Alphabetization Is Positively Fucking Shite for (large) Music Libraries

I’ve been run­ning Ubuntu for sev­eral weeks now, prob­a­bly over a month, almost exclu­sively. There are a cou­ple things I miss about Win­dows; I keep it installed as a dual-boot option in case it takes me more than half an hour to fig­ure out how to do some­thing in Ubuntu that I can do in Win­dows in under two minutes.

One of the things I miss the most, of course, is foo­bar. I’ve been using Song­bird, whose Linux ver­sion runs just as well as the Win­dows ver­sion I’ve got­ten used to. But I didn’t truly real­ize how lost I was with­out my library fil­ters in foo­bar; I think if in Win­dows I had wanted to play some­thing in Song­bird, but didn’t know what to lis­ten to, I would have used my foo­bar setup to fig­ure it out, then searched for the album in Song­bird. I did this absent­mind­edly enough that, now that I’m with­out foo­bar, I’m alarmed at how dif­fi­cult it is to nav­i­gate my library. I’m sit­ting here with Song­bird open, and I’ve got 1,369 artists. What the hell am I sup­posed to do with that?

In foo­bar I had mood tags and clus­ters based on All­Mu­sic data, so if I wanted some­thing upbeat, I’d just look under the appro­pri­ate moods. If that didn’t work, I’d at least find an artist who came close, and then could use foo_scrobblecharts to find any­body in my library who was up to two degrees of sep­a­ra­tion away from any selected artist on Last.fm.

In Song­bird, the best I can do is browse by genre (eye­roll), or use the Music Rec­om­men­da­tions add-on, which only lists the top five matches for the cur­rently play­ing artist on Last.fm, whether or not those five are in my library; if one of them hap­pens to be, it con­ve­niently links me to their tracks in my library, but it’s not that fre­quent an occurrence.

Any­way. The short of it is, for the eight­i­eth time: some­thing has to be done. How on God’s green earth does any­body fig­ure out what to lis­ten to? Oh that’s right, every­body just lis­tens to Cold­play and U2 and Radio­head and Suf­jan and The Hold Steady and The Shins and Miles Davis. If I only had seven artists I sup­pose I wouldn’t be mak­ing much of a fuss either.