Music Consolidation Day

Lying in bed and I remember something.

I forgot that I promised (literally one person, and in a fucking text message, not on their deathbed or in a chapel or anything) that I’d write a little bit about the tradition of Music Consolidation Day and how I’ve recently invoked the ceremonial rights in order to proceed with getting all three of my primary listening devices (or five, if you count my ears HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) synced up with each other. Folks, this is the post for which my Obsessive Compulsive Behaviour category was named.

See, it’s pretty easy to get an iPod and an iTunes Library synced up because they’re designed to be compatible with each other and communicate without being told to and all manner of creepy shit EXCEPT when your iPod is always in your car and your iTunes Library is always on your laptop which is never in your car. Take my most listened-to album of the past month as an illustrative example. Opeth’s Pale Communion – which is a meandering selection of moments that occasionally really shines but not as much as Mikael Akerfeldt likely thinks it does – has been playing on CD in my car since I bought it, but only because I’ve not update my iPod to reflect whatever the most recent spate of acquisitions and dispatches entailed (like today’s removal of “Baby Got Back”, for example).

Factor thereinto the third device – the PS3, which has zero compatibility with the autosychronisational functionality of the aforementioned Apple products – and the sheer honest-to-goodness necessity of Music Consolidation Day becomes apparent.

See, at the very latest point before it occurs to me to consolidate the PS3 music library with that of the capital-l iTunes Library, it is potentially months behind on tracks that have come or gone, and my efforts at pruning said Library are flung back at my ears when the likes of something I’ve deliberately excised comes up on shuffle when I’m cleaning up or some such. This is because the PS3’s music library must be maintained manually, in a relatively time-consuming manner to be detailed RIGHT NOW.

To begin with, and because I’ve done this a few times, I sought measures that would make the process less arduous. See, unlike with a typical computer interface, deleting things from a PS3’s hard disks takes time. The only way to make sure the music library is as up-to-date as possible is to delete every track before replacing it with what’s been taken from iTunes (more on which later). Now, to delete every track through the “Select All > Delete” option is to task the poor console with deleting (in my case a modest) 3,000+ tracks at once and because it has a little trouble with units over a thousand (per an article I read once) that’s not the way to go about it, particularly as it’s prone to going into the “Deleting…please wait…” display and never coming out of it until you’ve reset the console.

No, the best way to do it is by category and one at a time, and the best way to do that is to determine which category (of category) you have the least of. For example, you’ll probably have more Track Names beginning with A than you will Album Names, and the same again for Band Names and Release Years. If you’re a good friend of mine, and you know who you are because you’re the only one still reading, Genre is NOT the way to go because you’ll be lumbered with manually highlighting and deleting an ungodly number of groups of songs, but for me that ended up being the best way to go, as there wasn’t much beyond the meager selection of Metal, Game, Score, Pop and a few others.

BUT, I thought, what if there was a quicker method still? After all, the Genre tab in iTunes is of literally no use to me as I’m never really in the mood for just a specific type of music. The only option for division I’d prefer to have is the separation of tracks with vocals and tracks without so that I can have a playlist of less distracting music for backgrounding (like the one I’m listening to now). So that’s what I did – two Genres (per iTunes), with one for what was formerly music from films, television, games and wrestling renamed “Irreglar” and the rest, typically standard band-based recordings with vocals, becoming “Reglar”, and a third separate entry for comedy named simply “Comedy”.

This way, when updating the contents of the Library onto the PS3, I only have to click “Copy” three times which means less time spent waiting on much smaller installments to transfer as a means of not wasting time out of the room when I could be clicking, clicking, clicking.

Three. Simple as, right?

As Stone Cold would say, EH EH. Wow. That’s impossible to spell accurately.

See, ol’ PS3 has that trouble we talked about with transferring huge amounts of songs, so first thing that needs to be done is all the tracks need to be dragged out of the iTunes window (because if you drag them from your iTunes folder you’re liable to get straggler tracks that weren’t correctly deleted and such) into a folder on the desktop which needs to be divided into several smaller folders so that there’s never too much going onto the console at once lest it freeze up on ya.

With me?

Then simply plug, locate, transfer x3, and enjoy. By the end of the day, all three devices should be ready to play the same stuff. It’s worth doing every couple of months to clear out all that gunk I’ve got sick of hearing and make sure that new stuff I’ve forgotten to manually ‘port over gets a fair listenin’.

And so another of my obsessively detailed (just south of a thousand words and counting) idiosyncratic practices is rendered unto common knowledge. Maybe now I can get some fucking sleep.