The Great Music Collection, part three: The Import

It's no secret to my friends that I hate iTunes. The software (on Windows) has been sluggish, bulky and a pain to deal with. Any Apple software - for that matter - has been difficult to deal with. I remember a decade ago trying to play movie trailers with Quicktime on the web, or download the trailers and play them locally. It was a fiasco that I've since resolved by not installing any Apple software on my system, and just installing the proper codecs from others. This lets me download and enjoy those MOV files like it's nobody's business, especially not Apples. But I digress, iTunes is a necessary evil now that I've jumped onboard with the iPhone. I figure I could make it work, to at least get by. And so far, things have been OK - except the automatic updater has never worked, on any machine I've used. Anyway.

Anytime I've used iTunes to import my gigantic collection in, the software has chugged along, done its thing and given up quickly afterwards. This is mainly due to tagging and organizing. Although I may have an album tagged properly and it looks alright in software such as XBMC or Winamp, iTunes reads it differently and manages to ruin my day. But this time I've taken a different approach, and I must say it's been pleasurable. Perhaps it's my patience, or seeing the beneficial light at the end of the tunnel, or the ridiculous number of updates Apple has done to iTunes over the years, but things have been great.

I start with my main Albums folder, which is supposed to contain music I listen to most often. I import each folder one at a time. This point is crucial: one at a time. iTunes is also set to copy files into its library, and to organize the files itself (admittedly it uses a nice structure of Artist -> Album). Doing it this way allows me to inspect an album on its own, fix any tagging issues and sort it as I please. It takes just a minute or so to copy the album over the network to my desktop, and just moments more to fix regular issues. In some cases, I have to touch every track, but for the most part my meddling consists of modifying an entire album of tracks at once, for things like album name, genre and year.

Which brings me to what fields should be properly set up.

1. Artist
2. Track Title
3. Album
4. Album Art
5. Year
6. Genre

That's it, in order of importance. The top three are of the utmost importance, and have to be correct. Album art is important but not necessarily necessary. Year and genre are more for sorting and using later, and for the most part I could see years were correct, however I wasn't too keen on checking every album. Genre is tough and is probably worth a post all its own, but I tried to keep it simple. I had the Allmusic site open at all times to check genres of artists; quickly you see a limitation of iTunes in that you can only apply one genre, whereas Allmusic presents you with Genre, Style and Mood, of which an album could fall under a number of headings. So it's kept simple here, and not something that I plan on using too much later on.

Once an album is copied over, and I'm satisfied with the top four - I decided album art was absolutely important in this step - I would move onto the next. I got brave, and would be ripping some albums at the same time as importing existing rips. The software didn't put up a fuss and it wasn't too hard to focus on, with the end result that I could import my entire collection more quickly.

As I imported more and more, my satisfaction increased exponentially. Everything looked clean. I recalled days of importing two hundred albums at once and being scared by the mess that ensued, but doing it this way provided a clean, efficient and tidy collection that I was happy to scroll through. Everything is as what it should be. It took around seven or eight hours by my best estimate, over the course of three or four days, but I was enjoying every minute of it, and the end result made it worth the time and effort.

Afterwards, I would go through my library and put albums into the "Core" playlist, which is the playlist that will sync with my iPhone. It serves as the music I'm most interested in and represents what I'm currently and willing to play. The next step now is to bring this collection to the server, and allow both XBMC and Subsonic to view my progress.