Something Interesting About managingmusicfilesonyourcomputerandpersonalmusicplayer

Why thank you, Geoffrey.

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Today, I proudly informed my friends on Facebook, I gave into "the strange obsession that my peer group has with Disney music", and loaded the Lion King soundtrack onto my mp3 player. When I inserted the cd, a box appeared asking me what I'd like to do with the cd. All well and good. I was given the options of opening it to look at the files, not doing anything, or to listen to it or rip music from it with Windows Media Player, iTunes, Creative Centrale or Nokia Music Manager. These programmes all have their own pros and cons:

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Windows Media Player - usually just doesn't work. I gave up on it in 2007 or 2008. Sometimes I use it when I accidentally double-click on a video (when I should have right-clicked to select Open with PowerDVD) and it comes up and plays in Media Player. But most of the time I just never use it.

iTunes - I don't actually have an iPod, but I use this for most of my music needs. It works and I'm used to it. The only problem is that although I don't have an iPod, my sister does, and most of the songs shown are hers. And of those, only a fraction are actually on my computer - the majority ask me to find the file manually when I try to play them. Half of them are by Slipknot, so I don't mind.
Creative Centrale - this is the music programme that came with my mp3 player (a Zen Mozaic - I have the black one. Yes, it looks even more emo in real life). It's good in that it automatically finds music on my computer, and doesn't display all the songs that aren't there like iTunes does. Sometimes I find little gems on Creative Centrale that I didn't know I had - for example, today I realised that Bittersweet Symphony was on my computer, this being a song that had been on my "songs to get" list for months. I use this for putting music onto my mp3 player, even if I take it from a CD with iTunes.
Nokia Music Manager - part of Nokia PC Suite. I don't actually listen to music on my phone, because the last time I tried it took me about three hours to get one song on.

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So I selected "Import songs with iTunes". After the Lion King had finished importing I inserted "Housework Songs [Disc 1]", and then realised that I could set up a sort of production line, where as one CD was importing on iTunes, the CD that was imported before it would going onto my mp3 player. In this manner, I copied 16 CDs onto my computer, most of which I also copied onto my mp3 player. Now I've got lots of new songs to listen to, some of which I've never heard before.

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The way I organise my music is that everything goes on my laptop. Not literally everything - I don't go out and hunt down things like cheap, crappy modern hip-hop just because it's there. But if there's a chance that I might want to listen to something, or email it to a friend in one of my send-people-random-music sprees, I put it on the laptop - and not just the song, but the whole album, even if I only want one song from it.

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From there, it's narrowed down to the music I have on my mp3 player. I tend to listen to my mp3 player on "shuffle all", so if there's an album that I only like one song from, usually I'll just put that song on - though you can discover good music that you didn't know about from listening to the rest of the album that you got for the one song. I found "The Best of Blur" on my computer once (a leftover from my sister), and the only song I knew was Song 2. Everyone knows Song 2. But I listened to the rest of the album, and decided that I liked Country House, Charmless Man, Coffee & TV and Tender waaaaaaaaay more than Song 2.

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Since refreshing my mp3 player with this new music ("new" is relative - the CDs are all from my parents' collection), I've come to especially enjoy the addition of the greatest hits albums from The Eagles and The Beach Boys (don't laugh! The Beach Boys are the soundtrack of my childhood!).

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If only I didn't now have "Fun Fun Fun" stuck in my head.

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And she'll have fun fun fun till her daddy takes her T-bird away...