noa ks
We live in an era where streaming music is the default, and although i tend towards the Very Fundamentally Opposed end of the thoughts on streaming music, i can understand that most people just don’t care that much. For most people, music is usually pleasant background sound. A lot of people don’t listen to albums. In the same way that a lot of people don’t create a database of all the books that they own, most people don’t want to spend time managing what is essentially an ad-hoc database of all the music that they own. And that’s very understandable. Digital music tooling generally falls somewhere between not bad to very bad, and if listening to music is not an active hobby, spending time with janky tools just to make it so that your albums appear as a single album is not really a fun or interesting pursuit.
Growing up, i watched my father build a digital music library in itunes. When i first received a phone of my own, i put some of those songs on it. Over time, i built my own library, mostly through the one-pound album of the week deals that google play music used to have, back when it existed. And excluding a period of about eighteen months when i started university and fell prey to spotify’s predatory and heavily advertised student discount, locally is how i’ve always listened to music. Starting from about 2018, i used beets to tag and organise that music. Beets is a really nice piece of software that generally stays out of your way: it takes some initial setup, but then everything works really nicely. However, there have been a few things that i’ve struggled with over the years, and recently i’ve been using MusicBrainz Picard and kid3 more and more. Today i finally completely removed beets, and also took the opportunity to clean up the last few bits of metadata in my library.
The main reason for this is because i find it difficult to rearrange songs in beets, which is necessary when it tags some songs in an album in the wrong order. As a command line program, it drops you into a text editor with a series of numbers, and no other metadata. In picard, on the other hand, i can simply drag and drop things into the right places.
In general, i think that picard really demonstrates some of the biggest advantages of well-designed graphical applications: there are many situations where using a mouse is simply the easiest way to perform a task.
Another thing that beets still doesn’t seem to get totally right is multiple artists on songs and albums. Searching for information about this doesn’t turn up much, but there are threads going back a long way, and though some documentation implies it’s solved, that hasn’t been my experience compared to using picard to do the tagging.
So i’m still using picard, because it helps to clean everything up, and adding musicbrainz ids to songs is in general just very helpful, as my primary music player is aware of them and uses them to help distinguish albums that may have the same title and artist. Although i use picard, i generally will do a pass afterwards in kid3, because there are various things that the musicbrainz database doesn’t do, or that it does but that i don’t like.
The first is i like to normalise all chinese albums to use simplified characters, because they are the ones i use and can read, and unfortunately i have not yet found a local music library player that can search for traditional characters when simplified ones are typed. So for my convenience, i prefer to simply stick to the one writing system.
The other things are mainly related to sorting. First artists with a canonical english language name, use that in the sort tag. 王菲 Wáng Fēi is known in english as Faye Wong, and as a result gets sorted as wo- rather than wa-, where i would expect to find her, especially as her name is written in characters. In this case, the difference is not huge; but 五月天 Wŭyuè Tiān are known in english as Mayday, which is in a totally different place. So i like to go through by hand and fix that kind of thing up. For all artists with non-latin alphabet names or album names, the respective sort tags hold a canonical romanised form.
This is still not perfect: i chose not to add tones marks, and i chose to put spaces between each pinyin syllable, so Faye Wong’s early albums are sorted under “Wang Jing Wen” rather than “Wáng Jìngwén”. This is so that the syllables get sorted properly: as demonstrated with three fictional artists “Wan Bu”, “Wan Gu”, and “Wang Bu”; an alphabetic sort without spacing would result in the two Wans being split by the Wang:
- Wanbu
- Wangbu
- Wangu
My solution means that in lists, the names appear in the appropriate places, but it means that i can’t search for an artist just by typing as a single spaceless string. In practice i rarely do that, which is why i went for this tradeoff. The best solution would be for everything to be aware of the romanisations of other scripts and sort appropriately but that is a very hard problem that will probably not be satisfactorily solved for a long time.
So to conclude, i’ve made importing albums a bit more inconvenient for myself, so that actually listening is a bit more convenient. I think this is totally worth it because i like spending time with my music! I’m in a period where i’m chasing friction where i previously tried to streamline things. Thank you to beets for helping me out so much over the years!