It’s re-emergence into the sunlight after the gloom of a failed marriage or sustained illness. It’s a freshly-made butterfly gently fluttering its moistly glittering wings in the morning glow. It’s the heaven-sent moment when the car alarm down the street stifles itself.
I refer, of course, to listening life without iTunes. I have liberated myself from the tyranny of Apple’s erstwhile handy but now shackling program for managing and listening to a computer-based library. Bloated, slow, and uncooperative, iTunes’s cholesterol and blood glucose levels have skyrocketed right along with its overall intransigence. I stuck it out for a while there, heroically albeit grimly, because none of the available alternatives had the moxie, the shine, the cajones.
Library management had become iTunes’s Achilles Heel; the program was not designed with expansive classical music libraries in mind. The Apple folks are understandably wedded to their online media store—and why not? the thing’s a retail tornado—and the iTunes application has followed suit. But I’m not an iTunes Store kind of guy. I disapprove of the compromised audio quality on offer, and when I put down my shekels for a recording, I want the whole megillah—recording, liner notes, art work, disc, etc. A physical CD remains an unassailable backup medium, a reassurance that one’s money hasn’t been gulped into the gaping maw of some fetid corporate bank account. A CD is hand-holdable, up-front proof that you do indeed own a viable copy of the recording in question. Even though I dabble in downloads, especially the high-res variety, my heart remains wedded to physical media. Maybe that makes me a fuddy-duddy. Well, tough titty.
That iTunes was designed with an emphasis on surface appearance rather than underlying integrity is made manifest by the program’s behavior when ripping a compact disc into a digital file suitable for computer playback. iTunes decides where those files will go on the hard drive and it will decide how they are organized. By default the primary criterion is the performer as specified in the “Artist” tag. That isn’t the end of the world by any means, but consider a multi-disc affair with various performers coming and going on various tracks, all meticulously listed by whoever was responsible for filling out the downloadable tags. iTunes accordingly puts the tracks in a motley of directories—a folder for this performer on this track of this album, a different folder for a different performer, and so forth. You can override that only by specifying that the album is a “Compilation”—but even then, you wind up with your CD jammed into an all-encompassing “Compilations” sub-dictory. How distressing.
Moving the files once iTunes has spatter-shot them across one’s Music directory is not advisable; once the original file has been moved, iTunes won’t be able to find it any more. Short of deleting the album from your iTunes library, moving it on the hard drive, then re-importing it, you’re just stuck with iTunes’s bird-brained and high-handed decisions.
At one point I started using a third-party CD ripping tool called XLD that allows the user full control over the hard drive location for the ripped files. XLD also refrains from crashing the entire computer, unlike iTunes which can’t seem to handle more than a few CD rips without losing its digital marbles. Unfortunately, I learned to use XLD a bit late in my digital-audio game, with an appallingly messy Music directory resulting.
But now I’m free. I’m free. I have made the move to JRiver Media Center, a commercial app that was until recently restricted to the Windows side of things. Even in its currently unfinished Mac OS X state (it’s still an alpha, not even beta yet) it is overall more pleasant to use, infinitely faster, and just plain runs rings around iTunes. Best of all, its superb library management facilities allow it to repair file links, meaning that should I move one of the files on the hard drive myself, JRMC can bustle about energetically, figure out the changes, and correct the library.
So I took a deep breath, and over the course of a full week, I zipped and swapped and zapped files about until I had my hard drive files organized my way, and not iTunes’s way. I have a very large library; it’s a lot of files. So it took a while. I found a certain grim amusement in certain albums that had been scattershot all over the drive by iTunes’s inane classification scheme. I think the winner was a two-CD set of those fascinating recording incunabula, the so-called “Mappleson Cylinders”, named after the early audio enthusiast at the Metropolitan Opera who captured faint but audible recordings of Met greats around the turn of the 20th century on Edison wax cylinders. iTunes had exploded those two CDs into dozens of separate directories, each directory with a sub-directory. I’d guess that the 41 tracks of the Mappleson set wound up occupying about 30 directories, blasted hither and yon throughout my Music directory. Another casualty was an inoffensively bland little recording of Henry Purcell’s King Arthur, condemned to a vast disc diaspora thanks to somebody having meticulously indicated every single performer for each track, not to mention my carelessness in leaving all those multivaried “Artist” tracks unchanged. But it’s all re-assembled and re-collected now, its 30 some-odd tracks safe and snug in one single directory with all its siblings.
This morning I determined not to rise from my computer until I had finished the job. Several hours of mousing, moving, directory creating and trashing, and re-labelling later, I had it nailed. I let JRiver Media Center deal with this morning’s mountain of changes. Alpha software or not, JRMC chugged away for a few minutes, then announced that it had fixed something to the tune of 6,000 broken links. Everything’s hunky-dory now. It’s spit-spot, copacetic, A-OK.
Just gazing at my Music directory makes me happy. All those plain single directories, each one devoted to one composer or overall genre, a phalanx of folders marching primly down the file window. Nothing messy, nothing tossed about at random. Just “Abel, Carl Friedrich” followed by “Adam, Adolphe” and concluding a long way down with “Zimmermann, Udo”. My vast music library, beautifully organized not just on the surface via tags, but meticulously arranged and placed on the hard drive as well. OCD bliss, earthly heaven indeed for a musician with a mania for collecting and organizing.