jTunes

Intake

The Albums

I finally justified the purchase of one of those Skip Dr. type inventions that restores discs that are not playing correctly. I’ve heard any number of things about “home remedies” that will do just the same thing. I have tried a few, and none of them worked. Toothpaste was a notable failure. My Spin Dr. was (and is) awesome. It cleaned over 250 CD’s, I’m sure. If you’ve already spent a good deal of money on your music collection, you should probably get one. It’s an extremely low-grade belt sander, but with sufficient lubrication, it has worked flawlessly.

The Live Shows

All my live shows are in some lossless format already, although SHN is probably my least favorite music format of all time. Conversion to FLAC will be part of the project. Also, I’ll be using the tailor-made etree-scripts to do a few different things. I’ve already used it to successfully transcode a few of my favorite shows, and it’s a perfect command-line interface to the process. Hooray!

The Bowels

Synchronization

I’m no judge of precisely how Type A I am overall– (my guess is not very), but there are some things that I am absolutely compulsive about.

I am sick of spending a good deal of time editing metadata to get it exactly the way I like, and then either some other external program overwrites it, or I have to switch formats or something. Part of the synchronization process will notice that a file has changed and see if it needs to update the metadata on the lossy image. Robin Bowes’ flac2mp3 script is doing a fantastic job already.

Genre classification

I am also sick of having some random, proprietary genre structure that I don’t agree with most of the time anyway. AllMusic has something that I’ll agree with, usually. This element of the project hasn’t really begun.

Playlist magic

Once all files and genres are known, there’s nothing about amarok that would prevent me from getting playlist data out of it. From there, I can create my own playlist magic, if I’m unsatisfied with what I get for free.

I don’t know for a fact if I can get ratings I drop on my iPod to transfer over, but I’ll let you know if I come up with anything.

The Pimp Sh!t

Sharing At Home

All capable computers will serve the lossless files to perserve audio quality, where possible. Everywhere else will use the MP3 image

Sharing With Friends

I would never do this, right? That would be illegal. Or rather, it wouldn’t be illegal, exactly, but I could get sued. Even though they have everything under control.

Streaming Content

In combination with a bit more technical wizardry, it would be entirely possible for me to run my own Internet radio station that I could listen to during the day, changing directions according to my every whim.

Conclusion

Yeah, I’m pumped.