Boxes and Arrows tackles the frustrating task of designing an appropriate information architecture for distributing digital audio in the home. One obvious yet still insightful comment:

The appalling state of music metadata is no secret. Other authors have already explored the limitations of the available metadata with respect to jazz, a genre that “goes beyond the ‘Great Man’ theory and recognizes the influence of side players…” Whether other genres of music have as rich a metadata landscape as jazz is immaterial. Liner notes from any album in any genre hold more information than currently captured in most digital audio systems. All three manufacturers highlighted in this article believe the lack of good metadata is a crisis facing the entire industry. However, they all feel that once the industry cracks the nut, their devices will be prepared to address it.

I think this problem will be solved in two ways:

1. Using the wisdom of crowds to help cull this metadata. That’s the impetus behind MusicBrainz and projects of that ilk. [Why yes, I support MB financially. Thanks for asking.]
2. Allowing greater flexibility in metadata generation.

As you’ve seen with all my musiclogging entries, I grab a lot of concert bootlegs of artists I really like. Part of my process for setting those audio files up in my system is to set their genre as “Concert Bootleg”—that way I can filter for all my boots.

If you stop and think about it for a moment, you know that sucks. This means that the jazz bootlegs I grab get lumped in with the hard rock … and frankly, I don’t see the Theolonious Monk Quartet and Queens of the Stone Age getting along all that well.

If ID3 tagging embraced, well, tagging-style metadata generation, things would be better. I could tag all the TMQ boots as “Jazz, Concert Bootleg” and the QotSA as “Rock, Concert Bootleg”. Unfortunately, ID3 tagging just doesn’t work that way right now. It needs to go that way, though, to solve this sucktastic state we’re in right now.

But wait, you say, what about the issues of side players? Go play with MusicBrainz sometime—you can set up relationships between artists as well as between artists and songs. For example, Derek Webb’s relationships are starting to form as I and others like me try to piece them all together.

Yes, this generation takes work. But honestly, we all know people that are crazy enough to run this down for the music that they really, really dig. I don’t know all that much about Theolonious Monk—I’m very much on the ground floor—but there’s hundreds, maybe thousands of jazz fans that can piece all this together. Awesome … I’ll work on the stuff I really know.

Anyhow, this is stuff I think about often, stuff that keeps me up at night. Before you tell me that I need a hobby, let me state that this is my hobby.