Handling, organizing and listening to music

How I manage and listen to music.

Getting music

There are several ways to obtain music nowadays:

  1. Rip it from CDs Use ExactAudioCopy on a Windows machine with an optical disc drive (they still exist outside museums).
  2. Rip it from vinyl Use a turntable, a good analog-to-digital audio converter, and Audacity to record it. Audacity offers filters to reduce noise and remove cracks and pops.
  3. Download from web 2.01 websites youtube-dl is the Swiss Army knife for downloading from those sites. Check if your local radio stations have a player or Mediathek.
  4. Some radio stations provide their shows as podcasts.
  5. Some DJs run their own podcast to promote themselves.
  6. Buy it online.

Before the import

Transcode to a supported format

These tools come in handy:

  • ffmpeg, the Swiss Army knife for audio and video en-/trans-/decoding on the command line.
  • XLD to transcode audio files, split one file to tracks, etc.

If you want lossless encodes in an iTunes library, transcode the files to Apple Lossless. XLD handles this case nicely.

Set and clean ID3 tags

  • MusicBrainz Picard matches the files’ acoustic fingerprints against freedb2 and sets their tags accordingly.

  • Use mp3tag to derive ID3 tags from folder and file names and to fix ID3/APEv2 tags. Mp3tag is a power tool for mass manipulating and cleaning tags. It’s outstanding and works well within Wine. Nothing comes close to it, and it is the only reason I keep Wine installed.

    Wine is holding me back from upgrading to macOS Catalina as it does not support 64-bit-only OSes yet. I’m, by the way, wary of the Music app that ships with macOS Catalina.

Import files to library and organizing

All my music files are managed by iTunes. iTunes is really good at handling large music collections. I subscribe to iTunes Match to have the music available on all my devices.

iTunes Match restrictions

iTunes Match is sometimes slow.

It matches clean versions of lyrically explicit tracks. It’s annoying, but since voices distract me in music and I rarely listen to rap, it does not affect me much. I also keep the original files instead of replacing them with the matched version.

If you listen to DJ mixes, you will hit iTunes Match’s two-hour or 200 MB file size limit. Most of these mixes are distributed as MP3. mp3splt splits the files evenly without re-encoding.

Rating with a schema

After importing new tracks, I start rating them. Over time I’ve developed a rating schema (on a scale of 0 to 5 stars).

  • 0 stars: new to library, needs to be rated
  • 1 stars: rated to not keep.
  • 2 stars: keep for a reason, but the track is probably not great
  • 3 stars: an average track
  • 4 stars: a good track
  • 5 stars: a personal favorite track

Stars is useful to rate music via hotkey.

Accurate genre field

I try to set specific genres: Instead of Rock I narrow it down to Rock/Metal or even Rock/Metal/Black. Here are a few other specific examples:

  • Drum & Bass/Jump-Up
  • House/Bass
  • Techno/Acid
  • Techno/Hard

Tagging something as Pop is basically avoiding setting a genre. For Pop I started adding the decade like this: Pop/60, Pop/70, …, Pop/00, Pop/10, Pop/20.3

Clean up the iTunes library with beaTunes

beaTunes not only analyzes the content of each track, but also inspects the iTunes library. The inspection detects illogical tags, missing compilation tags, different notations of the same artist, finds duplicates, etc.

Go through the findings and commit the changes.

Determining the Key and Energy with Mixed in Key

Mixed in Key analyses the key and energy of music files.4

Create a smart playlist MiK todo that lists all files without Energy or BPM and with a rating greater than or equal to 2 stars.

Creating playlists

Creating smart playlists makes much more sense with rated and analyzed tracks. Name them wisely. I tend to follow the BEM naming convention5 and name them roughly like this:

  • stars__4
  • stars__4+--bpm-124-127

Smart playlists

Set up a handful of smart playlists:

  1. For energy levels (filter rules depend on your Mixed in Key configuration)
  2. For each possible rating (Stars 0, Stars 1, …, Stars 5)
  3. For Added in the last x weeks/months I have those for 4 weeks and 6 months and call them added-4w and added-6m.

My rating scheme (see above) leads to two special Star playlists:

  • Stars 0 is my to rate playlist.
  • Stars 1 is my to remove playlist.

Now you can create smart playlists like these:

  • Banger tracks: Track is in playlist Energy 8 and Stars 5.
  • Calm popular music: Genre begins with Pop and is in playlist Energy 4 or Energy 5.
  • Hard Techno post 2010: Genre begins with Techno/Hard and year >= 2010, in playlist Energy 6, 7, 8, 9.
  • More than 4 stars
  • More than 4 stars and in BPM range 124 to 127
  • Long and calm tracks: longer than x minutes, energy less than 5

Using beaTunes

In beaTunes you can set up criteria like Instrumentation, Key, Speed, etc. and let it create a playlist for you based on a seed track selection. That is super nice and the results are good. Over time, I noticed I do not use that feature much. I’m fine with the smart playlists.

Backup

  1. I use rsync to sync the Music folder to my NAS:
rsync --archive --verbose --human-readable \
 --itemize-changes --progress \
 --prune-empty-dirs --delete \
 -e ssh ~/Music/iTunes me@NAS:~/backup/Music
  1. Export the playlists with Doug’s Batch Export Playlists script. ⚠️ Make sure to export your Stars playlists! iTunes does not save the rating in the files’ tags. With those playlists you can recover your ratings.
  2. Add the exported playlists to a git repository and commit the changes, then push to a remote host.

Playing music

iTunes

With iTunes Match I can listen to my music on any of my  devices.

On desktop, I work with my smart playlists and the Column Browser in the Song view mode:

iTunes showing its song column

With MPD and Cantata

To play music on my stereo I launch Cantata to control MPD, which is connected to it via HDMI. It plays the files from my NAS. I scp the exported playlists (with corrected file URLs) to MPD’s playlists folder.

DJ set preparation

When creating a DJ set, I keep a playlist of A tracks as a track pool. Traktor reads my iTunes library, and I usually pick tracks from that pool and go with it.

Some mixes need more preparation. Then I create a plain old playlist in iTunes first and use that in Traktor Pro 3.

A laptop with a DJ software playing the song 'The End'

Footnotes

  1. A term coined in 2003 for the social web and user-generated content sites, etc. ↩

  2. freedb is a GNU GPL licensed track database. ↩

  3. This is collision-free until the year 2049. The first Pop songs I own are from the 1950s (Pop/50). ↩

  4. And more, like BPM. It can also set cue points to use with DJ standard software. ↩

  5. A naming convention for CSS. ↩

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