Madacy != metadata
Music 01/03/2004 |I’ve babbled before about my anal-retentive obsession with metadata when it comes to my music collection. Today, I remembered one of my major frustrations: the Madacy Music Group.
I’ve been slowly working my way through re-encoding my music collection. I’d had it all ripped to my old computer as .mp3s, but now that I have my G5 with the extra storage space and processing speed, I decided to re-encode everything as .m4a. Less space, better quality, and all that. While I could have just pulled all the .mp3 files over and done a mass convert to .m4a, I wanted to get the best quality possible, which necessitates encoding from the original CDs. No problem — it’s a big project (with upwards of 1200 CDs to go through), but worth it in the long run.
As I’m going through, I’m ensuring that each imported CD has all the correct metadata for each track — title, artist, composer, and year of release — which most of the time isn’t a problem, as all this is generally listed in the CD booklet that comes with each album. However, over the years I’ve occasionally ended up with albums from Madacy, who seem to specialize in ultra-low cost compliations. I’m not sure how I end up with them, as they’re generally not something I’d go for (cheap in more than just price), but I’ve got a few.
The thing is, apparently one of the many cost-cutting measures that Madacy employs is simply giving as little information as possible about the songs included on their compilations. I just ripped a 3-disc set of Irish folk music where the only information given for any of the 44 tracks was the title — no performing artist, no composer, nada. Grrrrrr.
I know this kind of stuff (especially to this extreme) matters not a whit to most people, but dammit, it matters to me, and having to deal with a company this shoddy about their releases is just frustrating.
[See also: iTMS Exclusive: LXG Soundtrack | Metadata is a good thing | I’m a music whore | There’s no such thing as too much music | Metadata goodies ]
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8 Responses to “Madacy != metadata”
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medhat abbas
Ryan Waddell
Sponge Bob
rawad
January 3rd, 2004 at 9:35 pm
I feel your pain. I have roughly 40GBs of music that is all ridiculously tagged, including original cover art for re-released albums. I have also gone to the extent of pasting images of artists onto their Finder folder as well as the album cover on the album folder. One day, I will let iTunes organize my music, but it will take some time to rename all my folders to follow the exact tag names.
January 4th, 2004 at 12:44 am
Doe these work on iPods or iTunes?
January 4th, 2004 at 12:45 am
i really should start checking spelling… do*
January 4th, 2004 at 1:40 am
Crap, Michael I’m so sorry… i posted in the wrong post :-(. I deserve my IP to be post are something…
January 4th, 2004 at 5:29 am
I feel you on this one Michael. I feel its absolutely important to have all the information, and when I don’t have it… snaps!
Just in case you don’t know these sites:
http://www.tigersushi.com http://www.discogs.com
great sources of information about artists and discographies, though limited in the overall tracking of all music. Meaning they are more likely to have information on smaller independent labels and their artists. Amazon for everything else! ;/
January 13th, 2004 at 10:24 am
If you used something like Musicmatch, you could a) automatically look up the CD when you put it in and populate all that data for you, and/or b) “super-tag” things afterwards, which is a combination of auto-tagging and mass-tag-applying.
January 13th, 2004 at 10:54 am
Well, that’s all fine and dandy, except for a few little details…
First, I run a Mac. No MusicMatch for me (not a complaint at all, just a statement of fact).
Second, iTunes has the same automatic ID3 tagging feature that MusicMatch does. Looking at MusicMatch’s site, I can’t tell whether they have their own database or whether they use the CDDB, but iTunes uses the CDDB.
Third, from what I can tell, the “super-tag” feature in MusicMatch is simply applying the same ID3 tag information to many tracks at once, which can also be done within iTunes.
And lastly, no matter where the information comes from — the CDDB, MusicMatch’s database, or putting it in manually — it does no good when the company the CD originally came from doesn’t provide the information.
March 30th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
Michael:
I stumbled upon your comments about the lack of metadata on Madacy released CDs. I happen to be an executive with Madacy and when I see negative comments, I like to try and offer a retort.
For the better part of 25 years Madacy has been creating value-priced music collections for the mass-market, and have done it quite well. We are actually ranked the largest independent record company in the US and Canada by Soundscan.
I realize that many of the releases from madacy are not embedded with metadata (as I am one of the people spear heading our digital initiatives) but the reality is that it has not been necessary until very recently. It so happens that the 3CD irish set you picked up is probably over 9 years old (considering our name was then listed as “Madacy Music Group” which was changed to Madacy “Entertainment” Group and now is simply “Madacy Entertainment”) and at the time of the release there were no MP3 players to speak of, no downloads, burning, ripping, etc. The technology of metadata was probably just getting started and the majority of CDs never had them.
Today, with the importance of digital music and digital collections on PCs, this information HAS become important and madacy is making strives to make sure that all CDs feature this information.
Another point that I think you should consider is, as I said, Madacy specializes in value music collections for mass market middle America. We are not audiophiles and we don’t release new artists or try to win awards for the best album out there. What we do is create a value priced product for our customer base and this customer base in frankly not an MP3/I Tunes type of customer. They are just catching up to this particular area and madacy is positioning itself to provide its customers with the proper information for all releases as the demand presents itself.
I hope this helps ease your frustration.
DA