Music Ripper

I spent the past 2 days clearing my music folder – prompted after my purchase of several cheap *ahem* cds in my recent trip to China. I had to rip the songs from the cds and felt that I might as well clear up my folder once and for all. That was when I realised I had an insane amount of songs which meant natually that I had accumulated a lot of mess as well.

Inconsistent filenames, duplicate songs everywhere, variation of artist’s name, chinese characters, hanyu pinyin, genres, small caps, big caps, etc. I decided that for Mandarin songs, I would use hanyu pinyin instead of chinese characters, since I figured it’s easier for me to type in English letters rather than screwing myself up with a Chinese software. But fuck. That took a long time as well. Then I wanted all my files to be formatted as “Artist – Title”. Not all in big caps. Not all in small caps. And yes, I need a space between ‘Artist’ and the dash, and another one after the dash. So in another words, I was committing suicide the moment I decided to be so anal with the filename. I also stupidly set the ripped output to mp4, only to realise later that my blackberry phone CANNOT play mp4 files. And to top it all, it made deleting duplicate songs difficult because even if the title was the same, the laptop would not automatically overwrite the files since one was in mp3 format and the other was in mp4 format.

Still, I diligently worked through the 6000+ songs that I had, or probably not so. I skived by deleting around 4000 tracks with lame excuses like ‘file format is wrong’, ‘i don’t like those songs’ and ‘i don’t really need so many songs’. I was also reprimanding myself for probably another 100+ original cds that I sold to Cash Converter a few years back. I didn’t even rip those cds – simply sold them away because I was feeling poor, needed more drawer space and I was too lazy to rip songs. And now I actually want those songs back. FML.

After I corrected all the 2000+ filenames, I loaded all of them into my Winamp playlist, only to realise that when the songs were played, it still showed inconsistent information. What the fuck? It seemed to tell me that I had been doing the shit for nothing because playlists and mp3 players will still show those nonsense instead of my clean-up file names – especially for mandarin songs. You know, titles like #$!#dw$$# even though your filename is clearly something else.

Frustrated, I took a break and went out for dinner. Since my blackberry phone could not play mp4 files, I pondered if it was easier to just buy another music player that could support mp4 format, or if I should find a software to do the conversion to mp3. I figured since any player in the market is going to show those ridiculous titles, I decided against buying a new one just to piss myself off with the inconsistency. So the moment I reached home, I googled for a reliable software to convert the mp4 files into mp3. This was relatively easy. I just had to let the program run while I watched the drama serial on tv.

I also took the time to click around Winamp to see if I could make the playlist show only the filename and nothing else. I surfed the net for this strange behavior and that was when I realised there are such things known as the ID3 tags. Wtf. I called it the smart-alec-that-waste-people’s-time function. But thank God, there are actually tag removers softwares around! Yay! I surfed around for the best tag removers softwars before deciding on one. But it jammed on me. Fine. I surfed for the second, loaded it up, and it screwed up again. I surfed for the ’Help’ section, but it was totally helpless. The irony, huh? Still, big bad wolf tried 3 times before it got burnt in the stupid chimney by the three little pigs, and so I decided to try for one last time.

Thank God, I wasn’t cut out to be a wolf. I had to went through the ‘Help’ section as well, but it worked! So happy! Got all the tags removed almost instantly and so now, whichever songs that I want to listen, it just shows the filename! No more nonsense. No more additional information like album title, year, album cover, etc, which I don’t care a damn about.

So as of now…

*HUGH sigh of relief*

My folders are completely clean-up, and my music players are showing the songs in the exact way that I want… after exactly 2 days of work. I’m a proud owner of  clean music files and clean playlists. I am going to reward myself by raping the boyfriend, who is fast asleep, once I’m done with blogging.

Till then.

(If you have the patience to read through this long-winded post and know that I could have shorten the process with some free softwares, please DO NOT tell me. At least for now.)

Related posts:

1. The Sound of Music