Empee3

I’ve been working on my Mp3 collection for way longer than I expected. In a somewhat entertaining exchange, my friend Ben and I were comparing collections (make as many jokes as you’d like). We had each been trying to catch up with the other and were somewhat surprised at how close we both were to each other. It was within a few hundred songs.

I’ve been working over the last 2 years on tagging (ID3v2) and sorting my collection. During that time I’ve made an effort not to accumulate more music. Sometimes I failed, but I ran into a physical limit on my hard drive which has allowed me to focus more on the task. I’ve now completed as much as I can manage and I’m backing up to a FW HD (thanks Phi) and reformatting my HD to make more space. No more partitions.

Today, right before backing up, I went through and deleted a rather large selection of items that didn’t fit into full albums or sounded like crap. Which brings me to my main point.

PC users are idiots. Who else encodes mp3s with the wrong names, at crappy bit-rates, and adds comments about “encoded by -=dipshipt=-“? PC users. That’s who. Now, I may have been guilty of some mp3 faux pas in the past, but I’ve easily made up for my initial errors. Besides, we’re talking about 1998, not 2002 or anything. And to those of you using a Xing or RealJukebox to encode, do us all a favor and destroy your computer. It sounds like crap.

Back in the day I used SoundEdit 16 to encode SWA files directly from CD. It took forever. But you’ve probably come across some of the tracks I encoded. Seriously. Ever come across Soul to Squeeze? The splash symbols and high-hat may have a slight wash, but that was in 1997.

Regardless, I want to thank all those who shared their favorites with me. My life has been enriched by the variety of music I’ve been exposed to. And to the artists, I’m still buying music and even going to some shows when I can afford it. I’m heading your call KRS, and if you come to Portland, I’ll be there.