Playing around with song ratings

With less than a week now until I leave for Odyssey, I’ve been spending some time working on something… well, it was on my ‘get ready for Odyssey’ list, but it probably isn’t as critical as a few other items on that list. I’ve spent quite a few hours over the past few days playing around with my MP3 collection and tweaking the filing of my songs. 🙂

I generally keep my MP3 files in a two level folder hierarchy. The first level is the basic rating, from 1 to 12, or ‘stage’ if I haven’t rated the song yet. The second level has to do with where I got the MP3, so ‘homerip’ if I ripped it from a CD, ‘record’ if I captured it on the MP3 boombox, (from a cassette tape or vinyl album, say,) or the name of the online music service I bought it from, like napster, emusic, or itunes. I switched from puretracks code to trackspure code when puretracks.com started selling DRM-free MP3 music, and I have a catch-all code of ‘purloin’ for… well, for music that I picked up here and there online without paying for it. (And that accounts for a small slice of the collection by now.)

So, what I’ve been doing with this has been tweaking the rating of individual songs up and down, to help me figure out what music I’m taking to New Hampshire and how. Among other tweaks, I’m looking at any songs that I have multiple versions of and trying to pick which cut I like best. As a general rule, anything other than the best copy can’t expect to get a higher rating than a seven.

On one level, spending a lot of time on this feels foolish, but we all need some foolishness in our lives. I know I do.