I have owned an iPod for over a year now and I have to say that i just love it. I have loaded it up upto 60GBs. Yes 60 GBs. Until a few years ago i used to think owning 5 GB’s of music was big and now i own this huge collection. Well, with that comes the challenge to manage it. Some of you who read this may think what is he talking about, but if you put yourself in my shoes will you understand. Its not at all easy to rip all the CD’s if you lose the files, find the rare bootlegs once again, rate your music, etc, etc.

 

I started off by planning my backup strategy. I once came this close to lost my music cos of a hard drive crash. Thank God i had a backup then. Now what next? I end up buying at least 4-5 CD’s each month and then sometimes you end up listening to a few songs from each CD that you liked on the first listening. Thats no fun. So what do i do about it? I figured that "Smart Playlists" is the way to go. Using Smart Playlists you can create rules for playlists so that you can listen to songs based on your preferences. Its a lot of fun to create these playlists. I already have one called "Favourites" which is more or less like a radio-station playing all the songs i love – one after the other, yes – thats what it does. 🙂 There is another called "Guitar Gods" and of course it has Vai, Satriani, Derek Trucks, Morse and company. Another one called "Killer solo’s" which has got the best solo’s ever. 🙂 The other one is called "31" which stands for the maximum volume on my car stereo and has got all the songs which listen to Full Blast – "Killing in the name", "Revelations", "Song that remains the same", "Rusty Cage" – you know what i am talking about. While playing with all this i realized a lot of cool things about iTunes. Songs can have lyrics, Albums can have ratings, "Apple Scripts" for automation. So where does this all lead me to? I have over 10,500 songs and less than 250 songs without artwork. 🙂 About 2000 songs have lyrics and the rest dont. Adding lyrics manually was never an option. So i explore a few plugins available but i wasnt satisfied with any of them. So i have decided to write my own tool to add lyrics and maybe artwork. A simple C# program to get the lyrics from LirycsWiki and artwork from Amazon that will update the ID3 tags of my music. Its wont be very easy but i am going to give it a shot, lets see how far i go. 🙂 I hope to have lyrics to atleast about 75% of the songs i have. Good luck to me.

 

The one other thing i am excited about is Windows Home Server. I think its a promising technology and i might consider investing in it. Lets see how that goes.