Re-Loving My Music

Panic

I almost lost my entire music library last week as my brother frivolously destroyed our drobo in my absence, he plugged out all of the hard disks at once. Oops!

I usually back up my music. Actually, onto that mentioned drobo and another copy is on my iPod. The music library is a mess, I am working on three computers, and then there are those external drives. All full with stuff, and of course, with music.

Clean Cut

Highly motivated, I was hoping for a tabula rasa and took this as an oppurtunity to unite those 3 libraries into a single piece and organize the whole mess, lyrics, tags, album covers and so on.

There's an app for that!

I started searching for shareware to help me on this, I stumbled upon CoverScout. It searches the internet for album covers and makes it easy to place, change or modify the cover art on the album. Unlike some oher iTunes plug-ins, this is a standalone application, it doesn't need iTunes to operate.

The Fun

The great thing about CoverScout is, it turns your your computer screen into an instant record shop, as if you were strolling through a stack of vinyl records. It finds around 5-8 different covers per album even on rare ones. This is the fun part, as CoverScout also finds special editions of those albums, the "five star picks". Everything's in there, japanese editions, scandinavian, even the russian versions. OMG!

You want to use the cover? Click on it, there you go.

The Test

For the first cut, I decided to auto-pilot CoverScout, overnight. My restrictons: Album covers at least 3 stars and up, min 500 pixel, only the square ones. I used SongSergeant to get rid of the duplicates, and SongGenie to correct the tags, assicate albums and add lyrics to the songs. It took a day or so to get everything tidied up. 10.000 songs round about.

The result: almost perfect!

The effect: I rediscovered my music! My own record store.

Not only did I enjoy correcting the few obvious mistakes CoverScout has made, but I got so hooked up hunting for those rare album covers, far east editions, the golden hits.

I even found the cover of Demis Roussos' "The Phenomenon", one of my mother's all time favourites, which always reminded me of Sergio Leone movies. The joy of finding such unconventional stuff and telling about it overwhelmed the guilt I'd feel afterwards, and sadly the disgrace as well, of publicly admitting possession of such a music title*.

Conclusion

If you want to stroll through your music library old skool vinyl style, give CoverScout a shot. It makes music fun again.

Music

"Funky Kingston.." Toots And The Maytals. God I love this music!

(*) I even suspect the infiltration of a few Micheal Bolton songs (one of my best friends is a fan), to destabilize my genuine reputation as an audiophile and thus undermine my music collection.