Owlspotting

My name is Cristian and I like my world organized.

My tendency to plan, structure and organize stuff has been mocked by many. It lost me numerous romantic opportunities (how does one plan a one-night stand?!). While it got me jobs and assignments, it also probably made a lot of workmates insane. Someone once told me that I’m unable to live the moment because I’m busy thinking about what will follow. Hey, that’s just how it goes. You can’t control the moment, but you can have tons of fun controlling your ideas of the future (even though you can’t control the actual future).

The planner and organizer in me has just completed a gigantic project. For the past three months I have been cleaning, organizing, sorting and tagging my collection of digital music. I started with some 40 CDs of MP3s files, most of which benefited from little to no tags (the file names had been clean though). Today, my IPod claims to have some 7,367 songs and other audio files on it. All have ID tags for most if not any of the following fields: title, artist, album, year, genre.

I won’t go into detail–suffice to say this: if I had only a couple of songs from band X then I did not try to find the exact album name or year; I just put the band’s name in the album field (I am not that anal). But album’s are well tagged. I used the trusted and awesome Mp3tag.

The main reason I did this is because Ipod’s are miserable at reading file names. They need proper tags unless you want your screen to say you are listening to “No Artist-No Title.” Uploading about 40 gigabytes of music onto my machine took more than 4 hours.

Boy is this baby ready to rock.

Curious what tracks correspond to a certain number? According to WinAmp, my trusted music player, here are some highlights:

17. 3 Doors Down – I feel you
69. ab4 – So away
666. Beirut – The long island sound
1000. Bright Eyes – Classic cars
3003. Hallelujah the Hills – To all my scientist colleagues I bid you farewell
4573. Neutral Milk Hotel – In the aeroplane over the sea
5000. Papa Roach – Broken home
7367. Zwan – Settle down