Nothing to say

You can’t even imagine how boring I’m being this weekend. I’m not even going to say my weekend is boring. Nono, it’s all me. That’s right, I’m spending most of it glued to my computer.

I just finished the post, and it’s long and stupid and pointless, so I’m going to save you the trouble of having to see it. :D :D :D

That’s right!  I finally figured out how to split entries!!  :D

Friday night, I started organizing my song files. What I do now, is I take all our CDs (mine and Kia’s) and I run them through Exact Audio Copy (EAC). I have it set to create FLAC files, which are lossless audio files. Once those are created, I transcode the whole lot (we usually buy multiple CDs at a time) in Foobar 2000 into variable bitrate MP3s. The problem is that the FLAC files don’t tag correctly, or Foobar doesn’t read them correctly, or SOMEWHERE along the lines, I end up with MP3s that aren’t tagged. No big deal, becuase MusicBrainz Picard is there to take care of that. Only, I’ve been accruing digital music files for about 10 years (CDs and download, like from music blogs and Epitonic, etc) without really doing a good job of keeping them organized.

Between backing things up to multiple CDs, then restoring them after a hard drive crashed … or keeping them across 3 or 4 computers … or having downloaded 2 copies of the same song without realizing it … or God knows what all I’ve done to fill up so many hard drives so completely … well, the point is that I have a complete mess on my hands here. I’ve been having trouble putting together the wedding playlist, because I just can’t figure out where most of the tracks are.

So Friday night, I set about fixing that for good. I used BeyondCompare to compare the tracks on my PC and one of the external drives, and got both consolidated to one. The FLAC files, already mostly organized, are on the external, and the MP3s local.

Now I’ve been running them through MusicBrainz since Saturday morning, and I finally made it to J. In fact, I typed most of this in the previous entry, but realized I was getting so far off topic it was … well, boring…er. So I copied it out to my text editor, finished the entry, and came back to this. In that span of time, I got through the first half of the J’s and the second half - plus a couple K’s - are now processing. And that explains me talking about it. MusicBrains has to look all this crap up in their massive database, so it’s not instantaneous. So I’ll process a few directories (artists) at a time, and while they’re crunching through, it’s best that I do nothing with them, because I’ve had the program crash on me half a dozen times so far this weekend. More than that, actually.

MusicBrains is a helluva lot better than doing it by hand, but it’s far from perfect. It may match 10 songs out of a 13-song album to the Japanese release. Tracks are in a different order, and for some reason, the Japanese discs always have “bonus tracks” on them. I mean, I understand that Japanese people are better than UnitedStatesians, but do they really deserve 2-4 additional tracks per album?? C’mon!

Anyway, I have to then look up the US release, load it into the interface, and then drag the files (individually, because it doesn’t think they belong in that disc, so it can’t shuffle them into the proper tracks). And that’s for the files that are actually tagged properly. As I mentioned, the ones transcoded from FLAC aren’t tagged at all, most of the time. For those ones, well, it’s a big hassle. It will put an album worth of tracks into 3 or 4 albums. One or two of the singles will get put in their respective single discs, one will go to a compilation or soundtrack that it’s on, and the rest end up in the right place, or shuffled between the US release and the UK release. Or the German release. Gah!

No matter. Like I said, it gets the job done better than manual labor.

Now I need to get my things together and go out. I should do some laundry tonight, since I haven’t all weekend. But to do that, I need detergent. And a trip to the laundromat. Because I hate using the laundry facilities here. I mean, they have a washer and dryer, but they break fairly often, the washers always leave lint on my clothes that the dryer can’t take off, and … the whole friggin laundry area is just a complete mess.

Mess is really getting to me right now. I feel kinda overwhelmed and unstructured. So I want to clean my desk and the coffee table, too, but I don’t even know where to put things. Gah.

You know. Instead of going on about it, I could be getting started right now. :)