The Joy of Data Entry

I often feel like all crowd-sourced information is already on the internet. Sure, there are people who edit Wikipedia furiously. But that’s not me. At least, I thought I would never have anything to offer.

At the beginning of this cozy winter, I took on the task of ripping my household’s CDs. I’d wake up, put the next letter of an alphabetical stack on my desk, and methodically get to work. My ripper levereges the MusicBrainz database to look up CD information. CDs don’t have any metadata on the disk, so wonderful projects like MusicBrainz map raw discs with the artist, album name, track titles, and other metadata.

Out of 257 albums, only eight where not on MusicBrainz! To not break my flow, I set these in another pile as they came up to worry about later. My initial idea was to enter in the information locally. When I finished the rest of the albums though, I let these linger on the desk.

It took me about a week of gazing at this pile’s beady eyes before I relented. I started poking around MusicBrainz for the first time to try to understand why it couldn’t find my discs. That’s when I found out maybe everything isn’t on the internet.

Most were missing disc IDs. Easy fix. Look up the release and submit the new ID from the disc.

But how is Q-Tip not on here? Turns out it’s the Korean version: scan the packaging, make a new release, done.

Etta James four disc set: budget Euro label, copy over existing song info, verify with packaging, done.

Operatic two disc set: every accent and umlaut must be accounted for! Why is the name on the spine different than the name on the cover?

Stigma: one of these thrity Stigmas must be them. (They were not, I had to add another one.)

It wasn’t the most compelling way to spend my time off, but it was rewarding. Beyond being able to correctly label my CDs, I had a blast building the collective conscience. The physicality of finishing an album and taking another off the stack gave me fuel to continue. Digging through booklets and entering in forms brought a sense of peace to me.

My apprecition goes out to all the people who contribute to MusicBrainz and make my life easier. Now I just have to get a scanner so I can upload these ablum covers…