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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

How often do users change the metadata of music bought from Apple Music? When ripping stuff by hand, this is understandable.. you make a typo, want to add a year, do some locale changes to add local characters, etc... so in this case i see a possible need to waste 5 kB of space to save a couple of seconds after an edit.

But with downloadad music with all the metadata (hopefully) correctly set, even 5kB is a waste of space.

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I always edit the genre so that the tracks work correctly with my various different smart playlists. In rare instances I'll also need to tweak the artist name to fit with the existing tracks in my library.

Sometimes the album or track names have extra info that I don't care about and will delete.

And TV show metadata is usually a mess and needs quite a bit of editing.

I can't speak for AppleMusic, but some online stores are terrible at providing metadata (e.g. JunoDownload often has ALL-CAPS artist names, & turns into &, etc...). Often it's simpler to just throw everything into Mp3tag and get new metadata from Discogs or Musicbrainz instead.

There are many artists/albums/songs on Apple Music which have all caps too.

I'm not talking about less-known artists too, two examples of this in my collection are Steven Wilson and Linkin Park.

Oh BTW talking about less-known artists, I've even seen the whole song being incorrect (duplicate of another song on same album) on Apple Music after switching part of my old MP3 collection to Apple Music native.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think I once came across a song that was credited to both "Bob Dylan" and "B. Dylan", or something like that.

I also have some "Conjure One feat. Rhys Fulber"... where Conjure One is the name of Rhys Fulber's solo project so it's the same guy.

They are probably bulk importing with little human in the loop, which I get as there are millions of songs to import.

I edit metadata for Apple Music stuff all the time, so it is consistent with the other non-Apple Music stuff I have in my library. I also fix capitalization (this is more common in non-English songs, which inexplicably adopt English capitalization standards), the occasional error in old songs (by comparing to scans of physical copies), useless metadata on song/album titles (looking at you, “(2013 Remaster)”), and sometimes the year (for re-releases, I put in the original release year). Then of course sometimes Apple Music overrides my corrections because someone at a record label decided to change the metadata on some song, so I also have to keep track of it using a separate app (“Music Tracker”) that tracks changes to my library (which is also useful to know when something disappears from Apple Music).

I don’t expect normal people to do this, but for me the ability to edit metadata and mix streaming songs with ripped songs is a huge advantage of Apple Music over other streaming services. Unfortunately Apple Music has a lot of other issues, especially with syncing, and I still can’t understand why there’s no dedicated “featuring” metadata field (everyone pollutes the song title: Spotify solved this), but for me there’s no other possible alternative.

I might be misremembering things, but I think digital "box sets" came/come with something like the album and album art all set to the box set instead of the individual albums.

So it's cheaper than buying the albums individually, but then you have to spend some time unpicking them again and restoring the original albums. At least the track/disc numbering is still correct, so that helps a little.

Judging from some reviews left on some box sets, this wasn't always the case, i.e originally even box sets had the proper album tagging…

I use it, but not very often. I do appreciate that it's still possible. Spotify probably wouldn't even understand the feature request.

How often do users change the metadata of music bought from Apple Music?

I have to change the genre on all of the Christmas songs my wife buys from Apple Music from "Holiday" to "Christmas" because there are holidays other than Christmas.

Otherwise, a "Holiday" smart playlist transitions from Silent Night to Monster Mash.

Isn't 0.5MB 500 KB? Not 5? Or are you referring to something else

They are saying that even a much smaller amount of memory than what they are wasting is a waste.

From the article:

> If you rip a CD with Apple Music using the Apple AAC Encoder (the default option), it will reserve approximately 5 kB of free space inside each file for this purpose.

I was saying that even this is too much, and 500kB is 'way way too much'.

> Isn't 0.5MB 500 KB? Not 5? Or are you referring to something else

The article said that the default is 5KB but Apple uses 500KB, hence the poster is saying that even 5KB is overkill.

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