Katalepsis

For those who caught my previous post, I’ve been diligently listening to my iTunes collection in an attempt to hear, cleanup, and rate every song in my ever-expanding collection. I am happy to report that it has taken me less than a month of listening to finish listening to all of the albums that begin with the letter ‘r’. I moved on to Incubus’ S.C.I.E.N.C.E. this morning.

Since my last post, I have added some 800 new songs to my collection thanks to my father-in-law. I have 8,203 songs left to listen to before I start over again and begin listening to everything that was added to my collection after I had passed the relevant alphabetical point.

As some of you may know, I am a huge fan of music. Thanks to my father-in-law, my music collection currently consists of 132 gigabytes of music. That’s 27,263 songs that would take 151 days to listen to if it were playing 24/7.

For some time now, I’ve been on a mission to finally listen to everything that is in my iTunes library. Last summer, I organized my library alphabetically according to album name and began at Abbey Road.

It’s taken me eleven months of diligent listening, but I’m happy to report that, as of this evening, I am finally through the ‘Q’ section of my list. That leaves just 9,387 songs remaining. Of course, during the past year I’ve acquired a bunch of new music — leaving new gaps in my playlist that will have to be filled in. But I think that I should be able to complete the project within the next year. Who would have thought that it could take two years of hardcore listening to listen to one’s iTunes collection.

It hasn’t been just listening, either. I discovered a great site for finding information on music albums and have been cleaning up my iTunes tracks. This involves:

1. Rating each song.
2. Making sure all track and band/performer names are spelled accurately.
3. Finding high-quality album artwork and embedding it in the actual files so that it can be transported to other media devices intact.
4. Creating more helpful “genre” categories.
5. One of the most time consuming tasks I’ve been doing is to make sure that all of the composer information is accurate. This has really deepened my appreciation for various songwriters and cover versions.
6. When it works, I’ve been using GimmeSomeTune, an iTunes controller for Mac, to automatically download and upload lyrics to every song file. When it’s not crashing, the process is entirely automated. I find it great to have instant access to lyrics — especially when I’m using my iPod on the run. You can access stored lyrics by continually pressing the center button of the click wheel until they appear.

The fruits of this somewhat tedious labor have been very rewarding. First, my genius recommendations have gotten ridiculously accurate now that I’ve rated over 15,000 songs. iTunes has a really good sense of what I like. Second, my library is no longer ugly to look at — at least the section alphabetized before ‘R’. I’m not missing any album art for those albums, so cover flow looks absolutely gorgeous. Plus, My main iTunes display is a wealth of information.

I can tell you the songwriter of most of the songs in my collection and my “comments” section is dedicated to interesting tidbits of information (e.g., cross-references, similar songs, stories behind the song, et cetera).

How about you? How long would it take you to listen to your entire iTunes collection?