of my first attempt to merge my libraries, my poor computer started creaking and slowed to a crawl. Only 5 gigabytes of free space. Bloat alert. Abort copy. Move into computer CPR. Purchase an external hard drive and attach to ailing computer.
Several hours later, I began the copy again. All seemed to be going well. But post-copy, on firing up i Tunes, I could not see the music I knew I had. So I tried a menu option: “Add to Library” and went hunting for the files. This did not work. So, I took a peek in the i Tunes library folder. (This is like looking in that cupboard where you shove
everything you will need for tax time, myriad bits of paper that may be useful and demand to be sorted come March.) I saw that I didn’t have a consistent folder structure. To be clear, I had a lot of structure, but it did not appear to be consistent structure. Why not? Who knows! Perhaps I inherited some structure from bygone days when I was in love with another mp3 player.
Suddenly I was in a series of Internet forums, searching, browsing, asking questions, begging people for information, and feeling frustrated that I did not know all-things-database; swiftly realizing no one else seemed to know what was going on either and I had no grounds on which to evaluate the different—sometimes conflicting— advice I was reading.
To cut to the chase and save you the dull and drawn-out details, in the end I called a friend who is not only patient, but also the Dr. Doolittle of the computer kingdom. He came over and sorted out what he diagnosed as a meta-data problem. He muttered all along about meta-data and index files, and inscrutable menus. And that he is “not a Mac user” and why is this folder structure so complicated…
We (well, he) completed the merge days later. The resultant tidy folder of folders in folders, Russian-doll style, was a beautiful thing to behold. This clean slate set in motion the kind of obsessive compulsive behavior that would have made Lady Macbeth proud. My greedy, music-hungry eyes lit upon the remaining 600 or so CDs I had not yet ripped. Anything that
looked like a CD was put in line for the music-ripping conveyer belt. Then I set about solving the next problem that emerged— removing duplicates from my music library. There were up to three versions of various CDs, each in a different format, making it difficult to decide which version was best. So, back online I went, reading about formats and “de-duping”, i.e., removing duplicates. Carrying out version comparison and removing duplicates should be easy—this surely follows the really basic principle that boring dull repetitive tasks should be done by computers who are good at that sort of thing, while we humans do the creative stuff. Isn’t that what batch processing is all about? Finally, thanks to iDupe, a nifty little application that simplifies the duplicate music file problem, the job was done. I had ripped hundreds of CDs and was ready to shuffle randomly across hundreds of gigabytes of music.
Then, my newly purchased Seagate external hard drive refused to mount— intermittently. I now had all my tamed music files and folders on an apparently failing hard drive. Detour again. This time, however, I was in a complete panic. I did not yet have a backup of those clean music files, old and new. Having at this point sunk hours into this music organizing process, I was not ready for a repeat performance. All the while, a recently unearthed 1980s song by the Fixx, “One Thing Leads to Another” played in my mind, accompanying my distress.
Fast-forward a few days. I am under my desk inserting a new
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