In which we talk about comments spam and ID3 tags.
We’ve been getting utterly hammered here at goblinbox by spam comment bots for lo, these past 12 hours, and Askimet isn’t catching them because they don’t have any links and they’re not from known IPs! It’s crazy! Bandwidth-eatin’ mofos, a pox upon you all: I’ve just installed Bad Behavior.
While I can very nearly understand the spam for ‘tranny hunters,’ ‘pee clips,’ ‘black cheerleader sex,’ ‘phentermine,’ ‘farm sex,’ ‘pictures of gay men using their dildos,’ and ‘amateur sex,’ what the hell is ‘anal bondage’? I honestly can’t even imagine the device one would need to purchase for that particular kink, and I’ve got an active imagination.
Heh.
On a completely different topic, I’ve been thinking about organizing my MP3s better and I wanted to ask y’all how you tag your tunes. I sometimes want to listen to a class of music – say, disco or R&B or jazz – but since my genre tags are so crap I can’t do so without creating a playlist, an activity that requires me to scroll through my entire library to find the stuff I’m in the mood for.
The vast majority of the files in my music library were already tagged by the Gracenote db or by the person I got the files from, and I have really no idea how to classify music anyway, so I haven’t messed with them much. (And some of the tags are just terrifying. I once downloaded Etta James’ Tell It Like It Is, and the genre was – I shit you not – “jungle music.” I have three other tracks under the jungle tag, but they’re actually jungle beat tracks so the tag’s not a racial slur. I have many hundreds of tunes tagged “rock” that are only tangentially related to one another. Songs that should be tagged jazz are tagged rock or fusion or swing or whatever.
Plus, how do you determine genre? By the artist, or by the song itself? Because nearly every artist belongs in more than one genre, but most albums have all the songs in the same genre. Which means you can end up with a country song in your ‘rock’ genre, or a baroque piece in your Gregorian chant genre, or the Basie Band and Maroon 5 in the same genre (which is clearly just plain WRONG, even though both tunes may technically be swing).
The point is, there are too many damned genres to be of any use, and it will probably be awhile before someone figures out how to code for a tag cloud. So I’m thinking of simplifying everything into the broadest categories possible: rock, dance, R&B/soul, jazz, classical, and world. But then I think that would just piss me off because if I selected a shuffle in the jazz genre and ended up with a 1930’s blues track right next to a Paul Simon track, I’d explode. So then I was thinking of using subcategories, like rock_classic, rock_soft, rock_arena and jazz_modern, jazz_fusion, jazz_classic, but that sounds like a clusterfuck, too.
Anyway, I want to know how you organize your music: do you even bother to organize by genre? If so, how? Do you use other ID3 fields for your own information? Do you ignore genre altogether and simply listen to a particular artist or album as the mood strikes? Or do you just shuffle your library and hope for the best?
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My favorite “sorting” technique is to just play everything alphabetically by song title. But this doesn’t work too well with classical compositions, where I get all the “allegro” pieces together, then all the contcertos, divertimentos, etc. – it creates blocks of music that get hard to truly listen to after a bit.
Other than that, I just stick to the basic genres.
Much like amped!, I start at the top and work the middle until I hit that bottom. Of the music list. ahem. Otherwise sometimes I’ll just make long-ass playlists of songs of the same mood instead of genre grouping them.
Top, middle. Bottom. HAH! You funny! 😉 -m
i just let windows media player label them. i don’t create a playlist of specificity. i like them all and have no issues about what plays when. i guess i’m no help. sorry 🙂
I don’t mess much with the genre tag, I usually listen by album or artist. Other than that I will make a playlist and put various stuff into it and listen to it that way. I *think* what you’re wanting to do may be available with MP3 Collector
I handcraft my own mixes to suit my mood. Were it not for the RIAA, I would post my mixes and talk about them, the artists and the links I see amongst them. Alas, the RIAA would sue me into oblivion for trying to promote their, so fuck ’em.
Current mix:
Peter Gabriel, “In Your Eyes”
Finger Eleven, “Falling On”
Spoon, “Underdog”
oh jeez, hard limits on comments. bummer. I’ll just have to make a post.
Nuh-uh! I have 3000-word comments. Browser error? -m
[…] Mush over on goblinbox asked about playlists and mp3 categories and all that, and I tried to answer via comments, but comments suck as a form of dialog, and I got my post truncated, so I decided that I’d post it here. […]
The person looking for anal bondage should really consider adding more fiber to their diet.
I am not sayin’, I am just sayin’.
LOL! -m
I almost always listen on shuffle. If not I tend to listen by CD.
I’ve been getting Increase your sex drive spam lately. That is honestly insulting….
I don’t use tags. I only put what I want to listen to into the playlist. That’s it.
It appears that genre tagging totally suxOr and nobody uses it.
Therefore, I want a 70-field tag cloud implemented in the next ID3, oh yes I do.
Sometimes, I like to sort my music by play count, that way I can listen to stuff that I haven’t heard before (at least since I loaded it on ITunes.)
I’m gonna do that, and call the playlist “jenny.” Heh. -m
i edit each file. with all avilable tag editors. cuz i’m picky. i edit groups of files too. with itunes. cuz im lazy.
Pink is the new black. Lazy is the new pink. -m