Plaidophile

Oh, and the iPod is great, though it's kind of forced me to go through and finally put proper genre tags on my stuff since that's the only way to actually tunnel through my massive collection on it! Thankfully, iTunes smart playlists make this very easy.

First, I nuked all of the genre tags. It's amazing how much crap leaked in thanks to people who don't put meaningful metadata onto their mp3s.

Next, I made a smart playlist to match all songs without a genre.

Finally, I scanned through this playlist to find easy-to-do clusters. I decided to tag all SongFight as 'SongFight' (and also CoverFight and RemixFight as well) all BEMANI music as 'BEMANI,' and all soundtracks as 'Soundtrack.' Live performances are 'Live' (of course, this makes SongFight Live a bit awkward, but maybe I'll just make another genre tag for those). Then, using various sorting criteria I've been paring down what's left in a meaningful way.

Though, some bands are still difficult to deal with. Like, what genre is Phish? My answer to that is "the same as Grateful Dead." Okay, so what genre is Grateful Dead? How about Cibo Matto? Where does rock, hip-hop, and electornica begin and end? Frank Zappa? They Might Be Giants?

Anyway, I've also taken the opportunity to get around to tagging compilations as such. Not that it makes any difference as long as iTunes doesn't puke on my directory structure, and of course, that debacle is why I've gotten good about keeping my stuff tagged to begin with. (Of my 23 days' worth of audio, only 4 hours are still missing artist tags, for example. Or so my 'missing artist' playlist tells me. Though I still have 8 days without genres.)

But that's not so important anyway, since for iPod goodness I'll be mostly listening to the 'iPod entropy' smart playlist (random shuffled selection of 25GB of mp3s — I don't like the way that shuffle works on the iPod, since it applies to everything, and this way seems to work with its interface better) or the 'presently digging' or 'current songfight' static playlists (which I manually move stuff into and out of as I see fit).

One annoyance about the iPod is that there's no way to manually mount it as a hard disk. Either you have to set it to always mount (meaning you have to manually unmount it even if you're only plugging it in to charge or sync), or it'll only be mounted while it syncs. And, toggling the "enable drive use" button brings up a really annoying warning each time which, unlike most of the warnings, has no "warn me next time" checkbox to disable. Argh. Maybe there's some way to mount it manually that I'm missing, but in the meantime I sent in a feedback form to be sumarily ignored.

Also, the people who are saying that the iPod puts its mp3s on a "hidden partition" are full of shit. It's in a hidden directory, completely accessible from the command line, which can in turn be used to create a symlink to access the directory. However, the internal storage format of the mp3 files isn't very browseable — it's setup like a hashed cache directory rather than like a usable, human-navigable filesystem. I don't know why they did it this way, since they need to maintain a separate metadata table anyway, but oh well.

Also, since this unit is a refurb, I'm much more quick to notice three things about it:

• There's a minor scratch in the mirror surface on the back
• The display goes totally blank (white) when the contrast is set too dark (not that it matters, but I wonder if that's why this was returned to begin with)
• It didn't come packed up all nice. :( (I mean, it was still packed way more nicely than the average piece of electronics, but it didn't feel all, you know, special.)