I really hate inaccurate or inconsistent track listings

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I've got a collector/organizer personality. I like long lists or arrangements of things, and I like the layouts to be uniform. This is probably most obvious in my music library, but applies to this journal, too. You may have noticed.

Now traditionally, the media library has been a major source of difficulty for me because folks who submit CD track listings to CDDB/FreeDB often name them idiotically, which screws up all of my ripping. So my entire (and considerably large) electronic music collection has been lovingly hand-scrubbed every time it's grown over the last few years. It's painful.

So I'm happy that the Zune software (and Windows Media Player, and Windows Media Center) syncs automatically with label-provided track listings and, as a mega added bonus, automatically downloads album art. This is the first time I've ever actually had electronic album art—paper liner notes are usually filed in some drawer somewhere. It's actually really quite cool to have this sort of thing on the media center or the Zune.

The problem is that even the record labels provide inconsistent (and occasionally flat-out incorrect) track listings. Gah. I'd say that it soft-fails to identify around 10% of my albums (which isn't too painful, as I can manually go in and pick out the disc) but downloads incorrect listings or completely refuses to tag tracks in about 5% of the cases.

This sort of thing bothers the living hell out of me. I'd fix it all if I could stand actually sifting through all of those tracks looking for errors. Which I can't.

P.S. I took the screenshot of the icon at the top of this article from WMP, as it had failed to identify a lone MP3 I had dropped on my laptop. In the time that I've written a few extra words and saved the article, WMP has since correctly identified the track and has automatically grabbed album art for it. Bravo, WMP.

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This page contains a single entry by milkman published on December 28, 2006 8:34 PM.

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