What’s wrong with digital music ‘collections’.

Over the last ten years, I have spent countless hours ripping CDs to mp3 files and tagging them up. As well as transferring from CD, I have bought digital music files, I subscribe to Napster and I have a Last.fm account as well as one for Deezer. Each of these services is available to me, along with my raw mp3s, via a Sonos music system, and each provides me with a library of some kind which is supposed to allow me easy access to the music I like.

But it doesn’t. It’s properly broken.

Let’s start with the raw mp3 files. Organising these should be like organising a physical record collection. It should be visual - I should have an interface that allows me to rummage around, quickly identifying the records by their covers. It should distinguish between important albums and lesser singles, EPs, bootlegs etc. It should be rich so I can access lots of other information associated with the object, not just metadata. And it must be personal - I must be able to filter and arrange the way I want to and not just in boring lists of meta information.

And then the other services. None of them know anything about my digital music collection (with the possible exception of Last.fm, but indiscriminately scrobbling music played by all members of the household is pretty useless anyway). None of them know anything about each other. None of them work like a record collection. For example, when I add Air’s Moon Safari album to my library in Napster it creates 3 new artist entries because the artist metadata on their version of the album includes some extra vocalist names! I have some albums which, as each track features a different vocalist, creates a new artist for each track! Why on earth would I want to arrange my record collection in this way? Of course this is useful for searching, should I ever need to find that track that had Francoise Hardy on it, but this now affects the *standard view* of my record collection - the view by artist.

I don’t use iTunes (because given the amount of struggle I’ve had with quicktime over the years I don’t trust Apple anywhere near files I hold dear), so it is possible that iTunes provides an experience closer to what I want than I’m used to. I don’t know. It’s also possible that I’m a too much of a digital immigrant to realise that organising a record collection is a pointless exercise from a time when the volume of files was within the realm of that imaginable by the human brain. It’s possible.

However, I’m pretty sure I have more photos than I have music files. And I’ve organised and tweaked and distributed all of those by hand using Picasa and Lightroom. Is it really going to take Google to come along *again* and do the job properly before anyone else does?!