music that has been very difficult to find otherwise. Even online, getting outside the late baroque / classical / romantic repertoire is tricky to find. Especially at a reasonable price. I think it is great that Harmonia Mundi and a number of other specialty labels have found their way to online distribution. My guess is the amount of physical inventory that they press now is starting to dwindle, but hopefully they find life in what is looking like this next arena of distribution.

The other category that is well represented is folk and blues. So lots of Peter, Paul and Mary tonight, some Richie Havens and some discs from Aarhoolie are finding there way onto the server finally.

The biggest downside is categorizing. This is a massive amount of music that I am suddenly throwing on in one night. It really locks the computer down during the initial import (on the one hand), then afterwards I have to go through and trick iTunes into putting this music into the right place on the server. I discovered that using the ‘Album Artist’ field in the tracks info boxes, that this will control what folder something shows up in. Since Subsonic sorts according to directories, this has been my main way of organizing things (while also making sensible playlists within iTunes for home streaming). The way tracks are labelled is not standardized at all, especially with classical music. Sometimes the composers name won’t appear anywhere relevant. If I had my way, I would ask the organizing powers that be to give me the job of controlling ‘cddb’, correcting the decades worth of poor organization and wrong information. If someone knows how this job can be given to me, please drop me a line.