“What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?” writes Robinson Meyer on Tuesday (7/28) at the Atlantic magazine. The three big metadata tags—artist, song name, and album title—“really fall apart when they need to classify classical music.… Apple has already discontinued its iPod Classic, the last media player that could conceivably let you tote around your entire music library in one device. The company is floating to a streaming model…. The new version of iTunes disappears music…. Its search bar cannot even find songs which it contains in its library…. If classical’s messy software is ever fixed, it will require, first, better metadata…. The CDDB [Compact Disc Database], the industry’s leading database of MP3 metadata, is now privately owned and controlled, but it began as a crowd-sourced project with volunteer contributions. There is no reason this now-private database couldn’t be supplemented by a more robust, more complete database of audio file information maintained on a wiki-like basis…. Many users with their own sizable libraries want software that lets them listen to MP3s and AACs. Plenty of minimalist text editors for Macs and PCs persist in the world. If iTunes is beyond repair, it might now be time for some minimalist media management software.”
Posted July 29, 2015
