I have, as I think I mentioned before, an iPod.

It's a dinky little device, exceptionally handy for taking my music to work and immersing myself in it for those all-too-frequent times when conversation drifts over the pigpen walls and I find myself frustrated by noise.

My music collection is not well indexed, though. I ripped all of my CDs years ago onto my Linux boxen (dagon, which is still with us albeit in reduced circumstances, and the ill-fated daoloth) and very carefully set the ID3 tags on the tracks, but iTunes doesn't take any notice of their values. I have hundreds of tracks indexed solely by their name: no album, no artist (unless encoded in the title, which I did for compilations).

This is fine for random serendipity, but is pretty poor for making any kind of choice about my music. Most especially, it makes it hard to construct a good working ambience - there are albums I work well to, and they are buried away in the unsearchable morass.

There is a solution of course, but it needs more scripting - I have to update my labelling script to write the ID3v2 tags, which for stupidly arcane reasons I can only do at home on azathoth. It might make some nice displacement activity, although I'll probably do it on Monday.

It's either that or I rerip everything into iTunes and let it go and get the CDDB data, and that's just not happening.

Posted by Dunx at May 27, 2004 04:44 PM