Words On Wednesday

In the context of rating systems, I’ve recently been pondering the difference between thumbs up and thumbs down versus five star styles. When I discussed my use case for Plex a little while back, I mentioned how the star rating system for songs and dynamic playlists allowed me to have effectively the same functionality as Google Play Music and its thumbs up playlist. I tell the system that I like a song, and I can shuffle the collection of all songs that I like. Pretty simple, and they both do that job very well. However, that doesn’t really tell the full story. The part where I tell the system what songs I like? That’s actually an enormous undertaking. My music library has a ton of tracks. Currently, it sits at 34340 items, and that continues to grow week after week. I can’t guarantee that I’ve even listened to all of those tracks (confession: I definitely haven’t), let alone considered each of them long enough to give it an informed rating. There are a couple ways that I could go ab...

The music died on July 1, 2021. Well, at least that’s when Spartanburg County Public Libraries stopped carrying music CDs in circulation. I know Don McLean was referring to February 3, 1959  when Buddy Holly and others died in a plane crash. I don’t mean to trivialize that event. But for me personally, it was a huge blow to my music consumption to hear that my local library wouldn’t have music on CD anymore. The lion’s share of music in my personal collection has come from the public library for a long time now. I would check out a music CD, bring it back to my desk at work, rip the album to my company-provided computer, and return the disc that afternoon or the next day. Was I supposed to be saving music from county-owned discs? Probably not, but I also wasn’t doing anything to profit off them, so I figured it wasn’t that bad. This process went on for several years. I started doing it some time in the late 2000s, but it really hit stride between 2012 and 2019 during my years at Q...

The recent death of Google Play Music forced me to adopt a new music streaming platform. I decided on Plex. That migration has not been easy. Disclaimer: A word to the wise, fix your music folder before you ever bother with the Plex side of things. There are several tools and utilities I have discussed below, but everything is going to work much better if you get the music file structure right first. Everything should be divided into artist, and further divided into album. A free utility called foobar2000 can do that for you, if you take some time to tinker with it. AFTER the file structure of your music is right, THEN download and install the Plex server. If you need to set up a static IP and port forwarding, you can configure that all later. Be wary of my mistake, though, you want the music file structure to be pristine before you try to import it into Plex. Now, onto the ordeal I faced. I’ve been a power user of Google Play Music since almost the beginning. At least as far back as J...