Seltzer

For each track in a mixed artist compilation or VA soundtrack I set the artist as whoever the artist is and album artist as VA. For the compilations, I check the Part of a Compilation tag and set the genre to Compilation. For soundtracks, I simply set the genre to Soundtrack. This seems to be iPod friendly.

As for how I physically store compilations/soundtracks on my file system, I do it as below. Most of my soundtracks are in Soundtrack Albums but if I have heaps of soundtracks by one artist (i.e. Ennio Morricone) then I have a folder for them in Soundtrack Artists.

Compilations & Soundtracks
|--Compilations
|--Soundtrack Albums
|--Soundtrack Artists

For the MB compilations, I set the album art as the MB logo.


I organise according to tagging (genre tags + Foobar) as well as folder structure. Personally, I prefer the first approach but I also maintain a folder structure for the benefit of other people downloading music from me (since they obviously can't make use of genre tags when downloading music off our flat server). And yeah, for the structure by tags approach to work, it is necessary to use a strong library-based media player like Foobar as most others including WMP are laughably crippled by large collections.

I embed artwork in every song for the sake of my iPod but also in case people want to download individual songs from me. If each track has its own album art embedded then it doesn't matter if it is taken out of context. I ensure that my album art is < 400k (and usually 20-50k) so that the storage requirement is negligible (unless I'm dealing with grindcore albums haha).

I've been meaning to look into flashing my iPod but I think I'll wait until the warranty expires. I've figured out most of the vagaries of iTunes/iPods so it won't be too much of a headache until then. One of my main gripes with iTunes was its unanchored shift-select but they seem to have fixed that.

I forgot to mention that I do that too - I annotate album names with (Compilation), (EP), (Single), (Bootleg), (Live Album) etc...

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Guybrush

Sounds good, but I'm not so sure about using the genre tag for information like soundtrack and compilations! If you use foobar, why not just store that information in a new tag (f.ex "album type"?).

I didn't like sorting by genres back in the days, but now I've got a python script part written by myself which I can run from inside foobar that fetches genre and style tags from the discogs database for releases. It's fast too! It's nice because discogs have a reasonably strict set of allowed genres and styles and any album can have more than one in each field which is fine since foobar has no problems with multiple values.

Style Guide - The Unofficial Discogs Wiki
Example album on discogs, Over-nite sensation (note genre and style information)

If I didn't use this, I'd probably have over a thousand different genres still on my computer ..

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Something Completely Different

Seltzer

I'm reading about Rockbox now and the manual makes it sound like nothing is flashed at all as the Rockbox bootloader & firmware are stored on disk rather than in flash memory. The Rockbox bootloader apparently replaces the iPod firmware on a boot partition (and presumably the original iPod firmware is copied elsewhere) so the boot sequence would be iPod bootloader (flash) --> Rockbox bootloader (disk) --> Rockbox firmware (disk), and the original iPod firmware could still be loaded from another location if need be.

This not only makes it even safer than I would have imagined but would also allow me to erase any evidence of using Rockbox should I need to make a warranty claim on my iPod. Up until now, I'd avoided looking into Rockbox because I assumed it manipulated flash memory and would thus make it harder to discreetly revert but that doesn't seem to be the case and so it's easily reversible as you say.

Well I guess I'll install Rockbox when I have the time - the project sounds quite mature now so I'm sure it's relatively free from threading, performance and power consumption issues. The coder/hacker in me really wants to play around with this.


Yeah it is a bit of a hacky solution to set the genre tag as Compilation or Soundtrack but on the other hand, it is iPod friendly (iPods don't natively support custom ID3 tags afaik).

I didn't mind applying the genre tags to my entire collection because by that point I'd already had each artist in a genre folder so writing that structure to a tag was a simple batch operation using Tag & Rename. This does mean however that all of my artists each belong only to one genre but iPods don't allow songs to have multiple genres anyway... if a song has a genre tag which is a comma/semicolon delimited list of genres then iTunes/iPods simply see the song as belonging to a custom genre defined by that string rather than belonging to each of the genres. A common hacky solution is to use delimited genre tags and create smart playlists which include music on the basis of some rule (i.e. genre tag contains 'Jazz'). I can't see iTunes properly supporting multiple genres any time soon (people have been after it for ages) and even when it does, iPods would still require firmware updates to support this.

Nice work on the Python script; I might use it one day when I get around to using the smart playlist hack or if I decide to flash my iPod.

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noise

oh! i made a big assumption. good to know it doesn't flash anything, makes me feel even safer using it

about the power consumption - it is a big issue. at least when playing flac, since the disc access rate increases so much. i basically have to charge it every other day, and i just listen for a few hours during my commute.

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my flac collection

Zarko

Lazily

someonecompletelyrandom

tsk tsk...

I actually have a very similar approach. It's just a windows explorer folder like yours, but I have all of my albums in it arranged for example like...

50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin
A.B Cretsil - The Osooku Stars

etc

Zarko

I tried ages ago, and if you go up one folder it contains the majority of my albums which have been organised to some fair degree eg




But one day, approximately a year ago, I created the mystical '-01' folder, in which all zipped downloads are unzipped into, possibly for future organisation. That day has never come, and I doubt it ever will (Currently has 23GB worth of albums in there )

Seltzer

Bad news for me. Rockbox isn't supported on iPod Classics so I'm stuck with bilious iTunes and its single genre restrictions (amongst other things)! And it's got me thinking that I wouldn't mind working on the Rockbox project but I don't think I have enough hardware knowledge (my degree is software oriented).

Btw, I've been using your script today Tore and it seems to work pretty well. The only modification I've made is adding .replace('&','%26') so that it can handle artists/albums with ampersands.

And so far, the genre categorisation at discogs.com seems to be reasonable except for when it comes to metal. They don't consider it a top-level genre so that means that every metal band gets tagged with Rock whether it's Burzum, Wormphlegm or Stratovarius. Occasionally ambiguity causes amusing genre tagging such as Death - Human being industrial/power electronics and Freak Kitchen being house.

Now to wait ~20 hours for another 5000 hits (not to sound like a crack addict).

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