Fall 2015 Megapost: The Playlist Project

This summer brought many changes to The Innerspace Library.  First we started fresh with a Linux OS and finally said “farewell” to Windows.  There was a brief period of limbo as I tested various open source media management software to find the right fit for my collection.  I finally settled down with gmusicbrowser which outperformed Clementine and other major players in its handling of large libraries and in the incredible versatility and customization of its GUI.

This was the very first time since the launch of Winamp 5 (the amusing successor to  Winamp 3) that I’d explored the power of music metadata to organize my library dynamically across multiple data points.  (I’d never really saw the need during my years with MediaMonkey Gold.)

But as the summer drew to a close, I was still irked  that my Subsonic media server lacked the function of genre browsing.  I’d previously sidestepped this issue by generating mammoth genre playlists to serve as my personally-themed radio stations, each with hundreds or even thousands of the finest albums of their respective genre.

But it was this fresh start in the last few weeks that inspired my refinement of those playlists into distinct album libraries which would zero in on a specific moment of music history.  The aim was to bring a semblance of order to the hundred thousand plus tracks in my file library and to give me a set of starting points to really explore the neglected and unplayed folders of my drive.

I’m proud to declare that this evening, the project was a complete success.  I’ve created 100 all-killer-no-filler libraries showcasing each of the largest collections in my catalog.  I found that 68% (9,300 albums) of my music library fell neatly into one of these 100 categories.

The following is an index of these 100 playlists, sorted by number of albums.  This roster effectively summarizes and gives order to what is otherwise an insurmountable archive.  I’m going to enjoy exploring these playlists throughout the fall and into the winter months.

Playlists by Descending Size (in # of Albums)

Playlists with 1000+ Albums

Midnight on Mars: Ambient Worlds – 2,986 Ambient Albums

Hearts of Space: Innerspace Journey – 30 Year Complete 1,069 Broadcast Archive

Playlists with 200-999 Albums

Kelly Watch the Stars – 607 Classic Albums of the Downtempo Genre

Mentalism: Psybient Dreams – 545-Disc Archive of Psybient Electronic Music

Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio – 450 Legendary Krautrock Albums

The Shape of Jazz to Come – 387 Modern Jazz LPs (1959-1979)

Just Gimme Indie Rock!: 379 of the Greatest Indie Rock Albums (1988-2014)

Underworld: Dark & Long – A 35 Year Chronology – 339 Albums from Screen Gemz to Eno & Hyde

Old Time Radio: Dragnet (298 Broadcasts)

Salute to Birdland – 259 Classic Jazz Records (1924-1958)

FAX +49-69450464 Label Archive: The Legacy of Pete Namlook 254 Disc Catalog

We Came to Funk Ya – A 227 Album Funk Odyssey

Ninja Tune: Turn Me Loose – 204 LP Archive of Ninja Tune Records

Playlists with 100-199 Albums

Days of the Lords: 195 Album Archive of Ethereal & New Wave, Gothic Rock, Minimal Wave, Post-Punk, Jangle & Noise Pop (1976-1997)

The KLF: Abandon All Art Now – 189-disc Catalog of the Justified Ancients of MuMu

Shirt Tail Stomp: Swing & The Big Bands – 181 LP and Broadcast Archive

Tangerine Dream: Journey Through a Burning Brain – 178-Disc Chronology of TD & its Side Projects

Old Time Radio: The Adventures of Superman (171 Broadcasts)

Night Lines – 140 Album Archive of Deep House Sessions

Light Patterns – Jazz of Tomorrow – 139 Future Jazz Albums

Heaven or Las Vegas: 30 Years of Dream Pop & Ethereal Wave (134 Album Archive)

Max & Dima: Sapovnela Studio Sessions – 131 Deep House DJ Sets

Nurse with Wound: Walking Like Shadow – 127 Album Discography

Old Time Radio: X Minus One – 122 Broadcasts (1955-1973)

Deutsche Grammophon: 111 Years of DG (111-Disc Box Set)

Lemon Jelly : Going Places – 110-Disc Catalog of All Things Jelly

Miles Davis: The Complete Prestige & Columbia Recordings – 109 LPs released between 1955-2014

Daft Punk: Daftendirekt – 104-LP Chronology

Flea Market Funk – 100-Disc Archive of Funky Soul & Rare Groove

Frank Zappa: Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar – 100-disc Catalog (1966-2006)

RYM’s Top 100 Downtempo & Trip Hop Albums

Playlists with 75-99 Albums

Franz Liszt: Lisztomania! – 97 LP Archive

Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser – 97 LP Discography

Good Looking Records: 94-Disc Archive of LTJ Bukem’s Intelligent D’n’B Label

Franklin Mint: The 100 Greatest Classical Recordings – 88 LP Catalog

Somnium – 87-Album Library of Pure Drone Music

Aphex Twin: We are the Music Makers – 86 Album Chronology of Richard D James

The Electronic Brain: Future Sounds of London & Amorphous Androgynous 86-Disc Complete Chronology

Mike Oldfield: Tricks of the Light – 86 LP Discography (1973-2010)

Jimmy Smith: Jazz Scattin’ – 85 LP Discography

Cinematic Soundscapes – 83-Disc Library of Music for Films

Old Time Radio: CBS Radio Mystery Theater – The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (83-Disc Box Set)

Klaus Schulze: I Sing the Body Electric – 81 LP Discography

Ludwig Van Beethoven: The Bicentennial Collection – 80 LP Complete Works

Old Time Radio: BBC Radio – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (79-Disc Set)

Vangelis: Poem Symphonique – 77 Album Discographic Archive

Old Time Radio: The Shadow – 75 Original Broadcasts (1937-1954)

Playlists with 50-74 Albums

Sun Ra: Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy – 74-Disc Catalog (1957-1994)

John Cage: A Chance Operation – 73 LP Discography

2manyDJS – This is Radio Soulwax: 72 Mashup Sessions

Brian Eno: Strange Overtones – 70 LP Discography (1972-2015)

Peter Gabriel: Here Comes the Flood – 68-Disc Catalog (1977-2010)

Ornette Coleman: Change of the Century – 66 LP Discography

Prayer for the Paranoid: 66 Albums from a Decade of Shoegaze (1993-2003)

Muslimgauze: The Broken Radio of Istanbul Station – 63 Album Discography

The Piano Has Been Drinking: The Complete Recordings of Tom Waits – 63 LPs (1973-2011)

Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers: Just Coolin’ – 62 Album Discography

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Kontakte – 61 LP Archive

Old Time Radio: The Complete Sherlock Holmes Audiobooks (Unabridged 60-Disc Set)

Philip Glass: Glasspieces – 60 LP Discography of Operas, Symphonies, Sonatas and Scores

Cornelius: Out of Phase – 60 Album Discography

Spacemind: Wonderland Syndrome – 60 Psybient DJ sets

Cafe del Mar: Step into the Sunshine – 59-Disc Archive of the Sounds of Ibiza

Throbbing Gristle: 555 Jazz Funk Greats – 56 Album Discography

DJ Food – Solid Steel – 55 LPs of Classic Jazz Breaks

Herbie Hancock: One FInger Snap – 52 Album Discography

Ash Ra Tempel & Manuel Gottsching: Deep Distance – A 40 Year, 50 LP Chronology

Houdini’s Musical Box: Early Experimental Electronic Music (1940-1976) – 50 LP Archive

Porcupine Tree: Synesthesia – 50 Album Discography (1983-2013)

Playlists with 10-24 Albums

From Murmur to Monster: 21 Key Albums of the Jangle Pop Era (1983-1994)

Old Time Radio: Orson Welles Mercury Theater 1938 (20 Program Broadcasts)

Philips Prospective 21e siecle Label 18-LP Archive (1956-1972)

RYM: Round Midnight – 18 of the Highest-Rated Cool Jazz Records

Deutsche Grammophon Avant Garde: 17-LP Complete Recordings (1967-1971)

Braindance: A 15-LP IDM Chronology of Warp Records

The Plastikman Arkives: 1993-2010 (14-Disc Box Set)

Jellyroll Radio – Ragtime, Dixieland & Bluegrass Standards (13-Disc Catalog)

Claude Debussy – 12-Disc Complete Piano and Orchestral Works

Kompakt Records: Cirrus Minor – 12 Years of Ambient Music (2001-2013)

Midnight on Mars: Ambient Worlds

Checking in for the Playlist of the Day! Tonight – Midnight on Mars: Ambient Worlds.

The list comprises the work of 1300 artists and clocks in at 2,794 hrs 29 mins. It’s a collection of the finest LPs from nearly a century of ambient music.

NP: Fripp & Eno’s “The Heavenly Music Corporation (Reversed) Pt 1”

Playlist of the Day – Bilateral Motion: Abstract Minimal Ambient Dub Techno

Last night around 9pm I saw a post from a fellow member of a music community I follow.  It was a curious photo of an LP he was spinning at the moment with a minimal, text-only label which read, “Fluxion – Vibrant Forms.  A.”

From the color of the label and the sans serif typeface I hypothesized that it was likely some sort of minimal electronic music, so I hopped over to Youtube and keyed it in.

I was delighted to find it was reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt’s ambient, minimal techno under his legendary Gas moniker.  Whatever this was, I wanted to hear more!

A quick survey of the artist page on RYM revealed that it was filed under Dub Techno.  Where I’d previously exhausted all artists under the Ambient Dub heading (dominated primarily by The Orb), the highest-charting Dub Techno LPs were almost entirely new to me.  A few names were familiar, namely Woob and Yagya, but the rest were off my radar.  Jotting down the artists from the RYM top 10 LPs I went to work straight away.

The Artist Top 10 included:

• Andy Stott
• Deadbeat
• Paul St. Hilaire
• Deepchord Presents Echospace
• Fluxion
• Monolake
• Porter Ricks
• Purl
• Woob
• and Yagya

That evening I compiled 45 albums from these artists – a solid introductory set to the genre.

Now playing and listening intently to the new playlist – “Bilateral Motion: Abstract Minimal Ambient Dub Techno.  Fluxion’s Vibrant Forms I and II are excellent highlights from the set.

Big thanks to Vils M D for the inspiration!

Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio – Legends of Krautrock

Sunday Playlist of the day – Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio – Legends of Krautrock.

450 of the greatest kosmische musik albums from 77 German artists.

Spanning 1969 to the present, personal favorites among the list include discographies from:

• Can
• Faust
• Kraftwerk (particularly the pre-Ralf und Florian LPs)
• Amon Duul I&II
• Neu!
• Popol Vuh
• Harmonia
• Tangerine Dream
• Klaus Schulze
• Manuel Gottsching
• Cluster
• Ash Ra Tempel
• Embryo
• La Dusseldorf
• The Cosmic Jokers
• and A.R. & Machines

The list also includes modern artists who celebrate and revive the genre, like London’s Public Service Broadcasting.

Album now-playing: Cosmic Jokers’ s/t – the band that never was.

Their albums were acid party jam sessions recorded and released without the supergroup’s knowledge. Participants included Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze of Ash Ra Tempel, Jurgen Dollase and Harald Grosskopf of Wallenstein, and Dierks. Regardless, it’s wonderful stuff!

Digital Music Management – Taking Full Advantage of Your Data

You don’t even want to begin to re-catalog THIS.

One of the challenges of a 77,000+ song library is the hundreds of artists a user may never hear. I decided to tackle this dilemma this week and found a solution.

The first task was to shed my database systems and Explorer navigation and find a way to manage my library from within a single application and really take command of the music metadata.  I decided that, moving forward, I would reserve my database strictly for physical media, and put Media Monkey Gold to the test of managing my digital library.

To facilitate the process, it seemed appropriate to lose some dead weight. I spent the first evening methodically rounding up my adolescent-era artists and relocating them to a folder outside the primary directory, aptly titled “Plebian Audio.”

Let’s get to work.

The process of elimination was simple.

If %GENRE% includes “rock” but does not include “progressive” or “avant-garde” then [Plebian.]

If mean album track %length% < 210sec then [Plebian.]

If demographic age < 20 then [Plebian.]

Else [Primary Audio Folder]

The resulting folder was a pool of p2p-era albums. Many had not been case-corrected. The file naming conventions were anything but uniform having sourced the tracks from multiple users, and not a single artist’s folder was a complete discographic archive. These were the millennial mix-tapes of the early days of file-sharing.

The next step was to clean-up the remaining digital files. For beginners considering this task, I recommend this article to get you started.

This was followed by an evening of fine-tuning – tailoring the %GENRE% values to be consistent throughout the library.

Trip Hop / Trip-Hop
Neo-Classical / Neoclassical / Modern Classical
etc.

It was at this juncture that I made the most valuable discovery of the project – that semicolons can be employed to apply multiple values to the %GENRE% field (or to any other field) in an ID3 tag.

I used Florian Heidenreich’s lightweight but powerful MP3tag utility to batch-replace all comma separators in my library with semicolons. The process took 36 minutes, and I confess that I did not take my eyes off that progress bar for the entire duration of the task. I just kept thinking of the incredible control that multi-genre categorization would offer. For the very first time I was able to navigate my entire catalog by genre without having to tie albums to one specific tag.

The Mp3tag interface

It was a difficult lesson to learn, but digital music inherently stores all its data within its ID3 tags, making an external music database redundant. I’d dedicated considerable time to indexing my vinyl, CD and digital music into a single database, but the reality is that it stagnates your data. The realization was reinforced by the fact that private trackers no longer have a need for massive discographic torrent archives, and have instead replaced them with decentralized manageable and crowd-sourced collages. If for example a newly remastered edition of a recording is released, it can easily be introduced to the library and is seamlessly integrated into the collage with a single click – a vast improvement to the previous method, which would require reconstructing and redistributing the entire static archive.

The same principle applies to local digital music libraries. Changes or updates to tag information, whether for a single track or for 77,000 tracks is a simple task, and is instantly reflected within your digital music application.

Perhaps my epiphany is common knowledge for the general public. I’m curious, because mine is the only library I’ve ever managed. I’d be interested in seeing statistical data with regard to what database solutions the average music consumer uses to manage their own personal libraries.

Discogs.com appears to be the most popular tool for record library management at present, with the particular benefit of real-time value assessment based upon up-to-the-minute sales data from the Discogs marketplace. And recently, Libib.com has premiered as a web-based library application to manage users’ book, movie, music and video game collections. I contacted the site’s support team, but was disappointed to learn that they are entirely UPC and ISBN-based, with no plan to implement record catalog numbers or digital music data in the foreseeable future (alienating perhaps the two fastest-growing collector demographics.)

But whatever software you use for your digital library, be it foobar2000 or MediaMonkey, the applications of audio metadata are empowering. For example, I could use this new multi-genre data to host multiple web radio stations (providing I can set up a server with sufficient dedicated bandwidth.)

Which brought me to my next discovery – the concept of autoplaylists. By entering criteria such as BPM range, genre keywords, or targeted folders, MediaMonkey’s autoplaylists will automatically populate qualifying tracks, relieving the user of the burden of manually-adding new music to existing playlists.

Unfortunately, my current personal media server does not support autoplaylists, so I am considering moving from Subsonic to a MonkeyServer system. This reinforces my realization that the MediaMonkey Gold may be a single-solution for all my music management needs.

Over the next two days I created 85 primary playlists to showcase my catalog, based on the library’s most prominent genres and for artists between 30 and 381 albums to their name. With an average of a 258 hour running time per list, these playlists totaled more than 2.5 years of continuous 24hr playback and will automatically update as new qualifying recordings are added to the library.

The immediate advantage is that these playlists will surely expose me to hundreds of artists I might otherwise never have heard.

In the evenings ahead I’ll be experimenting with MM community plug-ins to really get some analytical power out of the application.

So there you have it. With a weekend project-duration of approximately 20 hours I’ve re-evaluated my cataloging system, standardized the metadata of 103,633 files, retagged every recording, constructed 85 autoplaylists and relocated my database from a static system to a dynamic environment with an incredible number of potential applications.

Below are the first pieces of data I’ve exported from the new library.  These charts were constructed based on %GENRE% data clustered by autoplaylists with run times ranging from 10 – 8,501 hours.

Happy listening everyone.