For normal albums: Artist/Year - Album [release ID if necessary for ambiguity for various versions of an album]/Disc-track - title.extension . Compilations (soundtracks, promo mixes from shows, etc.) get “Various Artist” as the album artist and sorted under “Various Artists” of the top level of my albums directory. Stuff from other sources would sometimes get their own special directory at the top level outside “albums”.

Tags are everything, that’s where the in-depth data is. album folders hold extra art, inserts, metadata, etc.

I don’t really make manual playlists using relatively pathed m3u anymore because support is inconsistent across the apps I’ve used to listen to my library. These days Plex, jellyfin, ncmpcpp (tui front-end for mpd) all handle their own playlists. Those are mostly just spontaneous groupings or automated shuffles I don’t really keep track of.

Back in the day I made mixtapes on actual cassettes, recorded from the radio, my CDs, and later tracks I found on Napster and soulseek. Later I moved on to making tons of playlists in foobar2000. Some of those playlists probably still litter my hard drive (now dead text because the files having long since been reorganized and moved). For the really good tight playlists I made of that era, I’d make physical mix CDs that I would master with sound forge. Had a few people that would trade these around. Make a mix, master, make many copies, distribute. Those CDs often died in cars and turned into coasters, so I’d keep the bin and cue files of the masters to make replacements. Those tracks would ultimately get turned back into mp3 or flac depending on quality and tagged with my own title, cover art, etc. and get filed away in the Various Artist folder. Then I got an mp3 player and it’s been either full album listening or dynamic playlists for me ever since.

I still make yearly playlists in Spotify as I discover new stuff or rediscover old stuff, like a musical diary. Those playlists inspire library additions via the artist directly, Bandcamp flac files, or other means.

Rhymes with anise. ;)

Well, it seems that every time a search engine’s AI gives me a definitive and wordy “answer” to a question I search and provides a helpful citation of the page from which it got that answer, it is ALWAYS just a completely hallucinated answer that the cited page in no way supports. This isn’t just hyperbole, this has been my experience with every single search engine AI summary

And I find myself having to go back and fix the autocorrect that my phone keyboard “helpfully” makes with increasing frequency. It used to be that autocorrect would just fix a typo when I’d obviously typed gibberish because I missed a key. But now, it is regularly replacing entire words that I’ve typed completely correctly with some other word that makes absolutely no sense.

I’m all for some specific uses of AI. Things like speech to text or images to text? Sure that’s a great use. But when it comes to research, writing, or spreadsheets, AI tools just need to shut up and stay the fuck out of my way. I’m becoming convinced a little more everyday that anyone using AI to summarize articles or search results is a complete moron and shouldn’t be trusted.

I have 2 editions of The Gunslinger because Stephen King revised some parts to fit better with the remaining novels. The Gunslinger is a very early work and it shows. I’ve read the first 3 books of the dark tower series at least twice. Last time through the series, after King “completed” it, I started with the original The Gunslinger and ended the series with the revised edition. The differences are relatively minor and, although I am generally a fan of his, I prefer the rough edges of the original. Reading the original first and the revised edition last felt more like a conclusion and coming full circle than the final book ever could have. Despite the differences, they still feel like the same book to me.

Tech company surveillance and data collection is government surveillance and data collection.

Same energy as:

You know, I can eat a peach for hours.

Could be

Clarissa Explains It All maybe?

Dead or damaged media can repurposed and sold as an new thing. Art and craft items using old vinyl, cassettes, floppy disks, etc. as a medium to create something new is growing in popularity too. If you can find someone making that kind of art at a show, I’m sure some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement could be made so that you both can profit off that dead media.

This is way too coherent.

Cab Calloway was a legendary band leader in his own right, far beyond his minor role in a Saturday Night Live sketch turned cult classic. His picture belongs in the encyclopedia for skat.

The band was playing a bunch of songs before the brothers arrived, the brothers just performed the “last two songs”. We see Cab Calloway warming up the crowd with one of those other songs. It was all for a good cause and I’m sure the outlaw nature of the duo was no surprise to anyone. We as the audience are “in on it”, seems safe to assume the on-screen audience is kind of “in on it too”. “Orange whip? Orange whip? … Three orange whips.”

As if that stops police from using it to target randos or prosecutors from using it in court. The executive branch REALLY loves its junk science.

So much safer to go one album at a time using Picard. Picard makes it easy to go down the list of a disorganized directory, identify most things automatically, allow in depth review and modifications to what Picard came up with, and standardize file naming. I’ve tried to let programs like Lidarr and beets automate it, but they always ends up causing more and more complex problems to discover and solve after awhile. Music releases are complex and sources are diverse, using distinct standards of form and format. It’s not a problem that can realistically be solved for my entire music library without the guiding hand of a librarian. I could listen to my library for over six months without repeating, even 1 album out of a 100 mis-tagged or misidentifyied could take me years to discover.

I do like to automate the less critical and more machine oriented library tasks like adding genres tags, replaygain, and lyrics as you do. Just not things like the metadata tags, file naming, or album art (embedded or otherwise).

For me the wildest aspect of the Hyperion portals was that there was essentially only one portal. Hyperdimensional godlike artificial super-intelligences swept the portal across each doorway like some sort of cosmic lighthouse, mimicking the theory that there only exists a single electron in the universe that travels backwards and forwards in time to be every electron for everything everywhere all and once. Also, those articlfical intelligences shared their environs with other older beings referred to as “Lions and tigers and bears.”

I don’t want to know about Sam Neill’s controveries.

This is a non-sensical question. On a social media service YOU are the product. You’re characterizing the content as the product. But the content is merely the advertisement or bait for users, who are the real product, being sold to advertisers and countless other organizations. Why do you think reddit started charging for API access? Same goes for ads on Facebook, Google services, Instagram, TikTok, etc.

These days I try to buy either DRM free flax files. If I really like the art or the artist in addition to wanting to regularly actually listen to as an album, then I may try to buy vinyl + flac files. If it’s at a show I’ll buy whatever is available that I can play because at that point it’s more about the merch than music. I’m probably going to pass on the wax cylinders and I may think long and hard before buying a cassette.

Lake Peigneur oops

Ironic typo