How Should I Manage My Digital Music?
- What is Digital Music?
- Where Can I Find Digital Music?
- How Do I Play Digital Music?
- How Should I Manage My Digital Music?
The answer begins with understanding your music library. Your entire collection resides on your computer’s hard drive in a single "folder." Windows XP, for example, calls this the "My Music" folder. For serious collectors, it might contain thousands of albums in digital form, and tens of thousands of songs.
So think of that folder instead as a massive file cabinet housing a file for each artist. Each file contains separate albums that you’ve ripped from your CDs or bought off the Internet. Finally, each album comprises digital tracks of its songs.
Your player software, which filed all that music, can pick through the whole cabinet and locate an artist, album, or song far faster than you ever could.
It can store additional information about some or all of the following headings:
- album – album on which the song is found
- artist – musician or group that recorded the music
- composer – person who wrote the music
- category – the type of music, such as country, rock, world, or jazz
- mood – how the music makes you feel
- rating – usually a one- through five-star rating you give the music
- song – name of the song
- track number – where on the album the song appears
- year – when the music was released
Best of all, your player software can reorder the entire file cabinet in a split second according to these headings and more, such as the number of times you’ve played each song, or how long each one lasts. In each case, it sorts them in alphabetical or numerical order.
While your software will take care of this busy work, you have to tell it generally what to do. So, you’ll need to become familiar with how to:
- Navigate your music library
- Add song information
- Add music to your music library
- Create and use playlists
Navigate Your Music Library
The way you do it depends on your software’s features. Typically, though, information appears on your computer screen in columns with headings for song, artist, album, etc. You might ask the software to show you only the music on a given album, or only the rock songs, or songs you’ve rates with 4 out of 5 stars. Or, you could look for a group of albums in a particular category of music.
Click on the heading at the top of a column and the software will list the songs or albums in order by that type of information. You can sort the songs by name or category. Keep clicking the heading and the display will switch between ascending and descending order.
Add to or Change Content In Your Library
This one’s easy. Every music player software package has its own system for adding song and album information. You’ll be able to start it from one of the menus. There may also be a virtual button on the screen that starts it directly.
Add information in a couple of ways. Let your player software pull it from the Internet or, in the case of a CD that someone burned for you, be ready to enter the names of songs, artists, and albums yourself.
In most cases, your software will go to the Internet to find as much information about the music as possible. You might not have to do more than pick the right version of the song or album off a menu that will appear. You may even get a digital image of the album cover to store with the music.
However, there are times that you can’t get information about a specific recording, or the information you see is wrong. This happens more often with albums from smaller labels. Again, change or add information as necessary. In iTunes, for example, this requires no more than a second mouse click on a highlighted song entry – it might simply read "Track 01," and presto, you can type the name if you know it.
Create and Use Play Lists
Here’s a great way to make your own custom blend of music for any occasion. Your player software will let you create as many play lists as you like. All you’ll need to do is specify the music you want to include and a name for the play list itself.
Once you have a play list, you can play it just like you can play a song. The music player software loads up the list of songs and then goes though them in the order you specified.
Feeling adventurous by now? Try this as a final touch: Some programs let you create a label for your custom CD. All you have to do is print your title onto specially formatted label stock and press it onto the disc. Voilà. Instant professional results.
