Tag: music library

Technological Overthinking #3 | Retiring Last.FM

24 December 2023 /

This installment of overthinking yet again revolves around music, but this time it’s about keeping a long-term record of what I choose to listen to over time. (This was partially inspired by wanting to have my own version of a Spotify Wrapped that didn’t require Spotify!)

A couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to keep a consistent play count and record of what I’d listened to over time, that wasn’t solely dependent on my PC. I’ve reinstalled Windows, corrupted things in Windows, and changed hard drives out frequently enough in the past that I’ve had to recreate my music library data quite a few times before. Also, I don’t only listen to music on my PC, so using an external source that could collate data from my PC, my phone, and any manual additions, seemed to be the best approach.

Last.FM was the main tracking service I’d heard of, and it seemed trustworthy because of having been around for such a long time, so it felt like a good choice. I signed up for Last.FM in December 2021 and, at first, I really liked using it. My media software of choice, MusicBee, has a built-in Last.FM feature, so automatic scrobbling (the Last.FM term for ‘keeping track of a song being listened to’) from my PC was easy. I enjoyed the recommendation mix and radio, as they gave me a way of discovering new music that wasn’t attached to a streaming service.

The listening statistics were also fun to use, as they covered both global and personal stats. Being able to look up an artist or album and see which of their albums and tracks had the most listeners was interesting. But being able to click on an album and view my play-count of each song from that album, and to click on a song and see each time that I had scrobbled it, was a whole new level of data to enjoy.

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Technological Overthinking #2 | Sony Walkman Album Art

4 June 2020 /

One recurrent technological question I have is why my MP3 players never display album artwork consistently. The issue often seems random; when I get some albums working, others are blank in their place. So I wanted to figure out what the problem was and write solutions down for future reference.

As I’ve used Sony Walkman MP3 players since about 2008, I initially checked posts and articles about Sony players. However, this problem applies to multiple brands of MP3 players and to other devices like digital photo frames.

Many people with Sony Walkman players have posted about cover art issues on Sony’s support website. But the official replies just tell people to transfer songs using Sony’s Content Transfer software, without explaining why the issue exists. I wanted to fix the issue within the music programs I already use (MediaMonkey and Mp3tag) instead of adding another program into the mix.

After looking on multiple sites, subreddits and software forums, I found three essential criteria for making album art and other tags show up properly on Sony MP3 players. (These criteria may apply to other MP3 players as as well, and the “baseline” JPG criteria may resolve issues with car infotainment systems and digital photo frames).

1) Every song must be tagged using ID3 tag version 2.3.
2) Every song’s artwork must be embedded into its ID3 tag.
3) Every artwork image must be a JPG. More specifically, it must be a “baseline” JPG rather than a “progressive” JPG.

Now I’ll explain what all of those words mean, and the steps that I followed to make my song files and cover artworks fit these criteria. It’s important for me to clarify that each individual criterion was figured out by someone else; I’m just putting them together so that I can show the steps in one place.

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Technological Overthinking #1 | Music Library (2023 version)

4 June 2020 /

I can understand why streaming services have become so popular: being able to access a large library of familiar and new music that can’t be erased by a faulty hard drive or a wrong button-press is appealing. But, like most techies, I lean towards the “control” side of the convenience-control spectrum in many situations.

For music specifically, I prefer ownership over streaming. I like being able to buy albums from multiple places, store them and back them up wherever I wish, and play them on software I already use, rather than being restricted to specific marketplaces or software clients. (I would also rather rely on my storage and backups than on the unbelievably complex licensing arrangements between streaming services and publishers). For me, staying on team “offline library” was the obvious choice.

Investigating an issue with my MP3 player last year led me to an interesting program called Bliss. In short, Bliss manages your music library based on rules that you define. You set rules about how you want files to be labelled, named, and organised, and Bliss either highlights files which don’t fit the rules so that you can edit them, or adjusts them to meet the rules automatically.

Although Bliss is overkill for my relatively small and wholly-offline library, I really liked its rule-based approach. So I’ve taken the rules I decided on within Bliss and recreated them inside my desktop software of choice, MusicBee.

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