So, as noted in some earlier posts, I have successfully (I hope) executed a Grand Unification of the iTunes Libraries. Unfortunately, a key element in so doing was nuking the extant actual iTunes Library files, which means all my various library playlists are history as well.

My head hurts. On the other hand, I suppose the proper methodology is to assemble some album-by-album playlists and as I am so doing other ideas will occur. How I wish for straight-up tagging instead of bullshit genre catgories. Every single song ever written or performed by Willie Nelson belongs to the ‘country’ genre, but rap-crossover records with Afrika Bambatta AND Willie also belong in any number of additional genres.

After literal years, I have finally completed a multiple-library merge and de-dupe on my primary iTunes music folder. At the end of the project, I have about 30gb of unique songs, representing about 750 artists.

As I have been working on this, I have been pursuing a concurrent project to enable multi-zone playback from the primary iTunes machine, a five-year-old Mac Mini which is a part of my A/V stack. This was accomplished via both an inexpensive local-area rebroadcast base station and two satellite speakers (battery or brick power, which makes them easy to tote around inside or outside) and an assortment of Apple Airport Express wifi stations picked up on eBay at $25 – $50.

Overall the project was pretty hairy.

I blew out a 7.1 A/V receiver pretty much as soon as I started it, sometime last year, by hooking up a non-powered speaker to the B speaker outlet and refusing to realize why the amp was shutting down until I actually saw and heard a literal sparkflash and watched a sad curl of very expensive smoke curl up out of the receiver chassis.

Merging four separate 30gb iterations of the same music library is yet another kind of madness and one that drove me to the brink on several occasions. There are many tools designed to assist with this process but none that really easily manage the sheer range of possible variations a tune file can morph into over time. As it is, I am sure I tossed a few uniques along with the 90gb of duplicate files.

Anyway, it’s done, and I can get back to listening to the music, something I found nearly impossible to do with pleasure when the various housekeeping tasks I wanted to address were unresolved. Of course, in the intervening years, I have bought a great deal of music, and the older music that I have not had a chance to listen to for a few years is nearly new again.

So as I play the music, every second track, I’m all, “Hey! This is pretty good! Who is this?”

So now I’m off to track down a universally-accessible iTunes now-playing track publisher. I’m kinda thinking a Twitter publisher might be the way to go. Off to the internet research squirreling!

UPDATE: utter success. Mini now updating playlist via Twitter in protected mode. Inaugural programming: Sandinista, The Clash