(Phaysis)

This question goes out to all you librarians and taxonomists in my readership.

I have a large music collection, and I make every effort to keep all of my file tags as clean, correct and complete as possible. This allows me to easily search my collection and drill down to the artist, album, and song I demand to hear at that moment. If you’ve ever seen my CD collection, you’re aware of my meticulous arranging and sorting by certain criteria. The same is with my electronic collection. Physically, I prefer to sort by artist, then by album release date. Electronically, I can sort by any taxonomy I so choose. Easy enough.

So, going back to my library research orientation in my first year in college, I learned that books are sorted by subject, then by the author’s name, last name first, and then by book title. If the first word of the title is an article like “a”, “an” or “the”, it is moved to the end of the title after a comma and the book is sorted appropriately. So if I were to search for H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine”, I would search in the fiction section under the author “Wells, H.G.”, then for “Time Machine, The” somewhere after “Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”. This makes sense. If the author was a publishing group or authorship can’t be pinned to one author, then it would be sorted under the group name.

I do the same with my music collection. If the album is published under a band name, then it’s sorted alphabetically under the band name. Aerosmith would be sorted before Aphex Twin. But if the album is published under the artist’s name, then it’s sorted by the artist’s name, last name first. So Fiona Apple would be sorted between Aphex Twin and Apples In Stereo under Apple, Fiona. This makes sense.

When I first built my music collection, back when music software wasn’t so smart, I would manually put articles at the end of the album and song titles because the software could clump all of the “The”s together, etcetera. It’s a pain and a hassle to do it manually, and sometimes the “extra album info” features of the software would break because it didn’t recognize the album title, but I lived with it. Luckily, modern music software has gotten smart about the use of articles in the song and album titles and sorts appropriately in the music browser interface.

But the problem comes with the artist names, which I store in my particular, perfectly reasonable way according to my training and my experience with sorting physical media: last name, then first. However, the software doesn’t know that I’m listening to Fiona Apple; it searches the web for Apple, Fiona and finds no data to show. Just like the old days with the title articles, so it is with artist names.

So what do you guys do about this? Is saving the artist name as “Last, First” still viable, or is it a vestigial relic of an older technology? I like to sort by this method because it makes sense to me; I shudder to think about trying to scroll through a page of Michaels just to get to Michael Hedges. I don’t know, maybe doing the “Last, First” method is as obsolete in the electronic realm as typing double spaces after sentences; a complete necessity on technologies now rendered obsolete. Should I get modern and save artist names in the natural format? Most player software has a search box to allow me to jump straight to my desired songs, but I’d have to change my habits.

What’s your thought?

Last weekend, I began the slow, arduous process of re-ripping my entire CD collection into files easily playable on my computer. This time, instead of ripping into 192kbit MP3 with the LAME codec (like I did last time), I’m ripping them into FLAC. This has important implications.

First and foremost is that FLAC is lossless, meaning no data is thrown away between the transition from CD to the final sound file. MP3 is a lossy codec, and uses tons of statistical mojo to analyze the sound data of the CD and throw away the bits that your ears can’t hear, crunching the file size tremendously. The problem with this method is that you’re losing the quieter nuances of your music. FLAC’s strength is that it’s able to take the input waveforms and chop them up into similar, easy-to-compress chunks, making the file smaller than the original uncompressed form but on playback the audio is a perfect, exact copy of its original form.

Secondly, since FLAC doesn’t compress the file sizes as well as MP3 (with the obvious quality tradeoffs), the overall space needed to store my music collection has grown tremendously. Instead of storing an entire album in roughly 80 megabytes of space, it now takes an average of 350 megabytes. That’s a large bite to swallow, but with the falling prices of high-capacity hard drives, it’s nothing nowadays. Considering the audio CD format stores around 700 megabytes, that’s not so bad.

I’ve been meaning to do this, because even with my bad ears I can still sometimes hear the strange audio artifacts of the MP3 compression — called “sizzle” in the industry — when I’m listening to my stuff. After I ripped my first disc and gave a listen, I was shocked at the quality difference. There were little pieces of the sound, stuff from the studio, or the audience, or quiet stuff put into the mix, that I never knew was there after listening to the MP3-encoded form for years. The sound came out of my speakers; FLAC saves the exact same stereo phasing that’s mixed into the CD in the final file, and no amount of MP3 bitrate is going to capture that level of nuance. I’m shocked.

So last weekend, I bought a 1 Terabyte hard disk (that’s roughly 1,000,000 Megabytes), installed it, and started ripping the CDs on my shelf. Within two days, I had the shelf of CDs I’ve acquired since 2007; about 60 discs total. And then I cracked open the 120-pound crate of CDs that I’ve collected since my first disc in 1991. These were packed up at my last place, and I’ve just now gotten around to digging them out. I’m about 1/8th of the way through my entire collection, so I expect this to take a while.

When it’s all said and done, my hope is that I will never have to break out a CD again to get quality audio. The end FLAC files can be used as perfect copies to produce any sort of MP3, OGG, or next-generation compressed audio file for ease of portability. Any other use (like for listening at home), I can rely on the FLAC.

The most dangerous habit I have now is to watch a movie while I’m eating dinner. Any sort of forward momentum I may have with my projects or creativity is halted the moment I press Play. The rest of the evening after the credits is a mental waste while I swirl in the eddys of motivation and try to justify spinning back up so soon before bed.

I should stop that.

Those few of you who follow my postings, you’ll be pleased to know that I’m travelling to Texarkana this week to celebrate the Foodeating holiday with my family. I’ll be there for a few days, but before I know it, I’ll be itching to leave town again. But not until I make my rounds and see a few of you. I’ll be giving you a heads-up when the time comes. If you’re desperate for some Shawn time, hit me up on Facebook. You know where to find me.

On an unrelated note, last night’s Dresden Dolls show was fucking phenomenal. It was the last show on their current tour, and they pulled out all the stops. Amanda Fucking Palmer and Brian Viglione were at the top of their form, and it was a joy to watch them play off of each other’s musical asides and hit all the right notes at the same exact time. If that’s not the musical form of simultaneous orgasm, I don’t know what is.

They played most of their hits, which was a treat, but it was the weird little covers they played that made the whole thing worth it; a few of the songs were lullabies told with musical accompaniment, some are from the historical cabaret canon including “Mein Herr” from the movie “Cabaret”. During the first of two encores, they played an incredible cover of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, which gave me a new appreciation for the song and the craftsmanship that went into writing it. Sugar and spice.

What hit me most about the show was their inclusion of the audience. Not only was it OK to participate in the show by cat-calling and singing, it was compulsory (some girls near me knew every single word). They went as far as to pull 20-odd hand-selected people from the audience up to the stage to have them help perform “The Jeep Song”, and that was incredible. I wish more bands got involved like that.

It seems we, as a society, have lost our heritage of pub songs, work songs, and sense of being OK with singing in public, even if we can’t do it as well as the professionals. A travesty, really. But the Dolls do their best to remind us it’s OK.

“You motherfuckers, you’ll sing some day.”

If you’ve known me for long, you know that I really, really like the band Rush. Of the handful of arena shows I’ve been to, Rush has been the most frequent. I have all their studio albums, a stack of T-shirts, concert videos and a documentary or two. To say I am a fanatic is an understatement.

This week, among my internet friends and some sites I frequent, I’ve seen references to a lot of Rush stuff. A lot. Their current concert tour. A friend’s overview of their show this week in Dallas. An intimate interview with the band on Canada’s “Studio Q“. An interview with CNN before a show.  The full-blown documentary of the band released earlier this year. And in the news today is an article on the new Guitar Hero video game featuring the entire “2112″ suite (all 21 minutes), required to unlock a “Demi-God” to slay “The Beast” during the game’s Quest mode (how cool is that?). That’s a lot of Rush news.

These guys have been going at their thing for 40 years now, and that’s a huge achievement. But during most of that time, they’ve toiled in some level of obscurity. They have a gaggle of radio-friendly hits, but by and large their musical and lyrical content borders the fringe of what the mass culture is willing to accept. The main consumers of Rush music are the nerdier ones among us. That’s been the joke for a long while, but every joke has a thread of truth.

So, if they’ve been in the fringe for so long, enjoyed mostly by those who get their jollies on the weirder stuff, then why all the sudden press from the band?

Ah, yes, the press. Ever notice when disparate threads come together in your head and tie themselves together into a larger narrative? All the talk of the band this week reached a critical mass with me where it confessed the story of a band propelled back into the Limelight by a very skilled public relations firm whose sole job is to reestablish, in the public’s mind, the importance of their works and their worth to rock music at large.

I don’t need convincing, but apparently more outside people do. I can’t begrudge them that. If the Rolling Stones can keep going, selling out stadiums for more than $100 a pop (cheap seats), if U2 can still make an impact and elevate the people lucky enough to get a ticket to a show before it sells out in an hour, then why should Rush languish in the shadow? It’s noteworthy that the band even referenced these and other bands in their interviews, tying themselves and their career to the cannon of rock-and-roll. It’s a clever play.

The members have a certain level of humility in their interviews, and it’s somewhat refreshing to see a band of their caliber have that. But there’s also a subtle subtext of seeking recognition, of increasing the brand awareness, of getting the rewards they merit by sticking to it for so long. Of a band making a push to rocket into the stratosphere where the rock gods live. Of going out in a blaze of glory.

Our better natures seek elevation.
A refuge for the coming night.
No one gets to their heaven without a fight.