One upside of sorting through old CDs, is the opportunity to restore files that kind of disappeared two or three laptops ago. Another, is content for a recent experiment but that’s still a work in progress :^o.
Something that I also find curious is how tastes have changed. Less so my taste in music, more so my taste in interfaces. The last time that I ripped and organized these CDs, I had my own fairly strong notions of how things should be organized–and it mostly pissed me off. It’s hard to have a very uniform, tightly organized music collection in my experience. And experience has shown that often one method is as good as another until you start to stress specific problems like the maximum number of files in a directory, so meh.
My archival structure is more or less based off Plex’s format with a relatively lax level of adherence, since it’s easier to just import things like a Steam soundtrack as is, and a stack of old CDs is too much effort to value to sit around writing scripts to munge into the desired filesystem structure.
Which kind of brings me to two things that surprise me. One is that Apple Music will happily import audio CDs despite the emphasis on streaming subscription, and it’s a pretty snappy decoder. MPEG-4 containers with AAC-LC is perfectly acceptable to me as a format today due to the level of openness and support, and the iTunes Plus profile of 256K is good as anything shy of giving me a FLAC file. The other thing is that I don’t hate how Apple Music munges my rips, so much as I don’t care how Apple Music munges my rips.
The last time that I really touched anything Apple and music ripping was probably iTunes 6 or 7, which at the time was ‘current’, and let’s just say that XP was still sexy back then. Most of my friends liked iTunes, and not to big a surprise since most had an iPod even if few had Macs. But I was very perturbed by how iTunes wanted to assert its own definition of how to organize my content instead of obeying my system. Combined with being more of an XMMS / Amarok / MPlayer kind of guy, suffice it to say that I was never a fan of iTunes as a media player nor a library manager.
Fast forward to today, and what’s the real big difference there? Well, honestly the way that Apple Music manages imported CDs seems about the same that I remember from almost 20 years ago. The difference? I don’t want to manage my music through a file system. It doesn’t do my life well to organize such things in terms of files and directories built around tracks, albums, and artists and any other hoopla–no, it’s about the data model not about fitting that model to the file system.
It’s actually a lot like my contemporary relationship to notes taking over the past decade, and Android/iOS software in general. I don’t really want a model built around files when a model built around data is more practical. The obvious consequence of course, is that means decent tools. If you can’t do better than find/grep and so on then don’t bother making a fucking interface!
If files are a natural model to a problem: good. At some level most things should be files because we have good tools for working with files and it’s a fundamental aspect of data storage. But raw files are bad at metadata, at search, at relationships, and a host of other things that are more database like or more structured in nature than a stream of bytes. Files are good at storing that information not expressing those concepts, even more so when portability is a consideration. So while I still don’t like the way Apple Music organizes content anymore than I did iTunes, I can appreciate that it provides a reasonable interface particularly for the import part.
And of course the archival path is still tossing the resulting files into my own structure, lol.