As I’ve continued to prune and tidy up my local music library, I’ve started to notice small things that have bothered me for years (decades?) but that I haven’t taken the 15 minutes to fix. In case you’re in a similar boat, here is a list of things related to maintaining a music library that may be annoying you and can be fixed easily:

  1. When music you download has “Album Version” (or any varient thereof) in the track name metadata. Use an ID3 Tag editor program (I recommend Tagger) which lets you add all your music, search for a subset with “Album Version” in the name, and then you can go through and remove it from the titles one-by-one.
  2. When the artist name includes an ampersand, which gets removed somewhere along the way (examples in my library include “Mumford & Sons” being labeled as “Mumford, Sons”; see also, “Iron, Wine” instead of “Iron & Wine”).
  3. Extra album fluff. Most of the time when I download an album, I want it exactly as it was for the main album at release time. Additional content sometimes weight it down more than lifts it up. For this reason, I sometimes remove additional fluff at the end of albums such as Bonus Tracks, or “Live @ Venue” versions of songs already on the album. Note: the latter doesn’t apply to albums that are specifically live concert recordings.
  4. Low-res album art. Anything less than 1000x1000 (and that is even a bit small, arguably) is not sufficient. It’s fine on an iPod screen, but blow it up to even a smart phone level, and it’s not going to cut the mustard. That goes doubly so if you’re playing it on a TV.
  5. Low bitrate MP3s. Almost all of my library exists as lossless FLAC files (still 44.1 16-bit tracks, though), but there are occasional one-off tracks here and there that slip through and continue to live in their old 256kbps MP3 forms. Sometimes I spot the quality difference and replace them on-the-fly, but other times it’s worth searching for ‘.mp3’ in your library folder and picking out songs to upgrade that way. You may or may not be able to notice a difference (I can in some tracks, but not others), but if you’re going to preserve a track in your library long-term it’s worth keeping the higher quality version around.
  6. Alternate album art. Sometimes an album releases a few different versions which have different album art, but the version you downloaded has one that doesn’t spark joy. In those cases, it’s worth firing up a tag editor app again and replacing the original art with the art you prefer or most identify with that album.