Five Stars

March 14, 2008

I never had much inclination to go through and rate all my songs via the iTunes feature. I did try it for the early eighties stuff, but it kept getting removed when I’d be juggling the tracks around, and besides - my opinions of some of that stuff changed constantly.  Eventually I started to use it as a kind of shorthand to remind myself of tasks that needed to be performed. Remember, all of the 80s project was recorded from vinyl and took a lot of work to get each song sounding decent relative to the other 543 tracks.

One star: The whole track is a disaster and a new source record should probably be found
Two stars: Track too quiet and needs to be boosted.
Three stars: Excessive pops to fix up in Audition.
Four stars: Track too loud and distorting.
Five stars: Done, leave it alone.

As the eighties project came to a close this system fell by the wayside, but I’ve come to realize that iTunes Library / iPod maintenance is a daily struggle. For those of you who don’t know this (it isn’t very well documented), if you apply an EQ setting in iTunes it will carry over to your iPod - and if you leave the iPod EQ in the “off” setting, it will apply the setting that you specified back in iTunes. (used to be that “off” really meant off and “flat” acknowledged the track’s EQ setting, but at some point those swapped)

Of course, one EQ setting does not fit all and I am constantly adjusting tracks to get the best sound out of them. Decisions about putting tracks on playlists, new discoveries that I want to hear more often, and the most time-consuming activity ever: album art. How to keep track of this all?

One star: Track is old, tired, and needs to be removed from whatever playlist is causing it to be in such heavy rotation.
Two stars: Too bass-y. Change to a milder EQ setting.
Three stars: Album art needs to be addressed in some way.
Four stars: Not bass-y enough. Boost EQ.
Five stars: Needs to be added to one or more playlists.

You just can’t be too careful with the presentation of your music.

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