Fuck you ID3 Tags...

you're sucktitude knows no bounds.

If you have ever discussed music with me you would know about my extensive collection of albums. I started backing them up for a few reasons. The first? Since the birth of CDs in the early 80s, the CD manufacturing industry has done nothing to increase a CD's durability despite advancements in material sciences. See those things they are selling now to put over your CDs to protect them from scratching? You should be asking why this material isn't already on the disc? The second, unfortunately, was seeing Mike's entire collection get ganked from under our noses thanks to the wonderful invention, the CD binder; an invention we all must use when the majority of your listening experience is in your car.

In order to keep my music regardless of these two possibilities of destruction, I decided to move my collection to a more durable media: the MP3. And of course, this transition had to be done in a completely anal and quality oriented way as per the jamie norm.

I started this transition back in 1999, and what I soon found out was how completely suck ass the CDDB was at the time. People would enter in things like '[[MetallicA]] - Ride_The_Lightning' or 'L337 |-|@XX0|2 - I pwned the cddb'. I set my naming standard as - - .mp3. So the process was scan -- CDDB -- rip -- de-l337 file names and put into standard form -- place in genre folder. But the l33tness remained in the ID3 tags, the meta-data standard for MP3s and what would show in winamp's playlist. So instead of cleaning the tags, I just deleted them.

Fate is rarely on my side on small endevours such as this. It turns out, most portable players, in-dash head-units, etc. all rely on these tags. I discovered this after getting a Creative ZenTouch 40GB for Christmas. Not only does it dump all of your MP3s into a single folder on its tiny hard drive, it also only reads files by id3 tag. So not only was my naming standard moot, so was my by-genre directory structure.

My only wish was to have my entire music collection at my fingertips while driving my car. It seems that won't be happening until I write a program to populate the id3 tags for each of my kabillion songs.

It's been hilarious researching ID3 tags and mp3 file structure. A little digging I found that an integer value represents the genre of the song. Genres ranging from "Fast Fusion" to "Porn Groove" but this is priceless: Genre code 108 represents the genre "Primus."

This just reaffirms that Les Cleypool is the lynchpin of our society.

(for mike: The company that identifies music by audio content instead of track length etc.)