Obsessing over the music collection

With some time off I decided to pick the nits and fleas off my music collection. It had gotten to be a mess. The bulk of it lives on my portable player with a backup copy plus seasonal stuff off on my Windows system. At least that's how I thought it was. Truth was that the player and the Windows copy had diverged. Most of my ripping has been done using grip on Linux. For a couple of years I ripped to Ogg Vorbis format. My portable player supports Ogg. But some of the music gets used in video projects and the software we use for those doesn't support Ogg. So in a fit of stupidity I did a mass conversion of all the Ogg files to WMA using dbPowerAmp Music Converter. Without going into too many boring details, I also did some renaming and retagging and other cleanup on one or the other copy of various tracks so I ended up with a hopeless mess with tracks in MP3, WMA, Ogg, FLAC and a few WAVs.

I think I've mostly untangled the mess I made. The following tools were of immense help:

EasyTag

A great tag editor and more. Very useful for mass tag cleanup with features like the ability to convert underscores to spaces. I can't say enough good things about this tool! But I wish that WMA support was built in. I've found some links to code that will add it but haven't spent the time to do that yet.

amaroK

An amazing music collection organizer and player. But frankly I have a love/hate relationship with amaroK. When it works it's wonderful! But amaroK (or possibly the underlying GStreamer engine) doesn't get along with my portable player when the portable is mounted as a USB drive. It glitches, like a skip on an old time record, every couple of minutes when playing tracks from the portable. Tracks copied to the ginormous external USB drive plays fine. After enough glitches amaroK just freezes up.

Good ol' Unix rsync

While it isn't wart-free (rsync to a WinXP samba-mounted onto Linux seems to always think the file dates are different. Update: Doh! after a bit of rtfm I came across the --modify-window option), rsync has been a great help. In particular the "--existing" flag lets me update tracks from the main collection to the portable player without trying to jam the entire collection onto the portable.

At this point the collection is all rationalized to my satisfaction and I found some stuff I didn't recall I had.

Update: I once knew that the FAT file system (used on my player) and apparently the NTFS system (used on my WinXP system) only store timestamps to a resolution of 2 seconds. That by random chance would cause half of the files to appear out of sync. The --modify-window=1 option to rsync handles this nicely.