lowercase for life:
I’m no ‘neat-freak’, but I like to have certain things ordered in a particular manner. My bookshelves need to be arranged ‘just so’, the documents and folders on my hard drive must be archived in a very neat, some say regimental, fashion too, and woe betide he (usually she) who jumbles the order of my CDs in their storage albums. Maintaining the order is achieved fairly easily, once you have decided upon your chosen system of course.
One area where I haven’t yet had much success is in cleaning up the titles of my mp3s. It’s a quest that first took shape in 1999 when I began using Napster - it wasn’t long after having downloaded hundreds of files that I realised I would need to rename most of them if I ever wanted to be able to sort through them. Initially, I opted to have the first letter of each word in a filename/title in uppercase - e.g. “Rolling Stones - Paint It Black”, “Counting Crows - Atlantic City”, “Mobb Deep - Hell On Earth”. In April ‘02, however, I changed to the ‘everything lowercase’ approach - it just seemed less messy.
Somehow, I managed to rename around 3,000 files without too much hassle… doing it peace-meal over the course of a few months, and since then each new file downloaded is immediately renamed before being transferred to the corresponding genre folder in the music directory. The next battle on my hands is that of editing the ID3 tags in Winamp. This is a far more painful exercise, it’s no longer a simple matter of hitting the F2-key, typing the artist, title in lowercase, and hitting ‘enter’. No, now it’s: alt+3, click, title, tab, artist, click ‘copy from ID3v1’, click ‘update’, select next entry… it’s hard to find a good working rhythm when moving between keyboard and mouse all the time.
Bear in mind of course that my collection has now grown to some 5,000+ files - of which, only about 15% of those are titled correctly! Boy, oh boy, do I know how to waste my time! One thing’s for sure though, there’ll be no more changing, this convention’s gonna stick!
