The Sound of Music

After three days of ripping CDs, I figure I've done about 80 albums. Which puts me most of the way through the Js. At a guesstimate, this is roughly one third of my total collection. So, hey, I'm makin' progress!

In the course of converting my entire music library, I have found myself making a number of observations:

I have more Jimmy Buffett tunes than any person who lives in a land-locked state has any actual right to own.

Like everyone, I have albums which make me wonder what the hell I was thinking when I bought them. I've noticed, however, that random songs from albums that annoy me, when plucked out of context and played in-between other songs, tend not to really annoy me at all. This possibly goes some considerable way towards explaining what my thought processes were when I bought some of these bands, given that that's how I probably encountered their songs on the radio in the first place.

You can never have too much Jethro Tull. I'm entirely serious about that.

There are some utterly inexcusable gaps in my collection. A lot of them are due to the fact that when I first started buying CDs I was reluctant to spend money to duplicate albums I already had on tape. Given that I pretty much never play tapes any more, not even in the car, this means that some of my favorite music is languishing unlistened-to. Man, I'm not a starving college student any more. I should just replace the damned tapes.

There are apparently more musical genres than I was ever aware existed. Looking at the genre labels encoded on various discs is something of an education, but I truly despair of ever quite understanding the difference between "alt-folk," "folk-rock," and "contemporary folk." I may just go in fiddle with the genre labels until I've got stuff categorized in some way that's vaguely useful.

One thing which the Karma does which is mildly annoying is not to alphabetize things in any clueful way. Thus, The Beatles and The Eagles are filed under "T" when you look at the alphabetical list of artists. Jimmy Buffett and Joe Cocker are under "J." And so on. Actually, the latter isn't something the poor machine could be expected to do anything about; after all, how should it know that "Jimmy Buffett" is actually "Buffett, Jimmy," but "Barenaked Ladies" are not "Ladies, Barenaked?" I'd think dealing with "A"s and "The"s could have been built into it easily enough, though. Ah, well. This is something I could fix by hand with a little renaming. We'll see if I ever overcome my intrinsic laziness enough to actually do it.