Burst Attention Span

I have a lot of CDs at home. More than a lot. I use some for DJing which I keep in a box ready to go, others are mixes and some CDs are just for playing at home. I also have lots of vinyl in assorted sizes and speeds, as well as a massive selection of MP3s in no particular order and on several different hard disks on my system. I often wish I could browse around my entire collection as easily as I search for tunes in my DJ box, so I was quite intrigued to spot this article about navigation methods for digital music collections and found that I could identify with a lot of the points made. However, being about the challenges and not neccessarily the solutions, the article fell short of defining a usable solution for my situation. Another DJ I know has taken all his CDs out of their boxes and put them all in plastic sleeves with computer printed labels. He says it saves weight and allows him to read tracklists more easily in a dark performance area. The big problem I have with this approach is that I don't always mentally make a connection between the title and the tune. As mentioned in the article; typography, colour and sleeve art all contribute to the recognition of a CD, so homogenising them is not ideal. And it's this homogeny that digital music presents to me whenever I try to organise my collection. Efforts to organise are further spoiled by missing and incorrect MP3 tags, and the age-old dilemma of 'alphabetical or what?'. Ordering by genres is very tricky with modern music as fusions blur the distinction between them, but it's useful for a DJ planning a set. Year of release is a good indicator, but between international releases and mixed compilations it's hard to be consistent. The old favourite of alphabetical ordering is fine but which information to order on? Over time, artists join different groups with different names, and album titles are often abstract and hard to remember without the art accompanying them. That's why with over 4000 tunes from 300 albums on my iPod I hardly ever bother to choose a playlist anymore, I just play all and hope something really jarring doesn't come up. I want a system with all the visual cues and rich detail of my physical music collection, the covers, the sleeve notes and the little scribbles I've marked out my favourite tracks with but incorporating a full meta-data search across every tune I own. I want to be able to find the tune I'm thinking of as quickly as possible, whether it's in my record box, on my CD shelf or buried in a hard disk somewhere. What do you do? Have you devised a system that works? Let me know in the comments field.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Music & DJing.