Pimp My Music Library
// June 13th, 2011 // No Comments » // Computer, Guides, Music, Tips
If you know me well in person, you probably know that I love listening to music. Music keeps me company during my long bus rides, soothes my mind, gives me inspiration for stories and motivation to play musical instruments. I listen mostly to mainstream music, with the exception of Rap and R&B music. Thus as an avid listener of music, it’s hard for me not to keep up with the evolution of mainstream music.
In this post, I’ll share with you guys my routine of uncovering new songs that are dominating our speakers nowadays. Also, I’ll show you how I maintain my music collection.
Step 1: Discovering new songs
2. The Top Charts from iTunes Store
Unfortunately, the music that gets blasted on speakers nowadays are seldom to my liking. So I often have to find other means of discovering music.
3. Last.fm
Last.fm is a paid service that costs $3.00 USD (aprrox $3.80 SGD) a month. In return, you get rewarded with gobs of new music. In short, Last.fm offers an excellent database of music and the ability to network with other users. What it essentially does is that it recommends you songs based on the kind of music you like to listen to with its customized radio. The customized radio makes smart choices based on other users’ input. For example, searching for Piano Rock music yields me many songs that are tagged Piano Rock by the community. Pretty cool, huh? And if you’re using a mobile that utilizes Android or iOS, you can download the Last.fm app for your mobile devices. That way, you can use Last.fm’s services anywhere you are ;)
4. Shazam
Finally, an app that can regonize the song that is playing in the background! I’ve been waiting for such an app since I was a teenager! Shazam can identify the name, album, and artist of a song just by hearing it over your iPhone’s microphone. You’ll have to hold the iPhone mic close to the speaker for a few seconds as a song plays – on the radio, in a coffeeshop, or at a party. More often than not, Shazam will accurately report back with the song’s name, and (if available) and other useful details. In case you’re wondering, it does work for songs other than English and soundtracks as well… although sometimes it can fail terribly.
Step 2: Downloading the songs
There are almost countless different ways you can go about stealing songs. But I’ll still show you my method of downloading music anyway. In all humbleness, I believe that my method is the most efficient and the most reliable way of downloading particular tracks. Therefore, after reading through this, you should just forget your old method and follow my method XD
Floating in the vast waters is a talented software named after its creator. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I present to you SciLor’s Grooveshark Downloader.
Don’t be deceived by its simple design. This nifty software can fetch you nearly all mainstream music you ever come across, all nicely tagged and transcoded into high quality MP3s. Unfortunately, this is unique only to Windows. Sorry Mac users :(
Now the reason why I said this method of downloading particular tracks is the best is because of its source of music, Grooveshark. In case you’re wondering, Grooveshark is a popular online music search engine and music streaming service. Think of it as Youtube, without the videos and high quality music. Coincidentally, the music player featured on He’s Blog is fueled by Grooveshark too. But wait, I haven’t said why it’s the best yet. You see, because Grooveshark has a strict uploading policy like ensuring that the songs uploaded by users have to be of at least 128kbit/s and properly tagged. So you can be rest assured that the songs you download from Grooveshark are the real deal, unlike some trash you get from using your own method. C’mon, you jolly well know what I’m talking about. Afterall, Grooveshark’s primary goal is to provide you with free, high quality music streaming. Without a doubt, Grooveshark has fulfilled their goal. So now do you concur that my method is the best? ;)
Step 3: Managing your library
Warning: This step can be a serious pain in the ass.
Here’s how my iTunes look like:
Click to enlarge picture.
Personally, I sort my music according to their Date Added. All my music are properly tagged, of high quality and contain their album art and lyrics. Not sure about you guys but I find this step extremely important, especially when you own an iPod because without proper tagging, your iPod will look really messed up. When that happens, my OCD acts up and it makes me wanna pull all my hair out and /wrist. But obviously, it’s a huge pain in the ass to do this manually. Trust me, I tried doing manually tagging for about 1 year before finally giving up. It consumes way too much time. That’s when I told myself that there’s got to be a software that does this kind of tedious task. And I was right. After much googling, I stumbled upon Pollux - software that automatically tags the song name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics for you.
Regrettably, it’s not free. It costs $10 USD per year, but it will be worth the buck especially when you have a huge library of music to be tagged.
However, I do have to comment that it’s not foulproof. Here are some of its flaws:
- Wrong tagging. Sometimes, it tags some songs as being live or part of a “Greatest Hits” album. (about 10% of the time)
- Lyrics are left out at times (about 40% of the time)
- No album art at times (about 20% of the time)
- Does not tag at all (about 10% of the time
In summary, there are still certain tracks that you have to tag yourself. But considering that I had 1k plus songs to tag, it’s pretty worth the money. But I won’t be continuing my subscription after this year since I find manually tagging more reliable in tagging the newest additions as compared to using a simi-buggy program.
So there you have it! Now go pimp your music collection. ;)
Signs off,
He
