On Categorizing Music

First thing, now that I am back. I won't bore anyone with the relations of my tech-problems, but before I get on to pseudo-ranting about stuff I have been musing on, I will get right back to doling out free music.

Today's song of the day (feels good to say that again) is Lawn Wake IV (Black) by The Flashbulb (which I have a tendency to type as 'Flashblub'). I was teetering on the edge as to reccomending anything by this artist, as normally I won't push music without having a whole album, or discog, or something like that. Today, however, singles were in abundance, and after having heard some of the fellows music, I've decided that this is worth sharing. Good luck getting any more songs of his though... I only have 4 as it is. >> Anyway, about the song. I remember when I first discovered Goa-Trance - that's trance music fused with psychedellic guitars, for those who don't know. I was delighted to find that electronic music could have the same sweet riffy, catchy-ness that popular music could. And, then, I discovered just the other day that IDM and Breakcore could use guitars too. Genius! The Flashbulb makes music in a variety of styles, as is usually the case with prolific electronic musicians (who are actually worth listening to). Squarepusher and Venetian Snares, anyone? Right. Well, this song is pretty downright awesome. A very noisy, glitchy start, not nearly as abrasive as that Dev/Null track I reccomended a while back though, and then a sweet breakcore guitar-fest of mind-melting proportions. This song, as well as the other that accompanied it on the limited promotional EP Lawn Funeral, are available for download here. Enjoy.

Now, what do I have to say about categorizing music? Really just a wonderment, actually. As I'm a big advocate of music being freely distributed in the first place, it's easy to see that knowing what I'm getting would be a point of interest for me. What I have more to gripe about, however, is how proper music categorization is almost non-existent today, and indeed, most modern-day technologies and utilities seem to stifle the idea, rather than help it. Let me give you an example...

Say I purchased a CD from my local music retailer. Let's use Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind for the example. I take the CD home, unwrap it from its shiny plastic packaging, and after listening to a while, decide I want to copy the files from the CD onto my computer. A lot of programs allow me to do this - Winamp, Windows Media Player - I think Windows even has a built in utility. But, what do I find when I check the directory I extracted the files to? I can't tell which is which anymore! And so, I have to listen by ear and manually recategorize everything with my CD in hand as I scroll through a proprietary file tagger.

You'd think with all the time in the world to organize, format, and press CDs, a music company would take the needs of the consumer into place, and embed file information into the files on a CD. You'd think that, on the off chance that they do, that the music ripping program would make an effort to read that data.

I know this is an out of place gripe. Most CDs now a days are properly formatted, and with iTunes, there's no limit to the instant categorization! But to extrapolate further on this idea... go on to any random P2P music sharing program. Download a popular song... something by The Beatles. Play it in your music player of choice. No doubt, you will find things such as genre, album, and year are completely blank - and that the title is something like "the beetles_(song name)". No artist, or the artist will be the song name... blah blah blah, it goes on. When someone has the time to group and upload a torrent file of an artists entire discography - or, more to the point, even just that one album, you'd think they could also take the time to properly label it. Not so!

It ends up so that I'm one of the only people I know who has a near even close to properly organized music collection - at 50 gigs and rising, that's no small feat, but even I'm not close to done - and it's taken me literally days of work to get where I am. Even when I transferred over all my old music files, I had to retag them, because WMP tags weren't compatible with Winamp, and Winamp wasn't compatible with iTunes, or some stupid shit like that... it's just ridiculous. This is like a gripe people used to have on KaZaA back in the day - dialup users not sharing files. I disagreed with that one, but I think I'd like to take it to the extreme in a different way...

If you don't have properly categorized and labelled music files, do not share them.

I'm just kidding, really, but it is a huge pet peeve of mine. The fact that there's no 'auto-tagging' system for music these days makes me wonder what the internet is for... For people who actually want to tag their music properly though, look into getting Tag & Rename - it covers all different formats of tags, and all different audio formats as well. Really useful.


And that is all I have to say about that. Until tomorrow.