I'm sold on Big Buckets, and iTunes is what sold me on them. I have a huge
music collection and there isn't an iPod on the market yet that can handle
it, which means I'm always tinkering around trying to figure out what music
I will take along and what I will leave behind. I also have rather eclectic
tastes in music.
In the days before iTunes when pirates ruled the digital seas, I emulated
the way I stored my vinyl in how I stored my MP3s - Starting with large
buckets representing genres, I built out my hierarchy of Artist, then Album
- a perfect solution for anyone raised in the days of AOR (Album Oriented
Rock) - but then came the era of DJs, compilations, and remixes and I've
got the Gotan Project doing a remix of Sarah Vaughan's Whatever Lola Wants
- is it Latin?Tango? Electronica? Jazz? Vocal? - what folder am I going to
put this thing in?
Along comes iTunes (and actually any other player/music library) and I've
got all this other meta data I can play with. I can assign the same song to
different genres because hey, they're only key words. I can account for all
the artists, the album I may have got this from, whether it's part of a
compilation. There's a notes field (also key word searchable) .Heck I can
even track Beats per Minute if I want to. Fast forward to today and I'm
leveraging my RM expertise to construct these awesome playlists using
smartlists and some simple Boolean constructs - I am an RMDJ.
All of a sudden that file structure I built became a cumbersome construct.
Using it to find something, with lots of hunting and clicking, took much
longer than entering my criteria in the iTunes Search box. And tagging
things to hold - oh I mean, be excluded from the random play engine, was
done with a quick "apply to all" to the population of "Christmas" music I
pulled up. Once I got used to working with my files this way - essentially
all in one big bucket called "music" I wondered immediately why can't I do
this with my non-music records? And so - at least at home I worry much less
about the file hierarchy in my PC - thanks to Vista's meta-tagging ability
and the power of Google Office, I rarely click through folders anymore -
hierarchy is indeed an error to work around. At least at home.
So now I start to wonder if any buckets are needed at all - it's all meta
data, keywords and tags, the focus really is in finding which one's will be
meaningful, will help me find that document or record that demonstrates
compliance to a certain regulation, that needs to be segregated and held
for litigation. Some of that info might look similar to what we would
expect to see in a file plan, "accounting," "Accounts payable," "Invoices,"
Of course iTunes isn't without it's problems. As much as I love the instant
recognition of a CD and import of meta data, I still have to confirm that
things are correct - It's Stéphane not Stephanie - Adult Contemporary? what
the heck is Adult Contemporary? - OK, I can't read Kanji, but can append
some Romaji should that be Sheena or Shiina - and so on. but I love the
helpful drop downs and auto-completes when I have to create a profile from
scratch. Perhaps this task wold be made easier if I could drag and drop it
into a single folder, of course the more folders there are, the greater the
chance I'll accidentally drop it into the wrong one and then how will I
find it?
And so iTunes has made me a big bucket convert and I hope to someday have
an RMS that's just as easy to use.
Christian Meinke, CRM
Southern California Edison
Enterprise Resource Planning
Operations Support
Document & Records Management
(626) 543-7260/PAX 39260
Mobile (818) 414-9515
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