Trevin Chow

My music library consists of songs that I’ve acquired from a variety of sources such as web downloads, Amazon, iTunes, eMusic and rips from my own CDs.

One of my biggest pet peeves for the longest time is that songs and albums across my library vary in playback volume.  Since I almost always listen to music in shuffle/random across the entire library (or within a specific genre), track-to-track volume differences are very noticeable.  It’s particularly bad if I’m listening to through headphones.

By default, iTunes will analyze volume information on songs as you add them to your library.  It stores volume normalization in an extended ID3 tag called “COMMENT ITUNNORM” which it will read and adjust playback volume before each song starts.

While iTunes handles this really well, it sucks if you also use other media player software or want to move to another music player in the future.

Since I wanted to future proof myself, I started investigating how I could have a more portable solution that would be player independent.

Solution: Replay Gain

After doing some searches, I stumbled upon various ways of analyzing audio files in order to normalize overall loudness of song playback.  The most popular method seemed to be “Replay Gain” and it was getting a ton of support in 3rd party applications.

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So far I’m loving wordpress and my move from Windows Live Spaces has been a great choice.  Wordpress has done a phenomenable job in creating an extensible platform; the sheer amount of plugins, widgets, themes and advice on the web is utterly amazing.

Wordpress makes it very simple to get a blog up and running with features like themes, categories, easy “page” creation and even queueing up posts for automatic posting in the future.

Since migrating all my blog content over, I started to indicate which “categories” each post belonged to.  It didn’t take long for me to notice that the way I was using the wordpress categories wasn’t how it was originally intended to be used.  I was instead using them as tags, which normally don’t have an implied hierarchy, unlike the hierarchical category system that Wordpress offers.

The beauty of tags is that the origanization system is super flexible and allows you to link together content that is hard to do with other methods.  Another reason I love tags is duality it provides for content creators.  On one hand, the meaning of tags can be similar across sites, which allows your users to find simliar content despite the flexible nature of the tags.  On the other hand, since the meaning of tags can differ per application, it gives the content creator flexibility to create new meanings within their own scope.  This duality may be percieved as a drawback, but I personally see this as a powerful, and flexible framework for blogging and to allow users to explore content more powerfully than just following it chronologically.

However, this isn’t to say that categories are now defunct in favor of tags; categories can be more useful in some cases, or even be a secondary source of meta-data that helps in your content organization.  As a content creator, you have to choose carefully which you use, whether it be one or the other, or both. 

For my blog, I see tagging as the only content meta-data I’ll need and categories only hindering the evolution of my blog since I don’t need the structured hierarchical meta-data it provides. Read the rest of this entry »