I guess that title only makes sense if you’ve been hanging around here a while (and maybe not even then)…

My new G5 has turned me anal-retentive with my data.

Ever since my first computer (an Apple Macintosh SE) in 1989, I’ve simply dumped all of my old data onto a new hard drive without regard for organization. Over the past fifteen years, I’ve accumulated a lot of data, and it takes more and more time to transfer it to a new machine. And when it’s transferred using the Dump Method, it becomes very difficult to sort through it.

With this new machine, I’ve decided to be more methodical. I am slowly transferring the data, making certain that every file is in its proper place.

Of course, all I’ve really focused on so far is music: I’ve been ripping all of our CDs into iTunes. Didn’t I already rip them all onto the PC? Aren’t all of our songs already in mp3 format? Yes, they are. But when I did that first rip, several years ago, I had no concept of ID3 tags (the header information in an mp3 file). I made sure the file names were consistent (“U2 – I Will Follow.mp3”), but I didn’t do anything with the ID3 tags.

iTunes bases its entire organizational system on ID3 tags. It’s a wonderful organizational system: very flexible, easy to search, highly customizable, and, best of all, capable of creating amazingly complex “smart” playlists. (“Make a new playlist with all of the jazz songs between 1960 and 1970 but don’t include Dave Brubeck or any song with the word Love in the title.”) Without solid ID3 tags, this is impossible.

So, I’m being anal-retentive about my ID3 tags, especially the Genre tag. Sometimes it’s tough. Into which genre does Rickie Lee Jones fall? Are Wham! pop or synthpop? Is Elvis rock, pop, or, as I finally decided, oldies? I had to create some genres to match my collection. I have a lot of old-time radio shows, so Radio is a new genre. Kris and I think of an entire subclass of music (Natalie Merchant, Alanis Morrissette (whose name I can never spell correctly), Suzanne Vega) as “Chickrock” or “Bitchrock”. I have a huge collection of pre-1930s music, and despite its actual genre, I’ve classified it all as Vintage.

Over the past several days, I’ve managed to rip 5397 songs into iTunes. That’s 21.70gb of music, which would play for 16.4 days from start to finish. And I’m only to Hank Williams. I still have all of the compilations left, and all of the classical music, and all of the electronica, and the 101 CDs that are in our CD player.

After I finish absorbing all my music, I’ll absorb all my photographs.

Initially I feared that process would be long and arduous. I intend to re-scan many of my photographs, touching them up in Photoshop Elements before transferring them to iPhoto. Apparently the newest version of iPhoto (which I have not actually looked at yet) has several new iTunes-like features that help sort photographs.

Jeff came over yesterday and we scanned in some more recent photographs of Noah (the new photographs, when I’ve processed them, will be found here). I was shocked at how quickly we were able to scan them. On my iBook, it would have taken more than a minute for each photo, but on the G5 each took about ten to twelve seconds. Holy cats! This will certainly take the drudgery out of absorbing photographic data.

When I’m finished with the photos, it’ll be time to absorb all of my textual data: college essays, old web sites, e-mail I’ve saved since 1993, poems, stories, weblog entries. It would be nice if I could find an iTunes-like application for text documents, but I’m not holding my breath. I have fewer text files than music files anyhow, so sorting everything by hand ought to be okay.

Only I have the power to absorb all data!