I just organized my entire music collection into well tagged MP3 and M4A files and couldn't be happier; both iTunes and Sonos work better with clean metadata. The majority of my music comes from CDs which I'd ripped over the years. Between the crappy 128kbps MP3 of the earliest rips and the inconsistent metadata I decided to start over with a clean rip from a ripping service. I've also got some stuff bought or downloaded from various sources (mostly Amazon) with varying quality that I had to fit in. 1200 albums in all, 300GB.

A clean rip of the CDs was a great place to begin. I took all my discs to ReadyToPlay, a service down in Palo Alto. They aren't the cheapest (I paid $1.40/disc) but they came well recommended and their website does a good job explaining how they take extra care with metadata. I was really happy with the result of their work and enthusiastically recommend them.

ReadyToPlay's setup is a few robots loading discs into CD-ROM drives with dbPowerAmp doing the ripping and conversion. They ripped to Apple Lossless (m4a); now that Apple has opened the format it seems the best choice. ReadyToPlay licenses high quality metadata from All Music Guide and other sources so album and artist names are much more accurate than I've seen from free sources. They also do some hand editing and data entry as well as careful handling of the CDs and cases. Money well spent.

ReadyToPlay got me started with a metadata schema. Just 18 genres without silly micro classification. Artist vs. Album Artist vs. Composer is a headache, particularly with Classical music, but iTunes mostly does the right thing even if Sonos is a bit confusing. One clever thing ReadyToPlay did was stuff detailed genre info into the Grouping tag, so while Autechre shows up as "Electronic" in the basic Genre I can also find it in iTunes via a search for "Techno" or "IDM" or "Experimental".

I didn't really need to edit any of the ReadyToPlay metadata, it was correct from the start. The other music was more of a mess. I'm surprised at how poorly labelled Bleep and Amazon's early MP3 sales were. It took a few hours to collapse down the genres, fix up mislabeled album titles, and try to figure out what some of these unlabeled BBC Essential Mix tracks really were. But all that work is done and now I've got a great, easy to use music collection.

Anyone want to buy several boxes of used CDs?

Portishead's new album Third is due to be released on April 29. It's highly anticipated; their 1994 and 1997 albums were amazing and then the band imploded, unable to produce. Fans have been waiting nervously. But if your ethics are flexible you haven't had to wait quite so long; a near-final edit of the album was leaked to the Internet on March 6. First to BitTorrent, then to Usenet, then to YouTube. And the album is great. I've preordered my copy of the real thing.

If you were politely waiting for the actual release, yesterday a full copy of the album showed up for streaming on last.fm. It looks legitimate, branded "last.fm exclusive." Except the streams sound identical to the March 6 release. Including the abrupt end of the end of the first track, Silence, a rough edit. And including the IM popup sound 2:14 into track 5, Plastic, sounding like an error on the initial pirate's computer. Why is last.fm distributing these glitched tracks?

I love services that passively record things I do. So I was excited to find Audioscrobbler from last.fm. It silently watches my Winamp and Squeezebox traffic and tells a server what I'm listening to. Simple, well executed.

What last.fm is missing is doing anything useful with that data. The site has some complex dashboard social network thing that is impenetrable to me. And it has a music recommendation function which is pretty good, but too junked up by crappy quality free music to be enjoyable.

So hooray for third party graphs! lastgraph is a simple web site that plots your music listening history from last.fm. The tool is a bit awkward, but the resulting graphs are beautiful and readable.

I hope last.fm has already made the appropriate overture to provide these graphs themselves. Simplify the creation tool a bit, publish a PNG, and fix poor Édith's name and you've got a fine product feature.

I've been listening to Woody Guthrie's 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads. It's mostly pretty grim folk blues, the misery of people fleeing the economic disaster of the Oaklahoma Dust Bowl. So I was a bit surprised to find this funny little sexual entendre hidden in his Dust Pneumonia Blues.

If it wasn't for choppin my hoe would turn to rust
If it wasn't for choppin my hoe would turn to rust
I can't find a woman in this black old Texas dust

"Choppin" must be what the boys called it back in the 30s.

One of the best features of the new Amazon MP3 store is the new album music preview. Single click to preview all the tracks, all Ajax loading in the page. 30 second snippets from each track automatically play, cleverly from the middle of the track, not the start. Simple and effective.

Thanks to last.fm I've learned I need some Air in my life, but their albums vary quite a bit. The previews are great; I'm finding I like the older stuff like Moon Safari and Primiers Symptômes best.

They're serious about the MP3 store. I just found they're offering a 20% referral fee for all sales via links from Amazon Associates. That's about $2 an album. Some music blog somewhere is about to get very wealthy. And Apple must feel a little nervous. Big play.

The new Amazon MP3 store is awesome. $0.89 or $0.99 a song, $9 or so an album, and simple MP3 files with no DRM or iTunes nonsense. The MP3s come with great ID3 tags and excellent quality 256kbps encoding (sometimes VBR). The downloader app is even decent; I think it's there to make life simple for people who aren't download experts.

This store is it, folks. We've been whining for years that buying music online sucked and we got better results stealing it. Well, that's not true anymore. If Amazon sells a piece of music there's no advantage to stealing it other than thieving something for free.

Proper respects to Warp Records whose online store Bleep has been selling unencumbered MP3s for almost four years now. Bleep is awesome but it has a limited catalog. Amazon will be the big time.

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the wheres or whys
And something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Thanks to Metafilter I've enjoyed watching an old Beatles video for the song Rain. That's one of my favourite overlooked Beatles songs and the video is just lovely. Hard to imagine that music like this could survive in today's hipster ironic world. "Rain" is just straightforward and sweet and a little goofy. And the boys are cute and nice, not snarling tortured artists hating their world or gangsta thugs demeaning women.

I tend to be pretty snidely ironic myself. It's an obnoxious reflex, a lazy substitute for actual wit. Why not speak plainly and pleasantly? I mostly fail to banish my own irony, but I have at least learned to appreciate honest things.

I've talked before about how Sonic Youth was one of my few contacts with hipness when I was a nerdy high school kid. I was excited to learn that their first album release is finally out on CD. It was caught up in the legal mess of SST records and unavailable for a long time. Now it's out and only $8.50 on Amazon.

Oh yeah, and it's still awesome. It's much less rock than most of their music, more of a droning rush of sound thing going on. The original EP is just five tracks; the rerelease includes a live set from the same year. Haven't even listened to that yet, just excited to have the album I remember from high school.

The Burning Spear • I Dreamed I Dream • She Is Not Alone • I Don't Want To Push It • The Good and the Bad