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July 19, 2007
Vanilli, Milli
My iPod is sucking the life out of me.
I resisted the urge to get an iPod. I wasn't sure I needed one as I already had a couple of MP3 players that did most of what I wanted an MP3 player to do. This past winter I went so far as to buy a new MP3 player so I could make use of folders … and then I never bothered to do anything folder-like.
So how is it I have an iPod?
Well, Jack, the middle child, really really really (you recall the rule about three reallys, don't you) wanted a Wii. He kept saying things like, "When I save enough money …" and really, that's all the quote you need to see. He's 12; he has no money-saving skills — it wasn't going to happen as long as new Yu-Gi-Oh cards were being printed.
Jack, as it happened, had a 30-gig Video iPod. On it were the two songs I put on it for him the day after Christmas. One was some sort of child-friendly rap song and the other was Ted Ginn Did Everything by The Dead Schembechlers.
(Maybe you remember the conversation I had with my brother about Ted Ginn.)
Despite the dearth of music on his iPod, Jack spent an hour or so listening to it one night. I'm not sure if he programmed song order or if, preferring to be surprised, he had it on shuffle.
Then, grade cards came home, Jack had a disappointing grade, and he was put on electronic-gadget probation. No computer games, no video games, no porn, and no iPod. And, of course, we hung him from a gibbet in the cellar for a few hours.
Nine weeks later new grade cards came home, Jack's grades were up, and he was taken off electronic-gadget probation. He went back to the games, I made the porn thing up, he never touched the iPod again.
So it sat in a drawer up to the point Jack asked about getting a Wii.
I figured I'd buy the iPod from Jack and use the money to get him a Wii. Perhaps I'll tell you about the Great Wii Hunt later, right now we need to get into how the iPod is sucking the life out of me.
I've had the iPod for two weeks, I think. Thus far I have a bunch of Podcasts on it (NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and HBO's Bill Mahr). I have a whole bunch of music to put on it but I refuse to do any syncing until I get everything sorted just right. In the past I was a little sloppy about how songs were ripped. Some of the song titles have a format similar to: 05 Ted Nugent - Great Gonzos - Stranglehold and some are formatted like Gold - ABBA - Dancing Queen.
I know what you're thinking. Ted Nugent and ABBA would be a great double bill. Especially if they did a couple of songs together. I can almost hear Frida screaming dog, dog … dog eat dog as I type. Oh, and how about a super-group duet: That Nadine, what a Dancing Queen, she lookin' so clean, especial'y down in between, what I like … (ooh baby).
EDIT: This just came to me! They could do the wang dang sweet poontang part in Swedish (or Dutch or German, whatever the hell ABBA is) that way it would get American air play. And it's all about making it in America; New York, specifically, for you Nugent-Sinatra Supergroup fans.
(It's got legs, people!)
Anyway. There's a part of me that really wants all the file names to have the same format. That want lasted about 5 minutes. The want that every song has a good IDTag has lasted hours. And hours. As has the want that songs are grouped right.
I know iTunes will do some grouping (and probably a whole lot of stuff I don't know about yet) but a problem I've had is that, for example, a CD I have of 80's New Wave Hits was grouped by artist. iTunes created 10 folders, one for each artist on the CD, and then a subfolder with the album name in which the one song from the CD was placed. I have a number of CDs like this which led to a multitude of artists being listed with a single song in their folders.
(Another problem is that sometimes groups like The Who are stuck in folders named The Who and Who depending on the CD. Bruce Springsteen was put in Bruce Springsteen and Springsteen, Bruce while Milli Vanilli was put in Milli Vanilli and Vanilli, Milli. (I made the last one up.))
Now, there may be a smarter way to tidy things up (and I'm in no mood to hear about it now after all the time I've put into this), but I've spent hours moving things around the way I want them.
The most awesome thing about this whole exercise is that, 1) I will probably never look at the iPod display while it plays so IDTags are mostly useless to me, and 2) I will probably keep the iPod on shuffle all the time. There is not a person on earth for whom folders will be more useless.
Yet, I felt the need to sort things.
Posted by delmer at July 19, 2007 12:32 AM
Comments
When you're finished with yours, you're welcome to sort my music too! It really, really, really needs it. (Isn't Wii hunting fun!)
Posted by: Missy at July 19, 2007 10:39 AM
The Wii hunting was a treat and involved many weeks of sneaking around in the electronics department of the local Target.
By the way, I finally took the big step and actually synced the iPod this evening. As I type I'm resyncing to apply changes I made via iTunes. (I am now almost as hip as my 13-year old.)
Posted by: delmer at July 19, 2007 10:14 PM