OCD Saturday
I am presently engaged in doing battle with iTunes to clean up my classical music collection, slowly re-ripping from CDs to get all my bitrates at the same decent level. I continue to be impressed by the insanity of the Gracenote data for most classical music. Certainly pop music works better and has a larger market, but iTunes has not gotten better with classical stuff over time. Presumably I’m supposed to have an expensive stereo.
Of the main approaches, the make individual works an album with tracks approach is superficially appealing but annoying in practice. The invent a classification system based on abbreviations approach is a little over the top, even for a working librarian; I get the appeal, really I do, but it’s too much for me.
I have returned to my default, which is to rip concerti and symphonies and string quartets by joining the tracks into a single track which contains the whole piece. Sometimes I care who the performers are, mostly I don’t.
I am seriously tempted by a friend’s suggestion to just skip iTunes altogether and listen to CDs. Except that Vivaldi is soothing in Boston traffic.
