Hello all, my friends call me Bowen.
I’m a musician and music is a huge part of my life. I’ve been ripping, downloading, burning, and etc, music ever since the ability to do those things came to be. My music collection is huge and still growing… everything from Bird to Slayer… even a fair amount of rap/r&b. I generally have no use for pop or the people who insist on playing it constantly, but every now and then something will catch my ear… I have a few guilty pleasures cough JPOP cough.
Tagging is something that always frustrated me back before MP3 players came around. My usual method was to burn the music to a virtual disc image and then rip it back to MP3 at the desired bitrate after tagging the cd in whatever program I used with Win98. The better CD players could display a lot of metadata and I hated seeing random/incorrect/missing information scrolling across my deck, so I spent a lot of time organizing. Over the years I’ve changed methods numerous times and completely replaced my library at least twice.
My purchase of a Zune changed everything… MediaMonkey is still my go to application for encoding (love that it renames the files and creates the artist/album folders just the way I like them) but its tagging feature (while very good) has left me disappointed many times.
There’s no counting the times I wanted to smash something because Amazon’s data wasn’t exactly right. The wrong country’s release. The wrong track titles, or track order. No track titles. No album art. I asked myself what kind of black hearted bastards could stand to have so many glaring errors/inconsistencies in their information. All this was made more complicated when I dropped Windows in favor of Linux. Virtual machines, dual booting, bah. EasyTAG works almost as well as MediaMonkey, but it’s painfully slow and not very intuitive. I’ve been making what I have work, at the expense of a LOT of my time and a fair amount of my sanity.
And then yesterday I stumbled upon Metabrainz Picard while dinking around to see if anything new and exciting had happened in audio tagging. This community is absolutely the answer to all my prayers.
What’s not to love? It’s available on Linux. It’s incredibly fast. I’ve already found metadata for two albums that every other available tagger couldn’t find, which makes Picard the most accurate program of it’s kind that I’ve tried. I’ve still got one new record I can’t find metadata for… BUT WAIT, I can contribute the information for this record and suddenly the next guy won’t have the same problem.
TL;DR …I’m really excited to have found this community. I greatly appreciate all the hard work put in by the developers and users alike. I’ll be contributing at every opportunity.
If someone has any tips/tricks/recommendations for getting started adding new info to the database, I’d love to hear them (send me a PM or something please).