[thechat] keeping track of music?

[William Anderson]

Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns wrote:
> Just curious about how you all keep track of your music, whether music on
> your computer(s) or in physical collections. Have you been really good
> and set up a systemized catalog?


<geek>

I have two main directories under my mp3 share - data and playlists.

under data there are artists (with each artist subdirectory under an
appropriate letter subdirectory, e.g. /data/artist/w/Williams, John/), misc
(for compilations and other oddities), games (for video game music) and
soundtracks (for soundtracks by the infamous 'Various Artists').  I also
record John Peel shows from the DAB broadcasts of BBC Radio 1, transcoded
from mp2 to mp3, and they live in an offair subdir, while downloads from
winmx, edonkey, etc and cd rips go under scratch.

Each artist has their albums/singles in further subdirectories, some of
which have multiple versions.  As an example, I'm currently listening to the
Academy Promo of the A.I. soundtrack by John Williams, and the track playing
now lives in

  /data/artist/w/Williams, John/A.I. Artificial Intelligence OST/
     2001 Academy Promo/2/13 - The Pool Sequence (Pool Party).mp3

I must irritate people who download my music from WinMX or eDonkey, as I
strip the ID3 information out of downloaded music, and don't add it to
ripped CDs.

The next part are the playlists.  I load the tracks of an album into winamp
in order, then save out the playlist in .m3u format.  Then I can find the
album again under the playlists directory, which has categorised subdirs:
Chill, Games, Groove, Loud, Random, Soundtracks, Spoken Word and Thurston
(to hold my stupidly large Sonic Youth collection, which I'm still
organising), so that I can select music according to my rough mood.  So I'm
currently listening to

  /playlists/Soundtracks/Williams, John; A.I. Artificial Intelligence
     (2001 Academy Promo).m3u

I have a rather ridiculous mp3 randomiser script, which rattles through all
my mp3s every day at 6am, including ones I've downloaded from various
sources and haven't organised into the /data/ tree yet, and generates a
reasonably random m3u playlist:

#!/bin/sh
# random fucking huge playlist generator

STORE=/store/mp3
cd $STORE
echo -n "" > /tmp/rndm3u.drivem.$$.tmp
find data/ | grep -i ".mp3" > /tmp/rndm3u.$$.tmp
find data/scratch/ | grep -i ".mp3" >> /tmp/rndm3u.$$.tmp
cd $STORE/playlists/Random
LENGTH=`cat /tmp/rndm3u.$$.tmp | wc -l`
THIS=0
while [ `expr $THIS` -lt `expr $LENGTH` ]; do
THIS=`expr $THIS + 1`
# email note: long line, may wrap
echo "M:/`cat /tmp/rndm3u.$$.tmp | head -$THIS | tail -1`" >>
/tmp/rndm3u.drivem.$$.tmp
done
# rndln is some perl I got from somewhere to randomise the
# contents of a text file by line - this then randomises the
# content of the grand playlist so I don't have to mess with
# 'shuffle' in winamp :)
# email note: long line, may wrap
../../tools/rndln --dbm --outfile=Current\ Randomness.m3u  --skip-blank
/tmp/rndm3u.drivem.$$.tmp
echo "$THIS / $LENGTH"
echo "`tail -1 /tmp/rndm3u.$$.tmp`"
echo "`tail -1 /tmp/rndm3u.drivem.$$.tmp`"
rm /tmp/rndm3u*.$$.tmp

The current output from ~ 6am this morning is 515 KB.

</geek>

:)

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